Talk:The Corsair

Singular they

I don't suppose we could use the singular they in this article to avoid the clumsy pronoun trouble? --SB | T 18:42, November 5, 2011 (UTC)

No; grammatically incorrect. Keep it as is. CloneMarshalCommanderCody ☎ 02:40, June 17, 2014 (UTC)

Both

Shouldn't this article metion something about The Corsair being the only Time Lord to be both male and female?Mandalore74 ^{talk to me} 22:44, November 16, 2011 (UTC)

Not the only one — just the only one we know about. (For all we know, Borusa started out female.) —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 04:56, May 15, 2012 (UTC)

Davies and Lost in Time

I deleted a potentially bogus paragraph claiming that Russell T Davies (described as "head canon", whatever that means) said the Shopkeeper from Sarah Jane Adventures was the Corsair. The cited source contains no such reference, and The Doctor's Wife was produced and broadcast after the Shopkeeper was introduced in Lost in Time, and Davies has never made any statement as to the origins of that character (the DWM special editions on SJA make no reference to the Corsair having any connection). Feel free to put it back if an actual source can be found. 70.72.211.35^{talk to me} 14:28, April 10, 2013 (UTC)

Seeing as how the writer of the episode, Neil Gaiman, is the source for this information I think it should be included. PonyEnglish ☎ 03:15, July 4, 2013 (UTC)

This information will not be added to the article unless it occurs in the narrative. Out of universe sources are not valid sources for in-universe articles. Shambala108 ☎ 03:21, July 4, 2013 (UTC)

I would argue that since it is a "behind the scenes" bit that Gaiman warranted a blog post commenting on it that it should stay. It doesn't add to the character in-universe, true, but it adds a bit of creative, if not a bit of trivia, to the character. I don't see the harm.PonyEnglish ☎ 03:44, July 4, 2013 (UTC)

My IP has changed since I deleted the comment, but I have no problem with it being in Behind the Scenes, though there should be a direct link added to where Gaiman says this in the blog. It would be even better if we could find a second source. Has Davies mentioned this? Although it's all "non-narrative" right now there is always potential for Gaiman to write a future episode or novel - perhaps even bringing the Corsair back and making the Shopkeeper connection official. 68.146.70.124^{talk to me} 13:10, April 15, 2014 (UTC)

Plagiarism

The behind the scenes section is almost completely copied from the source (see the first footnote). I changed it when I noticed, but it's still too similar. CloneMarshalCommanderCody ☎ 02:39, June 17, 2014 (UTC)

Conjectural names for each incarnation

A few months back it was decided that we moved The Doctor (Fugitive of the Judoon) to Fugitive Doctor, a while ago, when splitting the Ollistra pages, I unconsciously created the page for the incarnation played by Jacqueline Pearce at War Ollistra instead of Ollistra (The Innocent) (with a {{conjecture}} tag). The reason I forwarded these two decisions was because calling an incarnation "something TimeLordName" is much more piratical when writing (and, specially, when reading) an article than the alternative "TimeLordName (story)". It makes each incarnation much more visually distinct. I mean, we have T:DOCTORS telling us to "avoid pipe switching to simply "the Doctor"".

Further, as I argued back on Talk: Fugitive Doctor, Tardis:Romana acknowledges and embraces the fact that her naming convention didn't originate from narrative sources, but rather an out-of-universe one.

And why am I saying all this? Well, like Romana, we have out-of-universe numbering for the Corsair incarnations. Gailman (the creator of the Corsair) and Houser (who wrote the stories in which she appeared) has told us that [[The Corsair (Old Friends)]] is indeed the Sixth Corsair; he's also told us that [[The Corsair (One Virtue, and a Thousand Crimes)]] is the Seventh Corsair (a story which he himself wrote). Finally, [[The Corsair (The Doctor's Wife)]], who was first mentioned in The Doctor's Wife and briefly appears in One Virtue, and a Thousand Crimes (both written by Gaiman), is affirmatively the Ninth Corsair, given he has the same exact same description (literally almost word-for-word) as the one in The Brilliant Book 2012 (in a piece also written by Gaiman).

All that said, I think the wiki would only benefit from moving these three pages for their respective new names, adding the "conjecture" tags on them. Thoughts? OncomingStorm12th ☎ 21:31, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Great plan! As long as the conjecture is clearly marked, it sounds good to me. Some page locks might also be necessary to keep well-intentioned editors from making [[First Corsair]] and so on. – n8 (☎) 19:08, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Well, actually, the piece about the Corsair in The Brilliant Book 2012 really ought to have an {{invalid}} page, to be placed in Category:Non-DWU features; and this would lead us to have [[First Doctor]] onwards as {{invalid}} pages sourced to that piece. Or am I missing something? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:17, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

First of all it does have such a page and second of all (assuming you mean [[First Corsair]] rather than [[First Doctor]]) then I don't see why not! In terms of OS12's proposal, I definitely support the splitting and chosen names. What I'm less sure about is referring to these pages in articles. As there's no in-universe basis for the names, we'd still be restricted to writing something like "[[Sixth Corsair|one incarnation of the Corsair]]", which could become a bit awkward. Danochy ☎ 23:28, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, re "First Doctor", stupid typo.

Although it's arguably a bit of a Freudian slip, because as concerns your last point — the thing is that we don't really have solid in-universe sources for Twelfth Doctor and Thirteenth Doctor. We have things like series titles (e.g. Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor), but it is usual for it to take years, if ever, for Doctors to be directly referred to as "the [X]th Doctor" in a valid source. Obviously we did not wait until The Time of the Doctor to write about "the Eleventh Doctor" on in-universe pages, as opposed to resorting to periphrases such as "an incarnation of the Doctor who would logically have called himself the eleventh". While I understand the scruple, if we do go forward with the Corsair renames it would, I think, be fairly silly of us not to use the names in such things as story summaries.

Anyway, while I'm going to leave this "open" a little while yet so that we can continue discussing the issue User:Danochy brought up above, as well as the possibility of the {{invalid}} pages for other incarnations, consider the proposal to use the conjectural names from the non-narrative source provisionally accepted. It's completely within the precedents of T:ROMANA, T:DOCTORS and the recent discussion at Talk:Fugitive Doctor. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:37, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

You know Danochy... I'm not entirely sure we would need to, or even should do such a thing. In general, conjecture names are chosen exactly with the purpose of avoiding wonky texts like that. For an example, we have several pages currently linking to Fugitive Doctor and War Ollistra without doing this workaround. Other example that comes to mind is Battle of the Game Station (or several other "Battles" present in Category:Articles with conjectural titles. With the risk of not actually checking several pages that link to them rn, I feel quite comfortable in assuming no one feels bad linking to them without going [[Battle of the Game Station|a battle which took place in the Game Station]]. Personally, I'd say we either go full in or full out on this; performing a rename for the pages only so that we don't take advantage of the simplified language for our articles seems a bit pointless, if I'm honest.

As for pages on [[First Corsair]]... I'm not entirely sure so far. Currently it's set up as a feature rather than an invalid short story. OncomingStorm12th ☎ 23:51, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

So what? There is ample precedent that non-narrative fictional pieces with pages can be cited on {{invalid}} page like any other invalid source. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 00:05, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I wrote this before seeing OS12's message, so I'll quickly explain why I see this as a different case here. The Fugitive Doctor is a fugitive, the War Ollistra is an Ollistra of the war, and the Battle of the Game Station is indeed a battle at the Game Station. As such we don't need to stretch T:VS too much to adopt names with at least some in-universe grounding. The problem with the Corsairs is the lack of any in-universe grounding.

I would honestly like to be able to use ordinal numbers to refer to the Corsairs, so while first I wrote an argument against using the terms in-universe, I also thought for a bit about the pro argument. I present both here.

Against: In the case of Scrooge's Doctor argument (similar to OS12's) we do have that in universe connection though from the previous Doctor. Even if (from an in-universe perspective) there's a small chance we have a War Doctor-like situation, the probabilities are heavily stacked in favour of that not being the case. It's more of an assumption than a T:VS violation. With the Corsairs, there's no "would logically have been the Sixth Corsair", because we didn't see them regenerate from a Fifth Corsair or into a Seventh.

Pro: The alternative argument is that we could treat the Houser and Gaiman tweets (as well as the Brilliant Book feature) as informal "credits". There is plenty of precedent for naming pages based on a credit, the only concern here is whether we do consider these as equivalent to credits? Or at least close enough to a credit to be able to use the names in-universe. We should be careful we don't create an unfounded precedent here, though, as there are certain cases where names are intentionally not used in any stories, for example a certain renegade Time Lord. Just because a writer adopts the fan term "The Collective" in a Twitter post, doesn't mean we should start using the term ourselves.

To end with, I'm in agreement with Scrooge that creating invalid pages for the First, etc. Corsairs would only improve our coverage of the character. Danochy ☎ 00:23, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I see your concerns for creating a precedent, and I think it is an entirely valid one. And, funnily enough, the renegade Time Lord was the next one I had in mind, specially because the name popularized itself on Twitter and Discord (much in the same way "Romana I" and "Romana II" did all those years ago). Again, while I appreciate and agree without concerns for precedent, both of these proposals would still be within the confinements of T:VS, because we're only dealing with the naming of the articles, and not the content in them. If we take a look at the description of {{Conjecture}}, it tells us "{{Conjecture}} is a template that flags articles whose subjects' names do not actually appear within a valid narrative."

While I inteded to keep this argument for the other discussion, I think it can be used here as well: if we're going to end up with "made up" names (which "The Corsair (story)" and "renegade Time Lord" (The Eleven)" kinda are) we might as well go with a more pratical/distinctive one (as long, of course, as we make it clear that they're conjectural). OncomingStorm12th ☎ 01:11, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, my whole response, including my concern for a precedent, was in regards to using the name in an in-universe context, not in the naming of a page. Scrooge has already (rightly) ruled on the page name discussion. And, again, using Roman numerals to distinguish Romanas is such minor conjecture that I don't think the analogy applies here. It is not the numbers that are coming from the real world, but the way of presenting them. Danochy ☎ 02:38, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't know about this. I'm with Danochy. The Romana precedent is for deciding on formatting, where the numbering is known in-universe.

"Sixth Corsair" is an in-universe assertion with no source, not simply a conjectural name in line with what information we're given. Conjecture should be descriptive, not completely inventive, and I do think T:VALID plays a role here.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 08:27, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

A bit of "historic" context for my Romana precedent: it wasn't merely a formatting decision (well, perhaps on the discussion, but not in general). As the bts of Romana I tell us, "For a long time, it was only assumed that this is Romana's first incarnation. There was nothing in any televised episode to indicate this to be so. She was never actually called "Romana I" in any story, televised or otherwise. The nomenclature comes from repetition across several non-fictional reference books, such as The Companions of Doctor Who, that have been written throughout the years. The Gallifrey audio story Warfare finally established that this incarnation attended the Academy, and explicitly stated in-narrative that she was the first Romana."

So, much like the Corsairs, the numbering came first from "non-valid" sources, only later to be confirmed. Except, in this case, the "non-valid" source is the author of the stories/creator of the character himself. Obviously I'm not arguing for [[Romana (The Ribos Operation)]] or anything of the sort, because today we have such confirmation in-universe, but the situations hold similarities.

And, for what concerns precedent, I'm only on the opinion that the "naming" (by which I mean both "what the page will be called" and "what name we'll use for the incarnations in the text") is what we draw from the non-valid sources. So "The Sixth Corsair met the Thirteenth Doctor and the Fam. (COMIC: Old Friends)" would be fair game under my proposal, but, say that Gaiman tweeted something like "Oh yeah, the Sixth Corsair once defeated the Daleks on the planet Mondas by poking their eyestalk with a Slitheen claw, then regenerated into the Seventh Corsair for laughs and giggles." That would not be used as a valid source in any articles, because that is not a narrative. OncomingStorm12th ☎ 16:25, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I'm kinda sceptical. Personally I feel conjectural titles should at least be inferences from valid sources. For example, the War Ollistra is an incarnation of Ollistra involved in the Last Great Time War in 99% of her appearances, the Defence of Gallifrey is a battle the Doctors are depicted mounting to defend Gallifrey and the Fugitive Doctor is an unnumbered incarnation of the Doctor who is a fugitive (indeed she is the titular Fugitive of the Judoon). These titles are all based on how these elements appear in valid stories, so their conjectural names aren't that much of a leap from the valid information. There is nothing in Old Friends or One Virtue, and a Thousand Crimes from which you could infer what number incarnation the Corsair is on. The numbering is entirely derived from behind the scenes intent and the currently invalid Brilliant Book piece. I also worry that giving these titles would give the impression to readers not familiar with how the wiki uses conjectural titles that these numberings were confirmed somewhere valid. Especially as I assume these conjectural names would subsequently be used on other articles where their conjectural nature wouldn't be made clear. That's just my take on it. SherlockTheII ☎ 17:33, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

You might just as well worry that the sentence

The First Doctor traveled with his granddaughter Susan. (PROSE: An Unearthly Child)

misleads to the reader to believe that An Unearthly Child refers to Susan's grandfather as the "First Doctor".

The general rule is certainly to use in-universe language on the wiki. For instance, sentences sourced from The Book of the War exclusively refer to The Homeworld, not Gallifrey, since that is the language used by the source. And it seems to be the prevailing objection that the title "Sixth Corsair" would break this rule, as that number has never been given in a valid source. But as I've illustrated, if we consistently applied the rule to Time Lord incarnations, we would have to cite Warfare every time we call Romana I Romana I, and we'd be using Epsilon the Eternal's lovely redirect Dr. Who (An Unearthly Child) in the infobox on The Klepton Parasites etc. We don't do these things because Time Lords are the sole exception to the in-universe language rule: we compromise for convenience and accept the fandom's out-of-universe names in article text so readers can easily distinguish between incarnations.

I agree that names shouldn't be inventive, and I would echo the objection wholeheartedly if the proposal was for Bald Master or something. But I don't think that's the case here! There are clear, universally-accepted incarnation names for the Corsair – they come straight from the creator and sole rights-holder; should any incarnation numbering ever be formalised in-universe, it will be Gaiman's. So for practical reasons alone, I don't see why this case should be any different than Romana or the Doctors. Allowing a small amount of conjecture, clearly marked via {{conjecture}} and explained in the "Behind the scenes" of each incarnation page, seems like a small price to satisfy the recognized objective of incarnation differentiation. – n8 (☎) 17:48, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I don't think anyone here is objecting to using a name given in a different valid source, where applicable. Other valid stories give us the impression that the First Doctor was the first, and so even if later stories did not give us "First Doctor" directly, it's a valid inference that we apply across all stories for the sake of comprehension (T:DOCTORS).

To clarify my own statements, I meant it shouldn't be inventive in the sense that it shouldn't invent content in being so named. Other conjectural titles are based on information given in valid stories. To take a mundane example, we stuck with "alien stingray" rather than alien (Planet of the Dead) (a later story would validate this name we chose) because this was a descriptive name (visual resemblance), and helped avoid turning to dab terms.

Actually claiming an incarnation is the Sixth Corsair would be inventing content, or using invalid sources to add content to the DWU. Using it in-line, even more so, would give the sense that this information that they are the sixth incarnation, which is not simply a reflective naming choice, has been verified with in-universe sources.

"Bald Master", on the other hand, would be perfectly in line with what we're given, would not add any new content that wasn't given in the stories in which he appeared. This is what I would term reflective, rather than inventive.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 20:46, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

That understanding of the Romana precedent is certainly worth considering, in any case. I maintain that "War Livia" is content-neutral, whereas "Seventh Corsair" is not, but all of the incarnation numberings were once out-of-universe assertions. The difference here, though, I think, is that we're not given a sequence of regenerations and inferring by necessity, by Occam's razor, that the first given was the First (by convention).

In Romana's case, I think, this was an out-of-universe acceptance but also an active community decision to take the path of least resistance, to assume the simplest explanation that the community has given is the right one, then to follow OOW on where to take this next.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 21:27, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

The thing is, we need to consider perspective here: we don't consider Eleven Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Corsair a valid source because of that dumb policy on narrativity determining validity - however, we seem to be ignoring the very simple fact that this is not how the authors think. It seems perfectly clear to me, at least, that Eleven Things... is being treated as a sort of ad hoc character bible by the writers of the authors of the Corsair stories. Discrediting this information that forms the basis for who the character of the Corsair is entirely disingenuous to the writers - they don't stipulate the incarnation number because they clearly expect you to be familiar already with the Corsair's incarnations, like how a story featuring the First Doctor and Susan will never refer to the Doctor as the "First Doctor", but expects you to recognize the character on common sense.

Simply put, us not recognizing Eleven Things... hurts our coverage of the Corsair, as the authors themselves have built their stories around this feature. The clear authorial intent is to use these numbered incarnations, and while, yes, Eleven Things... isn't valid, the precedent brought up by characters such as Romana has to be worth something.

As a last note, a counterpoint to @SOTO, if I understand correctly about your point about us making up names... we're not. These names are pre-established and unanimously agreed upon by the writers.

Epsilon📯 📂

02:09, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Can we stop with the "dumb policy" thing? It is pretty insulting to the people who made it/agree with it.

I am in agreement with those who are saying that these names are too inventive at current. Perhaps if there was a way to make Eleven Things valid? I've never read that fact file, does anyone know if it was written from an in or out of universe context? RadMatter ☎ 10:04, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Well it is dumb - during the lost Forum thread it was found that the rule had been randomly invented early on in the Wiki's existence by @CzechOut who wasn't even an admin at the time, all because one person disagreed with the purported weight of a Dalek from a fact file. The entire policy is based upon absolutely absurd grounds. And we haven't even been able to finish that discussion because @CzechOut had not only postponed the closure of that discussion prior to the Forums going down, he hasn't even restored the Forums in over an entire year he has had, a process, FYI, that could have easily been done in a matter of days.

I am confused though. How are these names "inventive"? By the definition provided by Merriam-Webster...

2: characterized by invention
// an inventive methodMerriam-Webster

An inventive name would indicate.. y'know, we invented it, which is explicitly not the case. These names originate from nearly a decade old fictional fact file written by the character's IP holder. These are 100% official, as evidenced by the fact that every story since that featured the Corsair has cohered to what the fact file said.

To reiterate, we haven't invented a thing so could you all please stop saying that we ?

Epsilon📯 📂

11:52, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

I'd like to thank User:NateBumber for detailing our page for Eleven Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Corsair. Now it gives us a better idea of it's contents in the Wiki itself. Answering RadMatter's previous question, as Nate's edits showed: yes, it is 100% and unquestionably written in a in-universe perspective, not too far from how we actually write our own articles. To directly quote one of the entries (number #1): "His TARDIS looked like a sailing ship whenever it was pratical - and sometimes even when it wasn't - because small, pratical sailing ships are cool.". Put simple, all that differentiates it from a few stories we currently cover is a more explicit framing device, but in-universe and somewhat narrative it is. OncomingStorm12th ☎ 15:46, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Given that we agree that Eleven Things is in-universe and narrative, I've started a discussion at Talk:Eleven Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Corsair challenging its invalidity. Hopefully that can be quickly resolved, since the original {{invalid}} tag was added without discussion or explanation, and then we can revisit this discussion with the new information. – n8 (☎) 14:57, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Right! That was definitely a piece of narrative prose, and I've resolved it as such on that talk page. I also carried out the Seventh Corsair and Ninth Corsair renames, which go without saying if Eleven Things is regarded as valid. However, [[The Corsair (Old Friends)]] remains a bit of an oddity, as the "Sixth Corsair" does not actually appear within Eleven Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Corsair at all, let alone being described in sufficient detail as to then be identifiable as the woman seen in Old Friends.

I do, personally, think we ought not to be pedantic for pedantry's sake, and to rename it too. We do have valid, narrative evidence pointing in that direction:

• the Seventh Corsair alludes to the events of COMIC: Old Friends as being in her past in PROSE: One Virtue, and a Thousand Crimes, thus providing narrative evidence that the Old Friends is one of Corsairs 1-6;
• Eleven Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Corsair identifies the Third Corsair and Fifth Corsair's tattoo-placements, elsewhere than on the wrist as seen in Old Friends, and also rules out the Fourth Corsair,w who is referred to with he/him pronouns.

Thus, valid evidence alone tells us that the woman in Old Friends could only be one of the First Corsair, the Second Corsair, or the Sixth Corsair. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 02:12, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Actually, Old Friends says the events of the Doctor and the Corsair waking up in a bank vault and in jail were in their past, and Eleven Things (which it was referencing) says this was either with the Fourth, Fifth or Eighth Corsair. Which alongside your evidence and existing descriptions of the other incarnations, pretty solidly makes her the Sixth Corsair. Now if we didn't have Gaiman's words that she's the sixth alongside that, I'd be a bit more hesitant, but I think both the creator's word and deduction based on evidence in valid sources makes it work. (Though I personally also think the fact have words from the character's creator and the comic's writer and artist that this was intended to be the Sixth Corsair and that it was written/drawn in continuity with Eleven Things You Didn't Know About the Corsair should be enough, as detailed by the above arguments, but that's beyond the point…) Chubby Potato ☎ 09:22, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

A-ha! Exemplary deduction-work. Yes, this is sufficient even if we didn't have any quotes on the matter whatever. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 11:31, 1 April 2022 (UTC)