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Tardis Wiki, the Doctor Who Wiki — also known as the Wiki or Tardis for short — is a free Doctor Who reference that is being written collaboratively by the readers and editors. Our goal is to become the largest, most reliable, and most up-to-date encyclopaedia about everything related to the Doctor Who universe. Most of our topics are written as they might appear if discovered in an encyclopaedia within the DWU. In other words, we try to treat the subjects of our articles as if they were "real".
This perspective makes us a bit different to other sites. So if you're joining us from the Doctor Who WikiProject at Wikipedia you might want to take a closer look at the differences between the Wikipedia and Tardis.
If this is your first foray into Doctor Who wikis, it's probably best to just say that anything which is mentioned anywhere in the DWU is fair game for an article, here. We cover everything from Titusville, Florida to the universe itself.
As long as it's been mentioned in a valid source, you'll find a page about it somewhere on the Wiki!
History[[edit source]]
According to Wikia records, Mantrid founded the project on 11 November 2004 — a mere three weeks after Wikicities, the original forerunner to Wikia (later Fandom), launched.
This means that we started as one of the 100 original Wikia wikis.
According to logs available in 2011, our first edit was made by an IP user at 12:59 (UTC) on 16 February 2005. However, James P. Moore, otherwise known as Freethinker1of1, became the first registered user to edit the wiki at 13:08, leading to natural speculation that James was the original IP editor. It is unclear why there was such a long gap between the founding of the wiki and the first edit. One possibility is that the logging system originally used for Wikicities was wholly changed after the first few months of Wikicities' existence. It's conceivable that the current logs aren't completely accurate when it comes to 2004 dates. It's equally possible, however, that Mantrid created the site and then did nothing with it for months.
We were inspired by Wikipedia, a free, open source encyclopaedia, and especially by Memory Alpha, a wiki reference site devoted to the Star Trek universe. Originally many of our rules and style guides were a mixture of those two wikis. However as time and the complexity of the Doctor Who universe made itself known we've had to craft our own (sometimes very specific) policies. Individual editors are, generally, bound by the same rules of conduct as at Wikipedia, but the style of writing articles has a lot in common with the style used at Memory Alpha.
In 2024, amidst increasing worries about corporate control of the Wiki's contents and design, as well as the threatened implementation of unwanted A.I. tools in the user flow, the Wiki's community declared its independence from Fandom and moved to a self-hosted domain. This gave the community more freedom in how the Wiki is run, with an eye to ensuring long-term stability. Due to dissuasive policies from Fandom, we have been unable to delete the husk of our Wiki that is still hosted at Fandom, but we strongly encourage that you edit this wiki exclusively.
Name[[edit source]]
Our original name was Tardis Information System, but this was changed in early 2005 to Tardis Index File. It remained so until the December 2012 discovery that "Tardis Index File" was not, in fact, a phrase ever uttered in a valid source. Assumed to be a part of the script of Castrovalva, "Tardis Index File" was then abandoned for something that does appear in State of Decay.
In January 2013, a community discussion elected to change to "the Tardis Data Core". Still, we became increasingly known as simply Tardis or the informal "Tardis Wiki". This fact was finally formalised in August 2023 by a Forum thread.
Our stance on spoilers[[edit source]]
We have a different approach to spoilers than you might expect, but we've found that it helps to attract the widest number of editors. We believe that a spoiler is any information about any story which has not yet been officially released in its entirety. This means that "Next Time" trailers, official BBC press announcements, or even advertisements are not discussed on this wiki in the main namespace until after the relevant sources have been released in their country of origin. Only a select few pages and subpages, tagged with the {{spoiler}} template, can discuss such upcoming information.
On the flipside, this means that full details about all stories are allowed within minutes of the broadcast of a new episode. So tread with caution on the day of broadcast if you don't live in Britain.
Copyright info[[edit source]]
All of the site's content is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible. See the copyright statement for more information. "Doctor Who," "TARDIS," and related names are registered trademarks of the BBC, the Daleks are trademarked by Terry Nation, and so on for other creator-owned DWU concepts. No copyright infringement is intended.
Tardis Wiki is a wiki, meaning that anyone may edit any article by clicking on the edit link that appears in every wiki article that is not designated as a protected page. This makes it very easy for anyone to share their knowledge and insight of the Doctor Who universe and add to the collected information available.