User talk:CzechOut

Please note that I will not respond to unsigned posts. I urge you to remember to add four tildes at the end of your post, because this is required by wiki policy.

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Hartnell episodes
Related to what you said earlier about stories sharing the same name as William Hartnell-era episodes, there's The Roof of the World (the redirect to the episode) and The Roof of the World (audio story). Little confused about what action to take here, though I'm guessing the current state's non-standard. - 01:59, December 9, 2011 (UTC)

Similarly, The Traitors and The Traitors (short story). -- Tybort (talk page) 11:57, December 9, 2011 (UTC)

Disambiguating and redirects
fallen angel should be at either Fallen Angel or Fallen angel. As there's a pre-existing page, moving it myself just makes an error message. -- Tybort (talk page) 15:51, December 12, 2011 (UTC)

250px
I spent about twenty minutes reading the piece you posted to my talk page, an hour thinking about it. Then I went back and reread it, making notes. I'm sure you realize that you asked direct questions, betrayed unspoken assumptions and raised questions without intending to. The matters involve include issues of philosophy, good writing, possibly outdated wiki policy and the question about whether one size fits all -- there are few people here who know how to use a semi-colon and among those who do, there is a tendency to overuse them. Should they, therefore, be outlawed in these pages? That's a question that will underline almost all of this long reply. You may view it as presumptive of me to say everyone else is wrong and I alone am right. Nonetless, that is what I am going to do here, as if I were to say no one should use a semi-colon but me. You're going to say "no" as a matter of public policy and I understand. Nonetheless, I still assert it. While I make my case -- perhaps my Apologia before you order me to drink that tasty hemlock, I ask you to understand that I have written what appears below with a self-aware twinkle in my eye.

Let's start with the general and head towards the specific: the larger the piece, the more tightly it should be edited. Looking at, say, the page on The Doctor, we see it is 45,000 bytes and has probably twenty articles hanging from it, including his name, his age, each incarnation, his scarf...it's huge. Adding more words and pictures should be done only when absolutely neessary. Pictures should be chosen on grounds of utility and aesthetics; happily, we've got a bunch of pictures of him. Them. Whatever. A bunch to choose from. Articles of similar size and importance (I note without comment that the article on Jack Harkness is close to 80,000 bytes; I won't more than mention that I recently chopped out of the page on Amy Pond the remarable fact that she once dropped an ice cream) should be treated with similar circumspection. This is one of my peeves about the article on River Song, about half the length (in part, I immodestly state, because I go through it two or three times a week to trim it). The triptych at the top is good and the shot of her from The Big Bang saying "Yes!" is excellent, but the others are awful, badly composed, shot too dark and with regeneration energy obscuring. We've got enough good pictures of her that we don't need bad ones.

When you examine the tiny articles, however, you are confronted with the opposite problem. We know there are no small parts, only short ones, but when all we know of a particular actor is that he was, say, a Greek in The Myth Makers, is it too much to put a picture of him on the page? What if the only picture I can locate without copyright issues is the one of him on the character page? Yes, I would like a head shot in civvies, but that's all there is. No one is going to bother going back oto the other page, and adding a picture to an article that is 500 bytes is not going to strain anyone's attention span.

From these extreme cases, I derive a general rule of good writing: long articles should be edited to the bone. Short articles should be granted some leeway so the subject can warn people to stand aside, this one takes big steps.

Unhappily for you as an administrator, these decisions require judgment, and consensus, two commodities always in short supply and almost invariably opposed to each other. You hanker for hard rules nd bright lines so you don't annoy people by showing favoritism. I don't envy you the responsibility. I, on the other hand, do have judgment and have used it for forty years in making a living by saying the consensus is wrong. While I regret the headaches it will cause you, consensus must be revisted at least occasionally lest the sins of the fathers be visited on the sons..... and more frequently if my judgment says they are wrong. A single photo of an actor in costume in his one DWU role makes the article better than it was without it.Boblipton talk to me 20:01, December 12, 2011 (UTC)