In general: Doctor Who

I don't favor splitting the page, but I do favor a heavy hand with the machete to pare down the text but good. The in-jokes, for example, can be nuked.

Text-wise, I think about 90% of the tropes can go, as duplicating content from the Recaps. We should take a page from Star Trek, and limit it to tropes that turn up all the time, not in that one episode of that one serial from 1974.

edited 7th Sep '10 8:42:46 AM by Nightsky

If a trope appears in more than three Doctor Who pages, it deserves to go on the main page, as it the practice with things such as Discworld.

Discworld has about 30 books; Doctor Who about 230 episodes. Thus a trope that shows up in three Discworld books is being used 10% of the time. The equivalent for Doctor Who would be 23 distinct examples.

Now, even if that were rounded down to 20, listing only tropes with 20 examples is an open invitation for people to list all 20, plus a few more to be safe. This wouldn't improve readability.

Maybe restricting the main page to tropes used by at least three different Doctors would work. Tropes that frequently occur with only one Doctor should go under their character.

Whether the number of examples is enough to list a trope in a long series depends on the trope. Something like In-Joke probably doesn't need to be added because someone can find 20 random in-jokes in 47 years. But tropes related ot each regeneration, for instance, probably ought to stay even though they may have only happened 10 times so far.

I kind of like the idea of the three doctor rule. If three doctors have used the trope, it makes it on the main page. Otherwise, we can set up pages for each of the doctors separately and list things specific to them there.

I've done another round of tweaks on the draft description, the factual corrections and a sparse few extra "fun bits".

Let's see what we can shave off.

Doctor Who is the longest running Science Fiction show in history. Since its debut on 23 November 1963 on BBC television, the British scifi series Doctor Who has thrilled, terrified and aroused three generations of fans worldwide. It also has an extensive Expanded Universe in the form of novels, radio plays and other media.

You've said it's SF twice, I'm pretty sure most people know the BBC is British, and three generations is needlessly specific. We don't want to start debating what counts as a generation. Aroused might be a touch misleading:

Doctor Who is the world's longest running TV Science Fiction show. Since its début on 23 November 1963 has thrilled and terrified generations of fans worldwide. It also has an extensive Expanded Universe including many novels and radio plays.

The rest can be similarly compressed, with some reordering. We shouldn't refer to New Who before we've explained about the revival. Skipping the detailed explanations, we get, following on from the previous paragraph:

Doctor Who was cancelled in 1989, but successfully revived in 2005. In the interim there was a single failed pilot, in 1995, and the expanded universe exploded.

The Doctor is a member of an highly advanced race, the Time Lords, who left his home planet long ago to roam all time and space in his Tardis. He is fond of Earth, and humans, defending them against a long procession of evil foes. In the original series he had fraught relations with his own people, but in the revival the Time Lords are extinct, making the Doctor the last of his kind.

The Doctor almost always travels with at least one Companions: mostly young female, and attractive humans, though there have been exceptions, most famously a robot dog. The first companions were the "point-of-view" characters for the audience at home, but the role evolved. These days, they are a mix of walking exposition generators, love interests, and moral anchors, with some growing into heroes in their own right.

Part of the reason the Doctor has managed to exist so long is that when faced with imminent death Time Lords undergo "regeneration"; changing both physical appearance and personality, making this the Trope Namer for The Nth Doctor. So far, there have been 11 different Doctors, pictured above.

Iconic fixtures of the show include:

• The TARDIS: Stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Has a Chameleon Circuit that allows it to blend in with the local setting, but the Doctor's broke in London way back in the first season and it's been stuck looking like a police box  ^*
  ^{Americans: think "old phone booth"}
  ever since.. It's Bigger On The Inside.
• The Sonic Screwdriver: Introduced by the Second Doctor, it's a piece of Applied Phlebotium that can be adapted to nearly any situation according to the needs of the plot including opening most locked doors, accessing computer information, the occasional improvised weapon and occasionally actually being a screwdriver.
• Three archenemies:
  • The Daleks are a race of Omnicidal Maniac aliens created by a man called Davros, devoid of all emotions but hate, encased in a Nigh Invulnerable armor chassis and given a trademark synth voice and Catch Phrase "Ex-ter-MI-NATE!".
  • Cybermen are cyborgs - converted from humans - who want to turn the rest of the world into other perfect, emotionless Cybermen.
  • The Master is The Doctor's evil counterpart, a rogue Time Lord whose plans generally run on the theme of trying to Take Over the World.

The changes the show has gone through over the years could fill a long book. It's gone through many writers and showrunners (Americans: think "producer/director"), evolving from an educational children's show to a low budget sci-fi action series to prime time, big budget "but still a family show" drama phenomenon. It plays fast and loose with its continuity and tone Depending On The Writer and gave the name to the trope Timey Wimey Ball for the way it handles the laws of time travel.

The format of the show has also changed greatly. There were 26 seasons Classic Who between 1963 to 1989, not all the same length, with episodes grouped into Serials (usually 4 to 6 episodes running 25 minutes each). After the cancellation, a Made For TV Movie aired in 1996, the only TV appearance of the Eighth Doctor. though he later got a proper run in a series of BBC radio dramas. There were also two non-canon theatrical movies. The successful 2005 revival, which rebooted the season numbering, has 13 45-minute episodes a plus specials a year with an overarching Story Arc and Myth Arc. It's currently the most popular show on the BBC.

Along with countless books and semi-canonical audio/video releases in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, the show has three official television spin-offs: Darker And Edgier Torchwood (bisexual alien hunters in Cardiff); the (somewhat) Lighter And Softer The Sarah Jane Adventures (ex-companion and three Meddling Kids fight aliens in London); and K-9 by Park Entertainment, which débuted simultaneously in the UK, US, and Australia in January 2010. A fourth spinoff, K-9 & Company, was stillborn in 1981.

==

Torchwood can be described on their own page. UNIT can probably go on the character sheet - they were only a fixture for the third Doctor, with sporadic appearances afterwards.

edited 9th Sep '10 2:55:39 AM by robert

Does anyone realize that the opening discussion/complaints regarding the structure of the article actually resembles some of the more difficult-to-categorize aspects of the show itself? Go ahead: reread it, and think about the show. Thus, maybe the page is structured pretty well, with that little fact kept in mind.

Or to put it another way, for someone who doesn't know a lot about the series, Some Guy hit it in one shot: it doesn't remotely match the format of anything else. Ever.

edited 16th Sep '10 4:55:40 AM by Squall

Yes, Doctor Who is unique in many ways, but we don't write works pages to match the peculiarities of the show; we write them to be readable, even without prior knowledge.

If there are no objections to the suggested rewrite above, we may as well implement it.

We also don't have a hard-and-fast, graven-in-stone template that works pages must follow. Dr Who has enough idiosyncrasies that forcing it into the same page format as Leave It To Beaver and I Love Lucy is simply not going to work well.

But, as you said, the trope list shouldn't really start below the fold. Doctor Who can't be squeezed into any boilerplate format, not that we have one, but the description should be written for people who've not seen the programme, and at a reasonable length.

Would the version suggested above be better, by that criterion, than the current text?

Who said the trope list shouldn't start below the fold? The description shouldn't start below the fold.

I misread you, but the important thing is readability. This thread was started by people saying that the Doctor Who description was not helpful, hence the suggested alterations.

Do people think the draft alterations would be better, especially for those not familiar with the show, or do they prefer the current version?

I like the one that's on the page now. It's easy to read, it's not dry and sterile and encyclopedic, and it gives not only factual information about the show, but also a sense of why the show has the following it does.

Does it though? The original complaint was that it didn't give a sense of the show, to people not familiar with it. For those of us who are, that's difficult to judge. Thus, what we really want is commetns from people who aren't.

I think that I've seen two, maybe three or four episodes. Back when Tom Baker was the Doctor. I think I qualify as "not familiar with the show."

I coulda sworn though that somewhere we had a guideline for the length of descriptions. And it was you, Mada, who said that some of the stuff sounded like it should go on an Analysis page.

That said, I think paring down the description would just be "good writing" practice. 'A work is finished not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing left to take away.' (Or maybe that was Strunk and White's Elements of Style.)

I've been putting off a critical look at Robert's draft description because it was too tempting to put my foot down and say "well I like mine better." ;)

edited 18th Sep '10 7:00:39 PM by Elle

I believe Strunk and White said "Omit needless words."

I think that Missing Episodes should be a trope if it isn't already. The section on the Doctor Who page mostly references other shows that have suffered the same treatment.

It's Missing Episode and Lost Episode.

edited 26th Sep '10 1:36:32 PM by Elle

I came into the page not knowing anything about Doctor Who other than the fact that there was a Doctor, something alled a TARDIS, and that Time Lords were pretty popular in the section.

I had a pretty good idea after I read the page. Then I watched some episodes.

Now I have David Tennant as my avatar.

I think the page is fine.

I know that the way the page is now isn't how we normally do descriptions, but Doctor Who is a rather complicated show and it would be difficult if not impossible for a short description to do it justice. I came to the page after my mom saw some New Who on PBS, and I found it to be an excellent explanation. I have now seen all of New Who and much of Old Who and I've begun watching other British shows as well. I think paring it down like that is a bad idea. I'm not opposed to making it better, but I think for a complicated show like Who having the sections that explain different aspects of the show is necessary.

As for Analysis, either I'm very confused about what that means or some of the above posts are. I don't see any analysis in the description right now.