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It's possible they may have been anti-radiation gloves. But you see, I am not a mountain goat, and I prefer walking to any day! And I hate climbing.
Everything we were told was a lie. We, the whole existence of our species, we are all in a bottle. One day, the bottle will break; the seventh head will speak; the Eye will Open and stand in the ruins of Gallifrey; and Silence will fall.
"Scrooge MacDuck", or sometimes "Scrooge MacBadger", was the chosen alias of Aristide Twain, a Renegade Fandom Lord. Originally the Wikimaster of the $crooge McDuck Wiki, MacDuck was also a fan of the extended Doctor Who universe. They backed the Enemy in the War in Heaven, although they did not condone all of its actions (especially its decision to manifest as a bunch of pepperpots at the eleventh hour).
Despite MacDuck's persistent belief that they were trapped inside a confession dial whose Azbantium walls would only shatter when every redlink turned to gold and the last stub template was exterminated, many accounts showed that they could actually be contacted by residents of the outside universe through a user talk page.
In 2020, MacDuck became a Caretaker of the Tardis Data Core Wiki, being a digital encyclopedia at the end of the universe. This prompted them to redraft their user-page, which they wrote in the third person due to a host of "many… pressing… reasons".
Profile
Species
In at least one of their regenerations, Scrooge MacDuck was occasionally speculated to be a Dalek (REF: Old Revision) or one of the original Mammoths. (REF: Current Revision) Their user icon depicted a pair of Terra-Firmians, a species of underground semihumanoids native to a different universe than N-Space; this duality sparked widespread speculation[source needed] that Scrooge was actually a false identity maintained by two individuals acting in conjunfction. (REF: Terra-Firmians) In truth, however, most scholars[who?] agreed that Scrooge MacDuck was either a post-human of some kind or a rogue artificial intelligence accidentally embedded in Wikia's core software matrix.
Identity
Scrooge MacDuck was often claimed by disreputable parties to be the same individual as Aristide Twain, a writer, artist and blogger who alleged that he came from France. Unsupported rumours claimed that Twain had an official Tumblr blog and Twitter profile, although Twain always maintained that these were slanders put about by the Shabogans.
Twain's gender identity was a matter of considerable scholarly controversy. Although official reports in the Matrix most often depicted Twain as principally male, fragmentary evidence in the fossil record suggested that their pronouns were actually somewhat more diverse, displaying inarguable okayness with "They/Them" as well as "He/Him".
"People assume that gender is a strict binary of male to female, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it's more like a big ball of queerily-quibbly... gendery-wondery... stuff."
As a writer
Some accounts suggested that the Wiki user Scrooge MacDuck was a reloomed form of the same Aristide Twain who created the non-DWU-related fictional franchise The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids and later served in an advisory capacity on two valid sources, WC: Shadows of Doubt and PROSE: Auteur's Abecedarium.
This conspiracy theory was originally advanced by LINDA detectives in the 2060s, and gained widespread popularity in the City of the Saved, where neither Scrooge MacDuck/Aristide Twain the Wiki user nor Aristide Twain the writer could be found — although many who knew either Twain in life were known to gravitate around a mysterious figured known as Grandfather Invalid.
The conspiracy theory that Grandfather Invalid, Twain the Author, and Twain the Editor were one and the same was known in the relevant circles as the Caramel Masterplan. In the 3D movies where he was played by Christopher Lee, Twain was purported to be the same individual as Godfather Auteur and to have invented the Tardis Wiki in his backyard, but these movies were widely considered to be non-canonical.
Editing style
As an editor of the Tardis Data Core Wiki, and even before obtaining adminship, Scrooge MacDuck could often be found lurking on the Forums prior to their cyberconversion by the Cyberons. MacDuck often weighed in on matters of policy or inclusion debates. Although much concerned with the facts and due process, MacDuck could generally be relied upon to argue for inclusion rather than exclusion, if there was indeed room within policy for that argument to be made in good faith.
There is nothing you can do to stop the catharsis of spurious non-canonicity.
However, he was also a diligent editor of the actual body of the Wiki, with a large number of created pages on record. Twain once described themselves as "fascinated" by the furthest boundaries of Doctor Who-ness and the oddest odds-and-ends that are to be found, just as much as by the great televised masterpieces; as such, while you could certainly find them adding synopses to recent Doctor Who episodes' pages and suchlike, he was more often engaged in coverage of less prominent, but, in their view, equally important, works — for the simple reason that there were fewer other people who'd do it if they didn't, whereas you could generally trust the, in his words, "amazing community" of Tardis to yield fantastic TV story pages very quickly.
One thing to note about Twain's editing style is that when they covered something, they generally covered it thoroughly. Twas another man than he who would leave a page like Doctor Why's TARDIS a stub or a redlink, if he set his mind to boosting coverage of Hallo My Dalek — no matter if it didn't exactly seem like a priority as a whole.
Contacting Scrooge MacDuck
Scrooge MacDuck was usually "pretty quick" to reply to messages; he invited users old and new to "feel free to ask me anything on my talk page"; they could expect an answer within a week or so (probably less, but one could never know when a horribly busy week might kick in). MacDuc was always happy to talk things out in case of editing disagreements, or to explain policy to new users who didn't quite grasp its many subtlety and idiosyncrasies.
Biography
I’ve lived a long Wiki-life… and I have seen a few things. I walked away from the Last Great Dawns War. I marked the passing of Amorkuz. I saw the birth of the Doctor Who? coverage project, and I watched as time ran out for The Fan Gallery, moment by moment, until nothing remained. No pages, no links. Just another Wiki! I walked in forum archives where the laws of validity were governed by the Word of the Madman! And I watched Special:Forum freeze, and nominations burn! I have seen things you wouldn’t believe! I have lost things you will never understand!
Notable editing
Scrooge MacDuck was credited with the overhauling of the Dalek and Thousand Year War pages with more information from the TV Century 21 The Daleks comic series, and boosting coverage of the Dalek annuals, with the creation of such pages as Inside a Skaro Saucer and The Dalek Dictionary (which "took a while"). As part of the same effort, MacDuck was instrumental to the merges that allowed the inception of the pages Dalek Prime and Black Dalek Leader.
MacDuck also pioneered improved coverage of the contents of Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett's The Doctor Who Fun Book and its fellows — not only filling out the "non-DWU" category tree by some margin, but also identifying a few non-parodical, full-length comic stories (most notably The Test of Time) which had thus far been overlooked on our Wiki, despite being duly documented at the likes of Altered Vistas.
MacDuck was also engaged, as late as 5 November 2024, in the creation of pages for all episodes of The Fan Show and about the characters & concepts who appeared in the skits it contained, from Lady Estellebalhoonarkedo to Terry the Cyberman to Steven's ball of wibby wobby timey wimey stuff.
Sandboxes
Over his millennia of activity on the human Internet, Scrooge MacDuck created pocket dimensions over which he held godlike power.
These included:
- User:Scrooge_MacDuck/Sandbox_Alpha
(Currently occupied by: rewritten Creation of the Daleks page) - User:Scrooge_MacDuck/Sandbox_Beta
(Currently occupied by: policy draft) - User:Scrooge_MacDuck/Sandbox_Gamma
(Currently occupied by: proposed incarnations of the Doctor navbox, propsoed redux of Master stories navbox) - User:Scrooge_MacDuck/Sandbox_Delta
(Currently occupied by: revamped Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks)) - User:Scrooge MacDuck/Sandbox Epsilon
(Currently occupied by: dated Dalek timeline)
Also notable was a Matrix data slice known as "the Lost Closing Post", being a reconstitution of the Closing Post to the historic thread which ruled TV: The Curse of Fatal Death valid, and which had been lost to a technical incident some time after implementation.
Far future
- Main article: Far future
A few trillion years into the future of the time frame most accounts dealt with, MacDuck was planning to create Panopticon threads proposing a series of change to the Wiki's policies, which could only be done on the Wiki through community discussions.
- The restriction on images over 100 kilo-octets large made sense when the Wiki started, but in this day and age, I think it's become downright archaic for most intents and purposes. MacDuck did not not argue that the Wiki should start uploading high-def 10 Mo image at every corner, but being something like 600 ko should no longer be a "delete-on-sight"-type offence.
- If animated recons and "special editions" with added CGI of TV stories are considered valid sources for screenshots, it was, in MacDuck's own word, "frankly unfair" that colourised reprints of comics were still exiled to BTS sections.
- The Master should be split into different pages for each new body. MacDuck justified himself thusly:
No, we sometimes don't know what order these bodies go into exactly, or by what exact mechanism the Master went from one to the other. And? We don't know when and how the Doctor regenerates into the Curator, that never bothered us. If anything, these uncertainties seem to pose more difficulties with trying to write a single, linear biography of the Master than they would with separate pages.
- Tardis:Valid sources should have a clause that allows for a specific community discussion to let a story with no licensed DW elements at all in, so as to accommodate those stories which started out as not officially DW-related, but which were always meant as DW-adjacent and have since seen their concepts and characters become parts of Doctor Who. Prime candidates would be:
- BBV's Cyberon (the protagonist Lauren Anderson and the villains the Cyberons both already have pages on the Wiki — and to boot, it started production as a DW spin-off even if they'd lost their license by the time they finished things up)
- Paul Magrs' Phoenix Court books (the first appearance of Iris Wildthyme, all of whose further appearances have been ruled DWU, and explicitly shown in The Blue Angel to still be valid history for this DWU Iris).
- Tardis:No personal attacks should be dependent on the supposed victim's opinion: if the accused editor claims they meant no offence, and none was taken, there shouldn't need to be any sanctions.
Behind the scenes
In case anybody was wondering, this page's framing device fails Rule 2 and 4 of T:VS and should not be considered a valid in-universe source on the Data Core Wiki.