Talk:List of Doctor Who writers

Asterisks

Shouldn't there be an indication of what the asterisks next to some of the names mean? Angmering 18:11, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Fuzzy logic of the list

I'm having a hard time understanding the point of this list. The first sentence of the lead suggests it's supposed to be a list of credited writers, but there are several instances of non-credited writers (Ian Levine, David Fisher on City of Death, Terrance Dicks on The Brain of Morbius and others) creeping into the list. Moreover, what's the deal with the arbitrary breakup of writers by number of episodes written? You'd have to know beforehand whether a writer wrote 3 or 4 episodes to know where to look for them. I guess overall I'm not quite sure how useful this list is, as it breaks its own rules and forces the reader to have pretty deep foreknowledge of the writing of Doctor Who to make any sense of this. It seems to wholly contravene Wikipedia:Featured list criteria in many regards. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 02:59, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

It should be turned into one sortable list. That would make it easier finding a writer. I also find it funny that Levine's rumoured involvement with Attack is included, but not C. E. Webber who wrote the script which the first episode of An Unearthly Child is based on (credited in internal docs). Davhorn (talk) 12:39, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

New list

Taking your suggestion, I've replaced the list with a single, sortable one. However, as I was making the conversion, I found several more errors in the text itself, only some of which I've corrected. Here are some of the concerns:

• Pseudonyms, except for Paula Moore, do not presently appear. Where's Robin Bland, David Agnew and others? Do Terrance Dicks' credits reflect work by Robin Bland? Anthony Read's certainly USED to include work by David Agnew.
• Are episode counts by the original broadcast or by the home video release? Eric Saward's episode count seemed to be inflated, possibly to reflect "Resurrection" being broadcast as a 2-parter but subsequently released as a 4-parter. Writers for Colin Baker's first season especially need to be checked for this issue.
• The notes field should be checked so as to ensure the notes are more about the author than the story. There's a lot of extraneous info in the notes. One thing I edited out, for instance, was the note on Kevin Clarke that Silver Nemesis was the 25th anniversary story. Not sure how relevant that is to Kevin Clarke.
• Previous table had a "colspan" parameter on single-story authors to make that credit flow across the "first" and "last" columns. This, of course, made the whole table unsortable. Though arguably "uglier", the current paradigm of putting the same story down twice should be kept in place to ensure the table's utility remains intact.
• The entirety of the notes field might be converted to footnotes if additional columns of information are added. It might be useful, for instance, to have a column for date of first script and date of last script.

CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 21:15, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I think that most of these objections have been taken care of now, although the notes section can probably always use work. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 16:10, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

RTD number

I count 31 episodes and two mini-episodes that count. Where does 32 come from? Sceptre ^(talk) 19:33, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in answering this; I don't check out the discussion page for this article too often. It's 32, though.

1. Rose
2. The End of the World
3. Aliens of London
4. WW III
5. The Long Game
6. Boom Town
7. Bad Wolf
8. The Parting of the Ways
9. CIN Special
10. The Christmas Invasion
11. New Earth
12. Tooth and Claw
13. Love & Monsters
14. Army of Ghosts
15. Doomsday
16. The Runaway Bride
17. Smith and Jones
18. Gridlock
19. Utopia
20. The Sound of Drums
21. Last of the Time Lords
22. Voyage of the Damned
23. Partners in Crime
24. Midnight
25. Turn Left
26. The Stolen Earth
27. Journey's End
28. The Next Doctor
29. Planet of the Dead
30. The Waters of Mars
31. The End of Time I
32. The End of Time II

I think perhaps you're counting "Time Crash", because you say "two mini-episodes"< but that's a Moffat story, not an RTD one. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 23:10, 19 October 2010 (UTC)