Forum:Introduction of Portal Pages

This issue has come up a new times before but I think it should be brought up again. Portal pages could make this wiki much easier to navigate and more new-viewer/causal-viewer friendly. A lot of fans will not know the name of all the characters in the show, for example Astrid Peth is commonly known as Kylie Minogue due to the actress being more famous than the character and a picture of the character would show viewers that the character is played by Kylie. An example page can be seen here and the colour-coding is optional. I have included a table of positives and negatives of introducing this feature, feel free to add to it. --SquirrelBoy 15:29, May 4, 2010 (UTC)


 * To see the discussions already taken place on subjects similar to this see: Forum:Proposal for character portals and Forum:Feedback on a new idea wanted!.


 * The focus of this wiki isn't just the TV series, it's all of the Doctor Who universe and all the different media that is produced. It I think is a mistake to think people are coming here just because of the current TV series and know things just from pictorial representations of characters.
 * Your Astrid Peth point is debatable (and depends on what exposure an individual viewer has to popular music/popular culture throughout the 80s and 90s).
 * To explore this further: the First Doctor's companions were: William Russell, Jaqueline Hill, Carol Ann-Ford, Maureen O'Brien, Peter Purves, Jackie Lane, Anneke Wills, Michael Craze. Alternatively the First Doctor's companions were; Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, Susan Foreman, Vicki, Steven Taylor, Dodo Chaplet, Ben Jackon Polly Wright.
 * Plenty of fans/new people coming to the site know the characters of the show but not the actors.
 * As I said over at Talk:Portal:Companions the examples there are broken up by sources, so that will mean in order to cover everything, TV, prose, audio, comics, short stories each image will need to be repeated at least four times, making for a very long page. Additionally there's the issue that not every companion has an image, meaning elements of this poral would always be incomplete. Also as I said over on the talk page, the examples given are all very visual based things they're all TV series' or video games, they're all visual sources (with plenty of places to grab images from), but the Doctor Who canon isn't, it covers a wide range of sources, many of which don't have pictures (and some of which images no longer exist). --Tangerineduel 16:04, May 4, 2010 (UTC)


 * Let me give an argument in favor of the idea. An acquaintance of mine came to this wiki to find "that companion of Tom Baker who ran around in skimpy clothes, spoke oddly, and waved a knife around". He had to go through all of the companions of the 4th Doctor one by one until he found Leela, or give up and ask me who he was thinking of (which is what he ended up doing). A picture would have gotten him straight there. (BTW, SquirrelBoy, Astrid wasn't the best example--if you're looking for "the one played by Kylie Minogue", you can go right to Kylie's page and follow the obvious link....)


 * I don't think such a portal should _replace_ the list, but I don't see why it can't be a supplement.


 * And, if it's used that way, it makes perfect sense for only TV (and maybe comics) companions to be listed visually. Even though most of the novel and audio companions do have pictures (from the covers, etc.), nobody looking for Benny will be looking for her by picture--not to mention that people who read the novels inherently have more tolerance for large chunks of text without pretty pictures.


 * The tricky part is how you guide people looking for a visual portal to the visual portal, without obscuring the fact that the TV (and comics) companions aren't the only ones.


 * One minor quibble: a reduced version of the picture from the article page isn't always the best idea. Someone looking for the main character of the Sarah Jane Adventures doesn't need a picture; someone looking for that reporter companion of the 3rd Doctor might not recognize a picture taken 30+ years later. The shadows obscure Ian's face much worse in a tiny thumbnail. Barbara would be much more recognizable if you first cropped her to a square before scaling. And so on. But I realize that this was just a proof of concept, not a finished work, and overall, it was well done. --Falcotron 16:21, May 4, 2010 (UTC)


 * Taking the Fourth Doctor example, the most likely course of action were they looking would be to put Tom Baker into the search box, or Fourth Doctor, on the Fourth Doctor page less than a third of the way down is a thumbnail with this image (which has the caption 'The Doctor and Leela).
 * Also just to test a word search; skimpy brings up two results Asird Peth and Companions (the specific wording under the companions result is "Leela, her usually skimpy attire notwithstanding, was depicted as a deadly...", knife brings up a few pages; life knife, sonic knife, Everything Changes and Leela.
 * On the Companion page it has a image within the infobox of all the companions (faces) and a list of links below it detailing them.
 * I am against something like this (for the reasons above) and because we treat all forms of Doctor Who canon equally and this is quite clearly, just by its design going to favour one over the other, there by giving new editors/readers a biased view of the Doctor Who universe and this wiki. --Tangerineduel 16:40, May 4, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, and if you enter "Tom Baker companion skimpy knife" into Google, the first hit is Leela's page on Wikipedia, and nearly every other hit on the first page is about Leela--in fact, you could get the answer just from Google's summaries.


 * But I suspect that you're better at searching than most people. You normally don't think of it as a skill, but most people are really bad at figuring out what to type into the search box--and their lack of confidence in their ability (or in Internet searches) is even more limiting, because it means they don't even try. There's a reason letmegooglethatforyou.com exists--because most people don't think to type in the "obvious" searches. My mother actually called me yesterday to ask me what the website is for Barnes and Noble


 * That being said, I understand your point about this favoring TV over other media. (And including comics would actually make it worse, because then a less-knowledgeable person would almost surely think they were seeing all the companions there ever were....) As I said, it would be tricky to come up with a way to offer the visual portal for people looking for TV companions without implying anything beyond what's intended.


 * If someone can come up with a way to do that, I think it would definitely be worth it. If not, I agree with you that the negatives outweigh the positives. --Falcotron 17:11, May 4, 2010 (UTC)