Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130519181606

I went to Template:Companions of the Eleventh Doctor in order to update it and got a bit stuck because we don't have a clear preference for how these templates should be ordered.

At the moment these templates are ordered roughly in terms of appearance. This is not only problematic for comics, but causes problems even where order should be perfectly clear.

Dorium Maldovar for instances first appears in television a season earlier than he appears as a companion. Which do we use?

We also seem to be sometimes putting long term companions ahead of other companions. Which isn't too bad except we then get into discussions of what makes someone a long term companion.

I think the easiest thing to do is to order these templates alphabetically. It means we don't have to make judgement calls and it's probably easiest for readers too. These templates get big and an alphabetical order makes it clear to the reader how these people are organised. You don't need to know duration or importance or anything else. 