Forum: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.
...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) elsewhere on the Wiki. 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 [+]Loading...["The Time Meddler (TV story)"] accurately to the original serial, acknowledging that the later soft-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, 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.
What should change
If all these (well, maybe not one of them, I'll explain in a sec) are merged into T:CHAR NAMES, we firstly need to make it clear that that page concerns both page names and what we can refer to the character as in the in-universe parts of the Wiki. Then, the general ethos of the page should be:
- Generally speaking, use the same stylisation as the source you are citing uses. If Interference [+]Loading...["Interference (novel)"] uses "K-9", use K-9. If K9 and the Beasts of Vega [+]Loading...["K9 and the Beasts of Vega (novel)"] uses "K9", use K9. If the source in question doesn't show the stylisation — perhaps it's a television episode or audio drama, and for some reason the name isn't given in the credits — then default to the stylisation most common to the time period in which the source was released; so if contemporary fiction styles the character's name as "K-9" even if this source doesn't show his name, use that stylisation.
Otherwise... I think T:DOCTORS should remain separate. Or at least have a more detailed section on T:CHAR NAMES. While the current policy is heavily flawed, which the top of the page saying "When referring to an incarnation of the Doctor please include the number of the incarnation in some way. Avoid pipe switching to simply "the Doctor"." which is incompatible for every Doctor from the Fugitive Doctor to Dr. Who to The Doctor (The Cabinet of Light) — especially as the wording of that introduction is poor, implying that pipeswitching dab terms is disallowed, which obviously wasn't the intent of that introductory line — it does have merit in retaining. While we should use the names most accurate to the source in question, if we do have an ordinary ordinal Doctor, who isn't referred to as "Dr. Who" in the source, then we should avoid pipeswitching the name. While I don't think, in most cases, it would be too confusing to just refer to the Doctor as "the Doctor", there are a good number of possible instances where the pipeswitch would be confusing, so I won't be directly tackling that in this thread.
Is this a double standard? Maybe? But I feel it'd be best to take this undertaking in smaller steps rather than larger ones. However, if everyone agrees on this, if a consensus forms, then I wouldn't object to it being tackled in this thread.
Also, with T:DOCTORS, "first Doctor" should be moved to the "correct" side of the chart and "first Dr. Who" should also be added, as we should maintain a way to reference which Dr. Who is which, although it shouldn't be standard to do so.
Thoughts?
18:15, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
(Addendum: just recently Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse [+]Loading...["Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse (reference book)"] stylised K9 Mark IV's name as "K-9", but despite it being present in officially licensed media, the name is completely banished off the Wiki.)
Discussion
Not sure off hand if something predates this, but I remembered that Forum:Artifacts or Artefacts of Rassilon? is relevant here. Najawin ☎ 02:06, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- Najawin, I don't think you're supposed to discuss things here until it's an actual forum thread, as opposed to a sandbox. Aquanafrahudy 📢 07:03, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- I stand behind my comment made while this was a sandbox and I thought it was a forum. :P (Also, doing a little bit of archaeology, T:NAMING used to redirect to the "Naming of articles" section in the MoS (scroll down). It's the specific subsection that was spunoff to T:CHAR NAMES though. Indeed, this dates back to the original MoS in 2006. And it's one of those weird issues where I can't see anything because it's so early in the wiki's history. Maybe there was discussion off site, or wiki saved something on another server and it didn't get ported over. But there's no discussion about the MoS anywhere and no discussion about the PoV page User:OncomingStorm wrote the same day.)
- There are two types of IU sections that seem relevant here, broadly speaking. Summaries and biographies. Surely summaries should use the names present in the book, regardless of stylization elsewhere. Indeed, they often do, I believe. Is this always the case with biographies? I'm... less sure. Suppose we're discussing the biography of some Doctor, and in some paragraph we discuss his loyal companion K9. Then, five paragraphs later, in a completely different context, we discuss K-9. Have we done something wrong here? Maybe. I dunno. Try this with Lolita and Lilith and Lady Wakai. I think there's a case to be made that we might want to keep biographies readable for the fans that we try to serve. Especially, might I add, for cases where it doesn't reflect some sort of evolving understanding of the character, but instead simply a stylistic choice about how to represent that character (and/or their name) in a way that's fundamentally familiar to what we know about them prior. I dunno, ymmv.
- And I think there's also the issue of how to address BTS naming conventions here. If we're on The Monk and we refer to BTS facts about the character during The Time Meddler, what do we refer to them as? (Well, you can treat "monk" as a name rather than description, but the basic point still holds. This is more than just an IU problem.) Najawin ☎ 04:24, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
I'm heavily in favor of keeping a more standard approach to characters like the Doctor. Sure, it might seem cute when some wiki writers insert "Dr. Who went on an adventure" and such into articles, what it actually does is insert an implied difference, to the casual reader, between sources that do and do not do this. So, if one paragraph on First Doctor says "The Doctor ate an apple," then another says "Dr. Who ate some grapes," this actually violates T:NPOV in some subconscious way by implying, to the reader, that these statements do not describe the same persona. A reader might use this logic to assume that sections which use "Dr. Who" should be skipped, as they appear to be written stylistically different than stories which don't use this name. While this might match the head canons of a few of our readers/editors, doing this is counter-productive to the entire point of refusing to treat more obscure sources as "lesser" than the most popular ones.
Not to mention that even in sources where Dr. Who is the character's full name, it's not used nearly as often as we imply on this site! To use Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks) as an example, in Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., "Dr. Who" is said, out loud, one time. "Doctor" or "the Doctor" is spoken 11 times. So even the Cushing Doctor's page should, on occasion, just say "the Doctor" instead of "Dr. Who," because that is what people call him!
When it comes to other characters, such as K9, I suppose a minor difference would not matter. But it does become contentious again once we look at things like Bessie vs Betsie. Is it not confusing to switch between these two names? By making the switch, are we implying to readers that stories which use Betsie are "lesser" by not conforming? I think it's seriously worth considering. OS25🤙☎️ 08:00, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
- Just dropping in to highlight T:PERIOD, which tells us that we have to uniformly use "UNIT", for example, not "U.N.I.T.", even when sources use the latter. 18:28, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
- I myself wholeheartedly agree with this statement and I disagree that saying Dr.Who and the Doctor I plus they are different characters especially when it is on that characters biography or for anyone even vaguely familiar with the classic comics of novelisations (many of which have been reprinted or had audio readings in the audio annuals) not to mention several sources imply that the Doctor’s Real Name is Dr.Who. I am a strong Dr Who supporter. And in any article we should use the name given for that in that source. To avoid confusion we have the alias section of the info box if anyone is confused they can just click a link one tap away and see the alias info box under the first Doctor lists Dr. who (I myself believe the alias should be split into “other names:” for other names they are called which also happen to be their true name (as in Dr. Who and the Doctor) and keep “alias:” for nicknames and false identities I.e. John Smith. Is the whole function of that part of the info box to avoid this kind of confusion? We should just call someone what they are called in that source. On a side note judging by the new Faction Paradox website it seems they are moving away from the name Lolita toward Lilith for upcoming releases and this alias is just as true and Lolita.)Anastasia Cousins ☎ 18:17, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
- Personally, I just think that having an article switch between UNIT and U.N.I.T. at complete random doesn't serve any purpose except making the sit look ugly and inconsistent to casual readers. Same for K*9, K9, K-9 and so on. And I again insist upon my previous point - having some sections on an article say "Dr. Who did this" will only lead to confusion and readers presuming "oh, this bit isn't canon then." We can discuss Who as a potential last name without having to reinforce it every single time one of these old stories comes up. OS25🤙☎️ 20:24, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
- If someone thinks that a source calling the Doctor "Dr Who" means that it isn't canonical, then that's a. their opinion, b. the Wiki functioning correctly, as we're not meant to be dictating canonicity but covering sources equally so people can have the perogative to decide what they think "counts".
- And to that extent, if we're meant to be representing media neutrally and equally, it really doesn't make sense to go and say "this name is completely exiled from the Wiki and can never be used ever, except in pagenames of sources which use the name". To exile these alternate spellings and names is the same territory as "names from novelisations aren't valid".
- They're very interconnected subjects! We shouldn't be pretending that a source gives information it doesn't actually say, as, for a very prominent example, the name "Celestial Toymaker" is a large misconception about the character's actual name, "The Toymaker", and because of the misconception people believe the character was named after a slur. Now imagine we have T:TOYMAKER which forbade us from using the character's original name and only the retroactive one. Not only would this continue to damage the representation of the character, under your argument the original shouldn't be used "because consistency". May as well call the Rani "Ushas" in The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind [+]Loading...["The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind (novelisation)"] and so on.
- Now I do understand the argument about internal consistency in a single article, but while using these names would introduce a bunch of different spellings for a given character's name, this is honestly preferable to invalidating them all.
- Furthermore, at least with "Dr Who", we can probably fudge it a little bit as most sources that use "Dr Who" also use "the Doctor" so we can just continue to use the latter. 22:57, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
