Forum:Coverage/validity: DWA meta-fiction

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Introduction

Doctor Who Adventures was a nifty little all-ages magazine. Apart from their various comic strips - both valid and invalid - it also had an abundance of fun and wacky features, many of which bordered on being in-universe, or at the very least presented themselves as such.

I've been gradually going back and grabbing old issues online and oh boy what a nostalgic treasure trove!

For a couple of periods, each issue opened with a letter written by the Doctor themselves; the letters written by the Twelfth Doctor for all 24 issues of the magazine's 2015 reboot are the most in-depth of these, easily placing within the same level of vality as the A Letter from the Doctor series in my mind; they fully contextualise themselves as letters written for the magazine, often touching upon each issues contents. The ones written by the Eleventh Doctor, which appeared in issues published from 2011 to 2013, are a bit briefer and only occasionally contextualise themselves. You can find information on some of these letters via the pages I made for them: Hello, Time Travellers! and Dear Readers. There maybe other incarnations of this "letter" series I haven't discovered yet - ones written by the Tenth Doctor, perhaps? - I'll wait and see.

Another reoccurring feature that presents itself with a metafictional slant - one which makes it a more problematic thing to cover - is the letters pages. For a long stretch of the Eleventh Doctor's era (at least), the magazine ran a letters page in which readers sent in questions to be answered by the Doctor himself, as well as by Madam Kovarian in her own little column for a while. The only reason I find this one more difficult to approach as "in-universe" is, of course, because of all of the real world names on display. If these were covered as in-universe documents, it would mean making pages for all of these random real world children, and that just feels… creepy, for lack of a better term.

Finally, there are countless one-off features that have elements of meta-fiction. One that I've already made a page for - currently presented as valid, though I'm open to that changing - is We Are 200!

I'll be coming back with more examples in the future, but for now, discuss what I've brought up so far. WaltK ☎ 22:38, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

I'm unsure - if something like this came out today, it may be best to leave it alone, but to me the question is whether everyone from it would be an adult now - if they're over the age of 18, that's a lot less problematic in my mind than documenting them while they're a minor. Not entirely sure, though. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 09:40, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Let's start with one of those one-off's: issue 249's The Doctor's Guide to 2012. It's the Eleventh Doctor doing a month-by-month summery of the then-new year. Like the majority of these features, it's a harmless piece daftness. It would indeed be fun to say it's valid that February smells like blackcurrant, or that Lady Gaga accidentally starts a new fashion trend involving tunafish. WaltK ☎ 01:13, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

I mean, that one seems fine to me, the only issues I potentially see with other ones are privacy issues with real children's names. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 10:07, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

As I go through it, I do start to question whether it should be valid. Reading about a meteor in the exact shape of Dermot O'Leary's face tends to do that to a person. WaltK ☎ 21:46, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Without understanding much of this situation, I think they should be covered but invalid. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 12:24, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

we cover the crossovers with Contact 21 (in-universe) and Spectrum Shadesas well as several of the children who wrote in contacting Brent Cleever so we have a precedent for this. Their for I think it should be validated. If we do not validate it then we are ignoring something which is very important to our coverage of the 2060s Dalek invasion of Earth as we find out that the Daleks lost the Invasion (we are not shown this but find out in a latter source how, but from a historic perspective the Spectrum Shades story Daleks on the Move? (short story)is the only conclusion from TVC21 on said invasio.Anastasia Cousins ☎ 16:04, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

I can only judge the Hello, Time Travellers! and Doctor, Doctor! parts of the magazine, given that I primarily own Matt Smith era issues, and apart from the potential issues with the identities of minors (although they are presumably adults now)... I have some concerns with the content.

Regarding Doctor, Doctor! and the identities of minors, I am hesitant in covering them even if they are technically adults now; for one, it is quite different to have your name printed in a single issue of an obscure kiddie magazine from a decade ago which few copies likely still remain today than to have a Fandom Wiki page based on that, which will, given Fandom's high SEO priority, be ranked high in search results. Imagine someone Googles your name and the first thing that appears is an in-universe Tardis Wiki page! I can't imagine many people would like that. Plus, there is also the issues that come with anyone who may be transgender or similar, as we could inadvertently document their deadnames. Of course, if any of the original readers come forth and are comfortable with themselves being documented in such a way (like myself) then I see little issue with covering them.

A solution to this may be to just name each person, generally speaking, something like Reader 1 (Doctor, Doctor! 292) and just... avoid naming them altogether. Even if these letters pages are made invalid, we still have to cover them, so I feel this is a priority over their validity.

I currently own DWA 217, DWA 289, DWA 292, and DWA 299, and looking at the Doctor, Doctor! letters... while they certainly are goofy, they are no more goofy like the How to be a Time Lord book which is very tonally similar to these letters pages, and nothing in them seem to break T:VS, apart from being occasionally meta-fiction leaning and parodical (in the broader sense of the term where something is very silly and unadulterated rather than traditional lampooning).

Regarding Hello, Time Travellers!, these are certainly more metafictional, which coupled with their sillier tone than the A Letter from the Doctor precursors, does make me more sceptical of their validity. In DWA 292's Hello, Time Travellers!, the Doctor claims that at the last Halloween party he went to, the Daleks dressed up as the thing they were most scared of — so a no-prize if you guessed they put on bow-ties to imitate the Doctor. Of course, the Doctor could be lying, but it does make me feel it needs a bit of scrutinising here.

That being said, they too should probably be valid (although I don't think this thread intended to invalidate them, but I wanted to express my thoughts on them). As @WaltK said, reading this sort of stuff does tend to make you question the validity of these things.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

16:54, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Epsilon's points about the safeguarding of readers' privacy (which are all absolutely solid) has been making me wonder if it was really a good idea to identify the competition winners who created Heather and Decky on their respective pages. And other "civilians" for that matter. WaltK ☎ 19:52, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

I agree there. I feel we could continue to identify William Grantham given he has a public YouTube channel where he openly speaks about the Abzorbaloff, but he is more of an exception.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

20:07, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Also, regarding my suggestion of Reader 1 (Doctor, Doctor! 292), we could do readers of Doctor Who Adventures like readers of whoisdoctorwho.co.uk. And this Forum does open questions about those real people too (although, thankfully, many of the people who submitted flash fiction did either use aliases or not their full names, though there have been some instances where I've avoided using what appears to be their email address which certainly is a no-go to cover here).

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

20:12, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

so what do we do with the TVC21 write ins? We cover each write in that crosses over with the DWU as valid including the children who wrote in. Are you suggesting we change them as well? The fact is that would, I feel, weaken those articles as those write ins can be as I have said before massively important for the history of the 2060’s especially the 2060s Dalek invasion of Earth which is functionally wrapped up in one of these short stories. Perhaps say a 40 year count so that after 40 years we pop their names up? This way we keep the old 60’s write ins as they are both important for narrative and fandom history reasons, and keep privet the more recent write ins. Of course another problem here is that some people may have transitioned since and changed their names. If they get in contact with us should we change the names on the page to their preferred names? Overall should we go for an opt in system or an opt out system? Emails of real people are definitely a no go.Anastasia Cousins ☎ 20:19, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

I think I agree. While it may seem to be a double standard... I don't think we need to have this level of caution with kids who wrote in nearly sixty years ago. I feel the chances of the issues arising with more recent write-ins are much less likely than anything more recent.

I think evaluating whether to cover real people should absolutely be a case-by-case with each story/series. Something from the 1960s? We should cover. The tie-in websites? Cover. Kid magazines from the past twenty-thirty years? Nah. I think that not only are we dealing with real people here, the Doctor, Doctor! readers often use their full names and were children at the time. Of course, in any case where someone is covered and asks to be removed, we should remove their names.

Re. deadnames, I don't think it is codified in policy (though it should be) but changing the page to use their current names is the only option we should pursue. Haven't we already established this with Jayce Black (in-universe)?

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

20:32, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

I guess I missed that page but we still need a formal policy (this I don’t think is the write place for that and will require a new forum). But I think a cut off point is important. Pseudonyms is say are fine to cover but really names should not be after a set time. I believe the cut of point should be officially decided on and not vague at all. I propose, as said previously, a 40 year cut off. As this allows significant time between point a and b ti allow them to be seen probably as different people with the same name? Anastasia Cousins ☎ 20:44, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

To me, forty years is a little arbitrary. It could be thirty-five years or forty-five or even fifty. I'm not sure there is a precise way to determine this cutoff point. (I don't reckon this Wiki — or really any other — will be around in forty years, and I'll be surprised if it is.)

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

20:47, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure I saw a deadname policy somewhere... Goodness knows where. Aquanafrahudy 📢 21:01, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

I absolutely think we should cover the letters as valid on the wiki. They were absolutely written as in-universe segments, so should be presented as such. We don’t have to put names to the kids who wrote questions. We could just do "DWA reader", and makes a page like the one Epsilon suggested above "Readers of Doctor Who Adventures". Danniesen ☎ 21:04, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Tardis:Names of actors is the closest thing we have to a deadname policy. It is not quite as robust as it should be. Najawin ☎ 21:38, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

From what information is available I would lean on the side of validity for most of the stuff in the OP. The parallel of the Doctor-penned letters to (the valid) A Letter from the Doctor series from DWM certainly seems strong but I'd be hesitant to rule on an all-in or all-out basis for the general concept of "DWA meta-fiction" especially when so much of it don't even have pages yet.

Then there's the privacy concern, which I agree is an issue for these more recent works. Even if a cut-off period for readers' names is a little arbitrary, I think it's a good idea to pin down a specific date. The letters section of Doctor Who Magazine has been ongoing since '79 and featured replies from the Doctor in several of its eras so we should make abundantly clear how recent is too recent for coverage. Borisashton ☎ 21:45, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Having given this some thought, how about we only cover details about these individuals fifteen years after their original publication? If we understand that children begin to learn to write at four-five years old, then fifteen years later takes them to eighteen. But idk, the fact that they were children when they wrote in gives me more hesitation than something like Who is Doctor Who? which, AFAIK, were submitted by adults or teens.

And even if we decide to grant coverage to these children with the "publication year + fifteen years" standard, I don’t think we should include images of them.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

22:55, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm just wondering when the cutoff point for that would be, since Graham Page ^[+]Loading...["Graham Page (short story)"] seems to have a picture of the real Graham Page. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 22:58, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

My Monster Day

Another quickie; a seemingly irregular series in which we see apparent diary entries from a different character detailing their daily lives. My gut instinct is saying valid due to their similarity to DWM's The Blogs of Doom. What I'm wondering is the titling; I'm thinking My Monster Day being the overall series name, with the subtitle being the individual story names - in this case, Dorium Maldover Tells It Like It Is! (short story)

I don't currently know how many entries this series has; this and another that covers Madam Kovarian are the only two I know of. WaltK ☎

I think that makes sense, personally, if "My Monster Day" is the caption of all (or most!) of the instalments. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 21:14, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Conclusion

Ach, sorry this has been in limbo for so long… I was, at some level, waiting for the outcome of the deadname-policy thread, which seems like it might impact this one, but carried too far that sort of parcel-passing makes for generalised ossification, and I should have known better. Apologies, all.

Part 1: The question of validity

It seems that the prevailing consensus of this thread is that these various sources are valid by default, although given what a large body of work we are talking about without specifics, it is possible that any individual work might fail one ore more of the four little rules — no more or less than any particular item of DWM or annual content.

Despite the title of this thread, the "meta-fictional" nature of most of those texts is not of the sort to threaten validity. Insofar as there is a fourth wall break — and I wouldn't say such instances are necessarily fourth-wall breaks — it does not seem of the sort specified in the Inclusion debates speedround thread's closing post as suggestive of invalidity. This does not seem to be "the Doctor, fictional protagonist of a TV show, is somehow alive"; rather it seems to be "you, a viewer of the TV show, are somehow holding in your hand a letter written by the Doctor from within his universe, where his adventures and enemies are quite real".

Somes slight concerns were raised about the light-hearted, joky tone of some entries leaning towards "parody" territory, but I don't think that's correct. As any child who used to get this sort of magazine knows, the whole thrill and gimmick of "letter from the magazine's main character"-type features is that you are reading words put down by the real character you love; not some deliberately-unconvincing spoof thereof. The Doctor telling the ancedote about the Dalek Halloween party is the "real" Doctor, however silly the anecdote might be; for him to be a parody of the Doctor would be wholly out of keeping with the typical narratological features of the genre. That the contents are sometimes silly should not give us too much pause when we are the Wiki which covers the Titan Comics backups as valid. As User:Epsilon, one of the contrbutors with first-hand experience of the sources, reported:

…while they certainly are goofy, they are no more goofy like the How to be a Time Lord book which is very tonally similar to these letters pages, and nothing in them seem to break T:VS.User:Epsilon

Besides, we must bear in mind that we're getting undiluted Doctor-patter here, not an omniscient-third-person account of events. The Halloween anecdote, for example, certainly scans as the Doctor babbling amusing nonsense because he is, diegetically, writing an op-ed for a light-hearted children's magazine. You might imagine the Eleventh Doctor telling the same story to Stormageddon or Little Amelia. (This does mean that appropriate care must be taken when reporting the contents of such sources. On Dalek, it should, for example, say "In a letter to a children's magazine, the Eleventh Doctor once claimed that the Daleks attended a Halloween party with fake bowties" under "Other references" — rather than the anecdote being included at "Undated events" as though it were objective fact. But this is not a unique ruling; this is what should always be done when fictional information is being relayed second-hand by a potentially-unreliable narrator.)

Ultimately, these stories are well within the precedent of many, many such short stories, features, and even novels which are presented as being putatively written by the Doctor, and are written with a young audience in mind. The DWA prose fiction pieces, as a group, have no unique features warranting invalidity on principle, although, again, this does not include more granular examinations in future. I belabour the point to clearly outline the reasoning used here, as precedent for future decisions — not because it was especially controversial. Again, it seems most everybody agreed this stuff should, on balance, be valid under current policy.

Part 2: Protocols of coverage

Having established the "whether" of valid coverage, we turn to the "how".

Privacy concerns

Chief among the questions examined by this thread were the privacy concerns. Indeed, these are questions which, as many observed, would trouble us regardless of validity: we'd need to cover this stuff one way or the other.

At some level, these worries are perhaps over-cautious. The "obscure kiddie magazine" was not so obscure when it was first printed, and "obscurity" is a subjective quality regardless when talking about a widely-distributed piece of merchandise associated with a world-famous franchise. Some might argue — though few, in this thread, did — that the children and their guardians made their choice when they agreed to their name being used in the magazine itself; and that we would commit no sin in reproducing this already-publicised information. I certainly feel that the coverage of fictionalised real-world individuals from TV Century 21 and contemporaneous sources should remain unchanged; fifty+ years is simply long enough for those children's involvement with Dalekmania competitions and the like to have slipped out of trivia and into history.

One side-point I want to establish is that, regardless of the time frame, the names of any Doctor Who-related competition-winners should be fair game. Let's be serious. Writing a letter once to a magazine is quite an innocuous act, and the letter-writers might credibly not anticipate (nor appreciate) that the tenuous sense in which this makes them "in-universe characters" would result in a Tardis Wiki character page about their ten-year-old self becoming the first result in Google searches forevermore. Fine. Fair enough. But winning a competition, and having your name publicised by the BBC on that basis, is very different; there, I think it is indubitably the case that one steps out of the private sphere and into the public record. Such competitions are marketing campaigns; they are meant to be public. That Joanne Hall created Heather McCrimmon is a very-much-public, and indeed fairly important, item in the history of Doctor Who comics — exactly the sort of thing which we not only have the right, but the duty to record. Fergotseck, we're talking about the creator of one of the Tenth Doctor's most recurring companions! We may as well worry about the privacy of Roberta Tovey or indeed Gareth Jenkins. If you had that kind of innately-public influence on the DWU, albeit as a child, then we gotta record it, even if that doesn't mean prying into the person's life beyond recording what DWU and DW-adjacent reference sources tell us.

Still, many are uneasy about the run-of-the-mill letter-writers, and that's quite reasonable. With great SEO must come great responsibility; we might no longer have quite as great a SEO machine as we used to at Fandom, but we are working to improve it, and we'd still rank unreasonably highly for any private person with a less-than-average first-name/last-name combination.

User:Epsilon suggested that…

…a solution to this may be to just name each person, generally speaking, something like Reader 1 (Doctor, Doctor! 292) and just... avoid naming them altogether.[User:Epsilon]]

The community seems to want some kind of solution akin to this; so be it, but Epsilon's seems over-cautious. If SEO is the enemy, then we can simply make an ad-hoc decision that the in-universe counterparts of children who wrote in to DWA's last names should be omitted, with the pages simply being at John (Doctor, Doctor! 292) etc. This renders them essentially ungooglable while avoiding putting undue burden on editors trying to base actual sentences on these sources. A Readers of Doctor Who Adventures hub page, as suggested elsewhere by Epsilon, seems quite sensible but has no direct bearing on the privacy question.

There was also some discussion of when it would become appropriate to include the last name again, as it is clearly okay to do with the 1960s kids. The forty year cutoff seems impractically long; forty years ago was in the heart of the Wilderness Years, people! A kid thirty-nine years ago might have been writing letters to the Seventh Doctor! Ancient history in cultural terms, which I am comfortable saying places us once more in a situation where our duties as recorders of historical data trump the tenuous privacy concerns at such remove.

(And again, these privacy concerns, while laudable, are fundamentally supererogatory when we are talking about names already printed in black and white in actual issues of Doctor Who publications, which the majority of our readers will already have on their shelves. As OCR and search engines improve, it even seems quite possible that the text of those magazines might become as Googlable as our own Wiki pages sooner than later. By definition, this is already the case with free, online media such as Whoisdoctorwho.co.uk.)

I thus gravitate towards the fifteen-year cutoff provided by Epsilon. In all but a handful of cases, it guarantees that any people under discussion will no longer be minors when that cutoff is reached. (If such exceptions are found, their age of majority should be substituted for the fifteen year cutoff.) The "no images" suggestion included in the same post, however, has seen too little discussion to pass; it can be discussed again in future if people feel it's a pressing issue.

This new, ad hoc policy will henceforth be codified at Tardis:In-universe counterparts of minors. Although not limited in scope to Doctor Who Adventures, let me clarify that it must not be construed as applying to real-world pages about minors when such pages are otherwise called for: we clearly do not want William Hughes's page changed to "William (actor)" or any such nonsense. Moreover it only applies to individuals known to be minors, not to adults or presumed-adults who write in to such opportunities (as was done at Whoisdoctorwho.co.uk), who should be held to be responsible for their choice in doing so.

Other matters

Other stray matters not mentioned in the above mammoth:

• The deadname question is left to the whims of User:SOTO's upcoming closure of Forum:Clarifying in-universe deadnaming policy in response to Rose Noble; the same standards shall apply regarding the first-name-only pages as would to any other in-unverse-counterpart page in that situation. I don't think specific policy is needed in this case.
• It does indeed seem to be the case that My Monster Day is a series with individual entries titled e.g. Dorium Maldovar Tells It Like It Is!. This has begun to be implemented and I see no reason to alter it, though again, we are working on limited evidence, and access to more entries in the apparent Monster Day series might conceivably prove our understanding of the situation to be mistaken — in which case this thread's decision should not be seen as overriding. I'm only vetting common sense, here, not making an extra-authoritative diktat.

As always, sincere thanks to everyone who participated in this thread! --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 01:52, 26 August 2024 (UTC)