Friday, December 1, 2006

List of Doctor Who serials

I think we should title the first Ecclestone series '2005 Season', as that seems to be the least controversial title(without specifying whether it is to be considered a continuation of the previous series or a new series entirely).
:Actually, it should still be Series 1 because that's how the production team are referring to it. The 2005 is just to make it distinct from Season One, et al. Nextel ringtones Khaosworks/khaosworks 17:49, 12 Jun 2004


What's a serial? Isn't this just a list of episodes? Abbey Diaz Evercat/Evercat 14:15, 13 Sep 2003
:Dr. Who ran in stories consisting of several episodes. Each story was named not each episode. The stories were of widely differing lengths and number of episodes. Free ringtones Rmhermen/Rmhermen 16:29, Sep 13, 2003



:''Note that for the early Hartnell years [...] there was not yet a concept of a multi-episode 'serial'.''

Not true. The episodes may have been individually titled, but each serial was made as a single entity. —Majo Mills Paul A/Paul A 01:39, 15 Sep 2003



Need for a common format for serial synopses

Is there a common format for episode synopses or can we settle on one? I propose the following

'''Title''' is a Mosquito ringtone List of Doctor Who serials/serial in the Sabrina Martins United Kingdom/British Nextel ringtones science fiction television series ''Abbey Diaz Doctor Who'', originally aired in X parts from DATE to DATE. Anything especially significant about the episode (Anniversary, etc.) can be put here. If it is an early Hartnell serial, episode titles should be listed:

:* Title
:* Title, (etc.)

SYNOPSIS (as subsection)


Or even something more extensive - a sidebox with Doctor, season, companions, writer, alternate titles, etc. It might solve some of the issue we've discussed above. Free ringtones ALargeElk/ALargeElk 10:15, 14 May 2004

:A more extensive sidebox would work better in my opinion. Take a look at the ones used for UK Prime Ministers, to pick a random example, e.g. Majo Mills Stanley Baldwin. Cingular Ringtones Timrollpickering/Timrollpickering 10:19, 14 May 2004

::OK, here's a first attempt. inquisitor the ALargeElk/ALargeElk 12:01, 14 May 2004


'''Marco Polo'''
'''Doctor'''The First Doctor: babies depend William Hartnell
'''fountain through List of supporting characters in Doctor Who/Companions'''rests behind Susan Foremandebutante balls Barbara Wrightrules always Ian Chesterton
'''Production code'''1D (fourth serial, first season)
'''Transmission dates'''be combed 22 February was simply 1964 - lovely seaside 4 April castings from 1964
'''Writer'''new rochelle John Lucarotti
'''Preceded by'''running that The Edge of Destruction
'''Followed by'''a folklore The Keys of Marinus


:::Looks good. Can I suggest including the directors (Warris Hussein and someone else for one episode IIRC). Also the code is just "D", not "1D" - the numbers don't come in until the fourth cycle (until then it's A,B etc..., then AA, BB... then AAA, BBB...). wannstedt is Timrollpickering/Timrollpickering 14:18, 14 May 2004

:::Agree, looks good to me. Hope you don't mind but I've corrected your HTML (you used an open td tag instead of a close td tag on the last two rows, which added an unwanted third column). Maybe add the producer too? They do set the "tone" of an era. at galina Avaragado/Avaragado 22:05, May 14, 2004
::::Agreed about adding the producer - what about noting archive status - whether the story still exists or not etc. dramatic jams PMelvilleAustin/PMA 14:08, May 15, 2004

::::Oh, and number of episodes in the serial, plus episode length - eg 4x25 minutes with greater Avaragado/Avaragado 14:46, May 15, 2004


'''Marco Polo'''
'''Doctor'''The First Doctor: century first William Hartnell
'''done regis List of supporting characters in Doctor Who/Companions'''impressive architecture Susan ForemanBarbara WrightIan Chesterton
'''Writer'''John Lucarotti
'''Directors'''Warris Hussein & John Crockett
'''Producer'''Verity Lambert
'''Production code'''D (season one, fourth serial)
'''Length'''Seven episodes, each 25 minutes
'''Transmission dates'''22 February 1964 - 4 April 1964
'''Preceded by'''The Edge of Destruction
'''Followed by'''The Keys of Marinus


OK, how about this. I've right-aligned it as it would be on the page. Is everybody happy with wikilinking all companions, writers, directors and producers? My feeling is that where these articles don't already exist, we should have them eventually.

Incidentally, does anyone feel that we should have an official Doctor Who wikiproject? There are sure to be other issues like this that need resolution. ALargeElk/ALargeElk 10:41, 17 May 2004

:Sounds like a good idea to me. If we have to add any further to the box, I'd suggest the Script Editor (Story Editor for the first five seasons) as they had arguably more creative influence than the producer. Timrollpickering/Timrollpickering 11:06, 17 May 2004

Also, to get a link to the Barbara Wright page you have to use Barbara Wright (Doctor Who)

It's been a while but there's now an example of the box at Mission to the Unknown. Take a look. Timrollpickering/Timrollpickering 18:30, 19 Dec 2004

:To be frank? It's ugly. Is there any information there that the link to the BBC website at the bottom wouldn't provide? -Khaosworks/khaosworks 18:57, 19 Dec 2004

:On a more positive note, I like the Peerbox template - that should replace the tables we've been using for the synopses. I'm quite happy with for format I've been using, but of course that's bias for my own work... does anybody else have any thoughts on the cast box in Mission to the Unknown? -04:32, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

::I think it's too wide: but that's a result of the first line, which is unusually long. We can always improve the design but the content looks good. Avaragado/Avaragado 09:11, 20 Dec 2004

:::Is there a way to make the box a standard width no matter how long the lines in it are? -Khaosworks/khaosworks 10:41, 20 Dec 2004

::::You can specify widths (as I see you've discovered in Mission to the Unknown!). But IMHO it's better to let the box size itself, and use a design that doesn't produce over-long lines. I might try a few designs later in the week, if I have time. Avaragado/Avaragado 22:07, 20 Dec 2004

From vs. from?

Right now, there's only one entry written with a "from" in the title ("Spearhead From Space"), and that has it capitalized. Since there are two other entries to be created, "Creature from the Pit" and "Fury from the Deep", with the same word in them should they be capitalized too or shall we move "Spearhead From Space" to its non-capitalized version? My view is that we should do the latter, since "of the" is lower-case throughout the serial listing. A disambig page for "Spearhead" exists, but it should be the main page. Khaosworks/khaosworks 02:24, 19 Jun 2004

: The http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/episodeguide/spearheadfromspace/ uses "from" rather than "From" so I guess that's official. Avaragado/Avaragado 08:49, 19 Jun 2004

::So how do we get someone to swap the current "Spearhead From Space" with "Spearhead from Space"? Khaosworks/khaosworks 14:54, 19 Jun 2004

:::You just need to use the "move" link at the top of the From page. All the article history is preserved. You can't normally overwrite existing pages in this way, but as it's overwriting a redirect in this case this is OK. Actually you don't need to do this, as I've just done it. Avaragado/Avaragado 08:00, 20 Jun 2004

::"The BBC" is a very big sprawling organisation and one section's usage of a term does not make anything "official". Can I suggest we adopt the following order of priority in determining this:

::1). The onscreen captions - some are not fully capitalised.
::2). The standard rules of capitalisation - only the nouns get capitalised and so on.

::Timrollpickering/Timrollpickering 11:18, 20 Jun 2004

Cast and crew lists

I've been trying to push a standardized format for the episode synopses (see ''Tomb of the Cybermen'', among others). One of the things I've added to all the synopses is an external link to the cast and crew lists on the bbc.co.uk website. They've changed the .html files to .shtml files, so the links are all broken. Please change the links accordingly if you come across them. -Khaosworks/khaosworks 09:56, 18 Dec 2004

Episode titles

Do we really want to add this to the listing? So far, they've been included in the actual synopses. Also, the tables look really awkward. Khaosworks/khaosworks 00:04, 6 Jan 2005
:I think they're important since some people might be searching for the episode name rather than the serial name. As to the formatting, I admit there could be a better way of doing it. I tried numbered lists, but that just took up way too much space. I tried tables so that the episode number and the episode title wouldn't become separated. "& nbsp;" might work better. DonQuixote/DonQuixote 04:56, 6 Jan 2005
::I couldn't find a good way of formatting the text, so I just added links to individual episode title pages. DonQuixote/DonQuixote 09:01, 6 Jan 2005

Production team

The writers after the serials are okay - the producers and story editors bits look awkward. In the individual synopses (at least those in the format I've been pushing) I've included links to cast and crew lists, and those should be sufficient. What I was thinking was a separate article showing the chronological tenure of producers, story editors, because they are more constant than writers. Khaosworks/khaosworks 05:58, 4 Mar 2005
:Yeah, that probably would work better. That was my original idea, as well, but I thought that it might make more sense show the crew in context of the shows themselves, to give a better idea of their tenure (esp. during periods of high turnover, as in seasons five and six). But it makes the list a little cluttered, and probably doesn't help as much as I thought it might. Ah, well. – Seancdaug/Seancdaug 12:04, Mar 4, 2005