Forum:Overhauling non-T:NPOV compliant policies

Index → The Panopticon → Overhauling non-T:NPOV compliant policies

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Opening post

Okay, so on this Wiki, we have several policies, such as T:TARDIS, T:K9, T:DOCTORS... which are completely incompatible with Tardis:Neutral point of view.

Media doesn't matter. One of the most important aspects of this wiki is that all media have equal weight here. Television is not the most important source of information on this wiki. That which is said in a short story in the 1967 Doctor Who Annual, or a Faction Paradox audio drama, is just as valid as the latest episode of BBC Wales Doctor Who.T:NPOV

...Now let's take a look at some of these policies about naming conventions. For example, Tardis:K9/Background states: "Still, conforming to the general T:NAMING rule that the more common names shall apply, the rule we've adopted here is that K9 "wins"." So apparently sources can "win" over others. Riiiiiiiiiight. (Also, I can't see anything in T:NAMING, or in previous revisions, that states more common names trump literally any and all variations thereof. Now, T:CHAR NAMES does say something along these lines, but more on that later.)

T:DOCTORS is unusual as it doesn't even reference stylisations of the character's names such as "Dr. Who"; I think it's technically allowed, though I have faced pushback before from usage of Dr. Who (An Unearthly Child). T:TARDIS seems to be convinced that we should only use one stylisation and stick with it... for stylistic reasons? (That's not a very good reason if you ask me, nor is it befitting to Doctor Who which in all aspects has proven to be anything but consistent, from lore to the design of spines on Target novelisations.)

Now, in recent times, the Wiki has gotten better at reflecting media on their original merits over the retcons that have been introduced later; we've pages like Planet (An Unearthly Child), we cover alternating accounts of character's identities like the War Chief, etc. Most relevantly, we cover the bloke who used the alias "Monk"'s role in The Time Meddler accurately to the original serial, acknowledging that the later retcons are "according to one account"; we deal with the discrepancies between the character's names — such as the Monk, the Meddling Monk, Mortimus, etc — all equally, not prioritising one over the other, using what the source being cited uses. This is seen as Tardis:The Monk, a policy which this Wiki has had since August 2012... which, while it postdates Tardis:K9, was created at the same time as Tardis:TARDIS and Tardis:Doctors! So we've been able to cover names equally for over a decade, except... where we don't want to.

More recently, we have really cemented the precedent of covering sources outside of later retcons in Talk:The Monk/Archive 1#Article made from whole cloth. An IP editor, increasingly frustrated about the Wiki's action of completely disregarding the original 1960s lore (e.g., the monk was human!), litigated his issues on the character's talk page. While they swung too far in the opposite direction by saying that any retcon meant that a new character had been created, it did result in @Scrooge MacDuck forming a ruling on what to call the character: "we should probably strive to use the names given by each individual sources in individually-sourced statement."

This proves to me that these policies need reform. They weren't consistent upon creation, and they certainly are not consistent with policies like T:NPOV now. So, you may ask, what do we do now? Now, I have a few thoughts on that.

Why these policies should remain... in some form

However, before I get into how I'd like to change these policies, I'd like to write about what I want to keep.

We should, after this thread, retain the policy as outlined by T:CHAR NAMES wherein we use the most commonly used name of a character to title our pages. I think it would be hugely impractical otherwise, as it would lead to confusing and ambiguous names. After this thread, I feel the policy pages — T:K9, T:MONK, T:DOCTORS and T:TARDIS should be redirects to T:CHAR NAMES, as they are all, truly, the same policy but worded differently between characters; it would be easy to have any important detail about the nuance of a given character's name in a subsection of T:CHAR NAMES. The only page I'd be unsure what to do with it Tardis:K9/Background, as that is actually quite an interesting read about the character's name. Perhaps it could be slightly retwritten to work outside of a policy page and then moved to the behind the scenes section of K9?

But, I feel the need to clarify something: this thread is designed to affect how we refer to characters in the in-universe sections of articles, not the names of the pages themselves. They're two similar, yet distinct, faces of the same coin. The current policy pages kinda flit between both of these faces, hence why I do need to write this section, rather than wholly saying it should be dismissed.