Template talk:Russell T Davies

Doctor Who Template‑class

This template is within the scope of WikiProject Doctor Who, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Doctor Who and its spin-offs on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this notice, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.Doctor WhoWikipedia:WikiProject Doctor WhoTemplate:WikiProject Doctor WhoDoctor Who articles Template This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

I think this template would be better off without the comprehensive list of Doctor Who episodes Davies has written. Davies was the head writer of the show for five years, so he oversaw, influenced, and executive produced all episodes in the era, with 32 writing credits to his name, and an unknowable number of uncredited rewrites. In cases where a notable writer pens a script or two (such as Template:Neil Gaiman), it's useful to include their episode articles directly, since their authorship is a large component of the episode's notability and it's meaningful to navigate between the episode and the writer's other works. In the case of Davies, his influence is not on individual episodes so much as the show itself. An episode in this era being credited to Davies is not the default as such, but it's close enough as to make navigation based on his writing credit meaningless for most users. The main Doctor Who article is transcluded in Davies's template instead.

To summarise: I think television series articles should only be transcluded in the navboxes of creators/showrunners, and that episode articles should only be transcluded in the navboxes of guest writers/directors. Do people think this is generally a good idea?

@Sceptre: I'd completely forgotten that I was the one who added the episodes – thanks for the reminder! To be fair, it was over a year ago, and it seems I was trying to consolidate the main Davies template with one someone had created specifically for Davies's Doctor Who episodes. Now I think we'd be better off without the latter template at all. Perhaps I should have come to the talk page first – it's quite difficult to make a comprehensive case for something like this in an edit summary! —Flax5 18:16, 26 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

As an additional illustration that this system isn't practical, consider Template:Joss Whedon. It's a neat enough navbox transcluding the TV series he created and episodes of other shows he directed, but if it were to transclude each episode on which he has a writing credit, it would be bloated by the addition of 28 Buffy episodes, and heaven knows what else. —Flax5 22:43, 26 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree the episodes have no useful purpose here; we have {{Doctor Who episodes}} for that. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:00, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Would it be appropriate to add in the children's series Breakfast Serials which Davies produced and wrote and Why Don't You? which he produced and completely changed the format of? Dunarc (talk) 19:54, 27 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I should add that neither would strictly fit in TV series created, but then Doctor Who is in there and he did not create it.Dunarc (talk) 19:56, 27 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not familiar with those kids' shows so can't really venture an opinion, but now that you mention it, there's a case to be made that only the series 1, series 2, series 3, series 4, and 2008–2010 specials pages should be linked here - those are series of television completely envisioned by Davies, whereas the vast majority of Doctor Who has nothing to do with him. —Flax5 20:10, 27 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like it would work well .Dunarc (talk) 23:51, 27 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have tried changing it along the lines suggested. Dunarc (talk) 23:30, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well it seems an anonymous user did not like it and changed back to the old format - however this still leaves the problem Flax5 identified - ie that only a small part of Doctor Who (the period 2005-2010) was overseen by Davies. Dunarc (talk) 20:08, 5 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]