Template:Wales crew/doc

 will allow for the much quicker entry of crew lists for the BBC Wales version of Doctor Who. It might be possible to use with other shows, especially those also produced by BBC Wales, but there are no guarantees that it will produce the precise job title used by other shows. It definitely will not work well on story pages from the 1963 version of Doctor Who.

Usage
To use this template, simply copy the entire text from the box below, paste it to crew section of the episode page you wish to improve, and fill out the form. Do not put the crew member's name in brackets; this template will automatically link both the job title and the people credited. If a person has a disambiguated name, like Adam Smith (director), the (director) part must be included for proper linkage.

You are strongly cautioned to use a blank form, copied from the latest revision of this page, when filling out new crew lists. Do not copy and paste from pages that have the list already filled out. This may seem to be a time-saver, but ultimately it is not. Even two-part stories have widely varying crew lists from one episode to the next. Also, new variables are rapidly being added to this list. If you copy from a previously-used form, a variable you need may not appear.

The order of these variables was originally based on end credits for The Eleventh Hour. This made it simple to go from the top of the credits right down to the end. However, the same credits are not given for every episode of Doctor Who, nor has the order of the credits been consistent across time. The production manager, for instance, has variously been listed near the top of the credits and near the very end. For this reason, there are a few variables that won't be in the order you see them in any particular set of credits. You may have to hunt a bit to find the variable you're looking for. Still, this is faster than having to type it all out with proper linkage syntax. (Firefox and Safari, at least, will allow you to search within the input box, so if you don't find the variable, type the first few letters into the "find" box.)

If you use this template and discover a credit that has no variable, create your own variable name, then please leave a note on the talk page, indicating what variable needs to be added to the template.


 * Please note that the template has a highly complex syntax, and the misplacement of a single character can break it. If you are not familiar with editing templates with parser functions, please do not attempt to edit this template yourself.

To do

 * Ultimately, once all the variables are in, the entire second table in this thing has to be collapsed into three paragraphs representing the three columns. They can't have any line breaks between each line; otherwise, "empty" variables will produce a line break. Done.
 * The business of auto-truncation of the diambiguated part of a name might be outside the limitations of wikia software, when combined with parser functions. Will look into this some more, but we might have to live with Adam Smith (director) instead of getting Adam Smith
 * This might be accomplished through use of #tag parser.
 * Update 07:07, April 17, 2010 (UTC). A solution to this problem has been found, but it will laboriously have to be implemented on every single variable.  This is clearly going to be a pain.  But it'll get done eventually.  So far, it's implemented only on the Director variable, but I'll rather quickly put it in on variables where disambiguated names are already present.
 * Update07:20, April 17, 2010 (UTC). Okay, not an entire solution after all.  This solution is temporarily causing errors in directors' names that aren't disambiguated.  So now, The Eventh Hour is the only page that works right for directors.  So the problem has been inverted.   A new solution is forthcoming.  However, changes shouldn't be reverted just yet on the COunterTenor variable, as the only person to ever hold that title is a disambiguated name.  The solution here is probably just to use another parser to detect the presence of a ( character, and only then to perform the pipetrick.


 * Need to put in some variables from Human Nature/Family of Blood/Blink.