Forum:Loosening T:NO RW

Index → The Panopticon → Loosening T:NO RW

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If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

Introduction

So today I am going to be kicking the hornet's nest in a sense. There are a lot of things Tardis Wiki is infamous for, and I'm sure privately we all have a lot of things we think the site needs to change. This OP is about one of my biggest gripes with how Tardis operates, and it all comes back to a rule which was created in good faith but is constantly enforced in ways that do not make sense. I'm talking about T:NO RW.

Background

T:NO RW is a very simple rule. The Doctor Who universe and the real world are not the same. The big infamous case given here is Marco Polo from TV: Marco Polo. In the story, Polo is said to have been born in 1252. This is a mistake, as Polo was actually born in 1254. Thus, on our wiki, we not only assume the 1252 date is correct in-universe, we generally don't add any real world facts about real world figures if said facts have not been stated in a story.

This rule is awesome, and exactly how a wiki like this should run. When it comes to the examples given on the actual rule page for T:NO RW, I pretty much agree with everything. However, where I disagree is mostly in practice.

Wikipedia, the clear godfather of all FANDOM wiki content, has a very interesting rule which I often see cited in debates about topics like this. You can find it at Wikipedia:Ignore all rules. If you don't want to click, here's the contents of the article:

If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.

So you might be wondering if I've highlighted this quote to recommend that we add this to our website? The answer is no, as it would be used it really stupid ways! But what I moreover wanted to represent was simply the other positive edition ideology present with this rule.

Our first goal as a wiki should be to make the website better for our readers. It should not be to blindly follow all rules in spite of if our actions actually benefit our users. Rules exist to make the site better, not to be followed to a point of destruction.

Issues on the site

I can not think of a better historical debate over this than TV: The Lie of the Land.

So in The Lie of the Land, the final arc takes place in this huge room filled with TVs projecting images of famous people from the real world. After this episode aired, User:Borisashton began adding screen grabs of these images to relevant pages. Shortly afterwards, our former admin User:Amorkuz messaged him and ordered he stop.

Hi, I've noticed that you're uploading and putting on pages images that were flashing, usually without context, in the Pyramid and in Monks' broadcasts. I would like to remind you of T:NO RW. In short, you cannot identify a person by the image based on your real-world knowledge. In order to put those images on pages, you need either to use the context (like in the case of Neil Armstrong, where the event is identified by the narrator and there is enough prior DWU information to understand who is in the spacesuit) or you need to compare the image with images of the same person that were featured in the DWU before. In the latter case, however, the new image is in most cases simply redundant in the presence of a superior image. A good example is your image of "Gagarin", which is so fuzzy that it would have been impossible to tell whether it is really him even if other images existed.

I would appreciate if you remove those images that are based on your real-world knowledge rather than DWU information from pages. Thank you in advance. Amorkuz ☎ 08:21, June 8, 2017 (UTC)

Here, Amorkuz stated that policy was that if there was no in-universe evidence of a photograph representing a person, that info should go in the behind-the-scenes section.

This began the, honestly confusing trend of pages like Mother Theresa. You'll note this page still insists on the image being in the Behind the scenes section because of the 2017 reading of policy, even though the article doesn't follow this logic and openly mentions the events of Lie in the main article.

This caused Amorkuz and I to have a very passionate disagreement, stemming both from me not understanding his suggested implementation of policy and also me being a bit of a hot head.

Here's the gist: at the time, there was only one documented story to mention Martin Luther King Jr. The Age of Revolution, where he was called Martin Luther King. So, Amorkuz set up the page as he intended: you can see it here at this edit. The info from that audio story was on the main page, the info from The Lie of the Land was in the behind the scenes section. When I added Remembrance as Dr. King's first appearance, Amorkuz moved that to BTS as well.

So here's where I got real annoyed with the situation. It's my opinion that, in cases like these, these topics do deserve in-universe coverage. And what Amorkuz was suggesting was that if I wanted to write an in-universe article about the man who gave the I Have a Dream speech, it had to be a different page than Martin Luther King.

I thought this was extremely unhelpful for everyone involved. After I publicly disagreed with him, he left this message on my wall:

I understand you want to discuss this. And we could have several days of intensive back-and-forth that would not lead to anything. Since at the moment I have other projects, I can just cite the policy: Trust only Doctor Who sources. Additionally don't go further than what the DWU source actually tells you. You are not disagreeing with me. You are disagreeing with the policy. "Did a DWU source tell you that this is a photo of MLK?" is the question that the policy demands you to answer. In principle, I do not understand how editors would be disadvantaged from reading about this photo in the BTS section rather than in an in-universe one. I am especially puzzled by you first arguing that readers should have the right of knowing what happened in a story and then adding a link to a story that provides no such information anywhere on the page. But, as I said, your beef is not with me. You want to change the policy - start a discussion on Panopticon. Until then, you are bound by the current policy as it is formulated.

Your own example of Remembrance of the Daleks perfectly encapsulates how this wiki treats such occasions. Martin Luther King is mentioned only in the "Story notes" and "Ucredited cast" (both RW parts) and at both places his name is not linked because there is no in-universe link to the name. Did you ever think why editors painstakingly added the info about MLK to this story's page but not to his own page? Do you really think it was neglect on their part?

The "we can of course" attitude already led to adding the year of Albert Einstein's invention of his famous formula based solely on his photo forged by the Monks. It will not lead to anything good.

So, as I said, by all means argue against T:NO RW. When you succeed in changing the policy, I will be enforcing the new one. Amorkuz ☎ 14:16, June 11, 2017 (UTC)

Our debate went on for some time.

Here's a recent example that I've seen some of the admins bring up on a similar situation: we've all come to agree that "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles plays in TV: The Evil of the Daleks. At no point does anyone in that story stop to say "HEY! I sure love the Beatles, who are performing this VERY SONG!" Nor do they say "OH MY WORD! IT'S PAPERBACK WRITER! THE SONG THAT IS BEING PLAYED RIGHT NOW!" And yet, we have accepted that is is ineeed [sic] Paperback Writer, a song by the Beatles, because of course we have. Who would it truly serve to bleach the information on that song from the entire site just because no one steps outside the boundaries of natural character writing to confirm to a bunch of fan boys from the future that Paperback Writer does indeed have the same name inside this fictional Sci-fi show from the '60s. A recording of MLK is a recording of MLK, just as much as Paperback Writer is a song performed by The Beatles with the title of Paperback Writer. OS25 (Talk) 14:48, June 11, 2017 (UTC)

All your examples work against you: Struwwelpeter never mentions the name of the book in the in-universe part of the page. And "Paperback Writer" is not identified as a song by the Beatles on the in-universe part of the page either. The only reason the song title is in the lead is because "Paperback Writer" is (rather persistent) part of the in-universe lyrics.

In fact, I could get into comparison of various editions of Struwwelpeter in various languages and how it's absolutely unclear from the RW perspective how it could be in English already by the time of the Frost Fair and how it is not clear what would be the title of the book in RW: would it still be in German or would the title also be translated. But it is "wholly irrelevant" as you say. Because it is the real world and it does not matter.

You clearly do not pay attention to what I say, so there is no point continuing this discussion. You have the right to your opinion. And I have an obligation to uphold the policies. Amorkuz ☎ 16:09, June 11, 2017 (UTC)

I won't quote more, because few constructive words were found past this.

To me this is a key example of the foundational disagreement in terms of how to read T:NO RW. T:NO RW says we can not blindly add information from the real world to articles. It does not say that we can not connect blatantly connected pieces of information. And the idea that this is what policy says is relatively recent.

To circle back around to the argument in 2017: it is not a controversial idea for someone to add to The Beatles that the Beatles song "Paperback Writer" played at a cafe the Second Doctor visited. Nor is it to say that on the article that "A Taste of Honey", as covered by the Beatles, played at a cafe visited by the Seventh Doctor. Yet, according to the reading of rules by Amorkuz, it should be speculation to identify the Beatles as the performers on these songs, as it's also speculation to say that an audio recording of Martin Luther King Jr is Martin Luther King Jr.

Thus, the historic and current placement of this information on the mainspace of The Beatles is incorrect, no?

In response to our argument, I started forum thread 219136, which is now archived at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon IV. I of course made an OP, which you can see here, that is shockingly similar to this one.

One of the most important things I found during my research was this historical Czech quote about the Star Trek crossover:

I hear ya, but IDW aren't going to spoonfeed aspects of the STU through dialogue. That would make for a very boring, very insulting read. After all, it's not like DW always names its objects. There are many, many episodes where the sonic screwdriver isn't named. We just know it is because we see it, we hear it, and, based on our prior knowledge, we can obviously put two and two together.

After all, we have many articles that are based solely on visual inspection — like Volkswagen Beetle, HMS Teazer, London Borough of Barnet, real world people who appeared in archive footage, Doctor Who actors who played themselves — or aural examination, like practically the entire contents of category:Songs from the real world. It seems to me that the better approach is to give things their proper name in the STU and then provide a "behind the scenes" note that it wasn't specifically named by the story, but that it is unmistakably that object/person/species.User:CzechOut

This was part of my main point. That we have no policy which bans us from studying media with our eyes to make correct assertions about what is being seen. This was, confusingly, apparently my downfall. After a few posts, the forum was closed by User:Shambala108 based entirely on this argument.

Closing this one right now. User:OttselSpy25's claim that we are primarily a visual medium blatantly ignores Tardis:Neutral point of view. For someone who has been part of the wiki for so long, such a blatant misconception rules the whole thread invalid.

If he wants to open a new post, keeping the policy in mind, then go for it. It will then be discussed as it should be.User:Shambala108, closing my post.

No, I don't understand why that's a good reason to close the debate either. But what you can clearly see here is that, despite me starting this in the forum dedicated to changing rules, I was asked to only start topics which keep current policy in mind. So back in the day, actually changing site policy was an uphill battle on a downhill escalator.

Now, today the precedent of Amorkuz' reading of policy is... well, honestly, widely ignored. I hate to cite this as precent, but look at Donald Trump. We have no in-universe evidence that the photo in that infobox is the same man as any other reference to Trump in Who media. And yet, it is not seen as controversial to have that in the infobox.

So, if in theory I've won the battle, why am I making a new OP? Well, because I think in spirit I still see the issues present in this topic come up time and time again.

Again, my basic argument here is that we have to use this policy in a way that benefits readers and matches authorial intent. Let me give you an example. Let's say I'm a Spider-Man fan! And I want to know every time the Doctor has mentioned Spider-Man. So I go to Spider-Man... And I scroll... and I scroll... and I scroll...

And it's not until you get to Behind the scenes that this information is presented.

In Winner Takes All, the Ninth Doctor says "My spider sense was tingling". This is a reference to Spider-Man, although no connection has been made in the DWU.

... Come on.

This is a reference to Spider-Man. We should be able to list it as a reference to Spider-Man in-universe. Now, you don't have to say "This was Spider-Man's catchphrase." But it should be in the article.

A similar instance can be found at Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The main article discusses all the abstract references to the book. But it then moves the most important reference to the Behind the scenes section.

This is the scene in Revolution of the Daleks where the Doctor recites the opening lines of the book in order to help herself get to sleep, because she is not an ally. Because the Doctor doesn't say "this is the opening page to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," we essentially ban it being discussed on that page or on the Harry Potter page.

Again, here's my issue: the "bedtime story" in that scene justifies a page. We can not simply say "Oh, this bedtime story is banned from being discussed in-universe. So do we create Bedtime story (Revolution of the Daleks)? No, because there's no need to have two pages for one thing. Well, in that case, we should be able to identify that the bedtime story is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Again, we are not adding any real world information here. We are just allowing two in-universe sources to co-exist on the same page using very basic logic. T:NO RW does not ban this! And it helps no readers for us to write articles like this!

The most recent example of this causing controversy can be found at Transformer (robot).

A recently uncovered Death's Head story with DWU connections, titled COMIC: Meet Death's Head, features Death's Head discussing Galvatron and the Transformers. This is the first in-universe source we've had that the "Robot universe" and "Robot war" mentioned in other DH stories were, in fact, the Transformers universe and the Transformers war. Thus, through T:HOMEWORLD, we can say "Transformers universe" and "Transformer war" etc.

However, there's another source. To quote the page:

When Gedarra told Primo de la Vega that Yaotl was a member of Faction Paradox, he expressed that this information meant as little as if she was a member of the "Transformers, robots in disguise." (PROSE: Against Nature)

This caused an argument between me and User:Najawin. His argument was that due to T:NO RW, the site should have separate pages for Transformer (robot) and Transformers robots in disguise. I disagreed, saying it was very very very very very very very simple as both editors and readers for us to assume that the Transformers and the Transformers, robots in disguise are the same thing.

But Najawin believes that, because the above quote implies that the Transformers, robots in disguise is a group that a human could join, we should cover the Transformers as the species and the Transformers, robots in disguise as the organization that the members of the species were made up of. I have pointed out the obvious: that Primo is being factious and is purposefully saying a phrase that doesn't make sense. But Najawin believes that using real world context to apply a sense of tone to a passage is a violation of T:NO RW, and that covering the Transformers and the Transformers, robots in disguise as the same concept is also a violation of our rules.

So once again, we're back to that old debate: how many pages should Martin Luther King Jr have?

An additional issue

This forum pretty much recaps most of my issues here, but I do have one more complaint.

Our site's policy is that we create pages on only on concepts relating to characters and world building but also... Well, pages for words and nouns. The Tardis Wiki page [[Chair]] is very infamous on this front. I actually think this is charming and can be very useful for people researching niche topics... However, there is an obvious flaw with some of these pages which I think is quietly called by T:NO RW.

The way these pages should be formatted is that an opening sentence/section defines the topic. However, doing so often means making summaries of a topic based mostly in the real world. Very rarely does a DWU story give an in-universe definition for a very basic term. Thus some edit articles believing that writing definitions for nouns is against site policy because we can't prove that definition also applies in-universe.

So instead, many articles simply go straight into discussing some stories reference to the noun. Take for instance, Essay:

700 Wonders of the Universe was, as acknowledged in the Dalek Combat Training Manual, a detailed essay by Co-ordinator Engin which was available in the Panopticon Library by the Last Great Time War. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Another example of this causing an editing conflict can be identified at Widow. The page, at various points, had had this as the leade: "A widow (female) or widower (male) was a term for someone who lost their spouse."

In January, User:Shambala108 removed this from the article. Her justification stated:

(T:NO RW.)

This was latered re-added and then removed by Najawin. His edit summary stated:

(T:NO RW: "don't go further than what the DWU source actually tells you" - common sense inferences are explicitly disallowed.)

If T:NO RW does ban this, I don't think it explicitly does it. I, in fact, think readings this extreme are not part of current written policy. And if contributing simple definitions for nouns is against site policy, then we should clearly state this. If the opposite is true then this distinction should also be listed in the rules.

Again, my issue with being this dedicated to following a rule to the most extreme point because we have to follow rules instead of following a rule to a natural endpoint which is constructive to our readers is that what we're doing here actually suggests a nature to this material that doesn't exist. It would be one thing if we had a source which gave a totally different definition for what a "widow" was. But instead what we do have is several sources using a word in precisely the context it's used in the real world. Giving said context is just a natural part of covering this content and expecting sources to treat us like babies to define words like essay and chair is not reasonable. A "widow" is the same thing inside the DWU as outside it. Thus simple definitions given in the context of explaining valid sources is not and should not be against policy.

Conclusions

So I know this OP is just sort of a long rant, but here's the basic argument.

If one story name drops Martin Luther King Jr, one story shows an image of him without naming him, and one story plays audio of him again without context... All three characters are the same man. There is only one Martin Luther King Jr. And if policy is that we have to dance around and pretend oh there's no evidence that all these sources depict the same person... Then policy is wrong. And we should amend policy to be function and useful to our readers.

Furthermore - adding to Shambala108's statements about Doctor Who existing in all mediums - we should be able to identify and define things not only with our eyes but with our ears. So when a photograph of the Beatles appears in a story, we can identify them as the Beatles. And if audio of the Beatles plays in another story, we again can very simply identify them as the Beatles because they sound like the Beatles. And we can thus connect these two sources as being the same band and have both pieces of information on the same page.

And if a story makes as overt a reference as "my Spider sense is tingling," that information justifies being added to Spider-Man without being moved to the BTS section. We are not inserting real-world information, we are again just allowing in-universe information to be presented in the same relevant place. Simply moving info to the behind-the-scenes section is not a good enough compromise for pages longer than a paragraph.

And sure, I'm certain there will be situations where there's more of a complexity where the intentions of the author on stock material being equivalent is brought into question But these cases should be the exception, not the rule. Martin Luther King Jr. is Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Potter is Harry Potter, The Beatles are The Beatles.

This is how the website should work, and T:NO RW should specifically explain this as the accurate reading of policy. OS25🤙☎️ 05:34, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

>.>

Not quite up to the time period in which T:NO RW was coined, so I can't quite track its genesis off hand. I'll do a search later. For the time being let me note that I think OS25 is being slightly uncharitable, I'm sure unintentionally. For instance, consider Thread:219136 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon IV. Amorkuz explicitly denies that he thinks that you need separate pages for MLK and for the person who gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. (Originally he suggests that you place the IHD speech in the BTS section, but he later decides that such a tactic is implausible.) See:

In other words, I agree with most of you if a RW object/person is always identified in the same way: always by image, or always by last name, or always by voice. The question is what to do when there are two unrelated and uncorrelated descriptions. I'm afraid I have to concede here that, though no universally optimal solution exists, there is little to be done other than put all these differently identified references to the same page. Again, the principle of equality of media was decisive in persuading me. [...] We all agreed that having separate pages for MLK would have been madness. What I realised recently was that it is hard to provide a principled rule regarding which representations of MLK are to be primary and which are to be relegated to the BTS. After internal deliberations, I concede this point.

I also would like to strenuously deny that

the [...] quote implies that the Transformers, robots in disguise is a group that a human could join

I think this is an egregious misreading of my comments. Which anyone can see, given that the talk page doesn't contain the word "human". Regardless.

we have no policy which bans us from studying media with our eyes to make correct assertions about what is being seen

Is this true? Our policy is very mixed here, see Talk:Antonio Amaral. We have examples like Bart Simpson and the Movellans where we do this, as well as those that Czech cites, but we have explicit examples where we've been told not to do this. See Talk: Blue Humanoid and Forum:Proposed Deletion of Blue, Red and White humanoids - Yes or No. Suffice it to say that this is less obvious than I think you think it is, and it's one of the policy areas on this wiki that we need to clean up in its own right - visual identification = same entity/group.

where the Doctor recites the opening lines of the book in order to help herself get to sleep, because she is not an ally.

Hey hey hey. 13 is not an ally. Don't pin her TERFism on any of the others. Well. 10.

Definitions, are, in fact, specifically disallowed. Thread:238917 is relevant here at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Time Lord Academy.

If a story doesn't define a term, we don't use real-world language to define it; see the changes I made at those two pages to see how to handle it. User:Shambala108

Exactly. User:CzechOut

Real-word knowledge (RWK) contradicting the plot of the story is not allowed. RWK irrelevant to the story should be considered very carefully. Same goes for too many details in RWK. User:Amorkuz [In each, emphasis my own]

Common sense inferences are in a weird grey area, since they were quite clearly disallowed, see Talk:Cannabis and Talk:Onanism, but these pages were unilaterally merged so it might now be a T:BOUND issue?

The argument I used in The Old Times was that of an opaque blender. The current rules say that we're allowed to name our article "blender" if we see an opaque blender on screen, but we have to write the article like this - "So and so put fruit, milk and ice into a blender, a loud noise emanated as they waited for a few seconds, and then removed a smoothie" + a BTS section that explains what happened was blending the ingredients, rather than just saying "So and so blended fruit milk and ice in a blender to make a smoothie".

This is bizarre, right? A truly strict adherence to T:NO RW would entail an absurd lack of object permanency, and since we don't have pages for verbs on this wiki, we can't clearly define, well, any action per our policies, and we have to assume what actions are based on Real World Knowledge. Which is sort of a contradiction.

The worst part is that I don't know if there's a clear solution. Obviously allowing free reign of RWK is absurd, but truly taking T:NO RW seriously is as well, and every step in between seems, well, ultimately arbitrary. It's just Sorites. Najawin ☎ 23:34, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh, doing so much research I forgot. I think the LotL pictures could be easily treated like Big Finish promo pictures. Seems like an analogous situation to me - they were placed in BTS sections prior to our recent decision to let them be in infoboxen if no other pictures existed. Najawin ☎ 23:37, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

A very good OP I feel! Frankly, I agree that some of the more extreme use T:NO RW is quite ridiculous, and I think both readers and editors would only benefit from applying it less strictly. After all, not only would be it much closer to the policy as written, it would also simply make the wiki a better place.

A lot of the rules have shifted a bit over the years through forums discussion and talk pages, but ultimately, I am of the belief that the rules as written in the policy pages are what we as a wiki should go by, not the word of a former admin. I believe that if common sense inference are disallowed, even if only through historical application of T:NO RW and former thread ruling well. We should change that.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything OS25 puts forth here, and I hope this change comes to pass, as it would benefit everyone. Liria10 ☎ 02:16, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

I just want to point out that Revolution of the Daleks was written and filmed before J.K. Rowling went full-on TERF so the Doctor quoting Harry Potter doesn't reflect on their allyship one way or another. Also, I do agree that the real world policy has been abused and is in need of reform. BastianBalthazarBux ☎ 21:40, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

I wholly agree with this post as well. One of the wiki's unique quirks is having pages for minutiae. This is cool because if you're curious about some random topic, you can see how it's been covered in the Doctor Who universe— after all, the very point of the wiki! This is, in my opinion, especially fun with other fiction and pop culture references. So, the extremely literal "do not connect these things unless it is explicitly said" to me goes against this entire point of having these pages. If we want to supply information about real-world concepts in the DWU, we're making this information awfully hard to find, and read. Of course, the use of real-world info is still a very important concept to have a rule for. But the point is to disallow assumptions of information that in a DWU context is totally fabricated, not to disallow common sense.

As I understand it, some basic ideas of the wiki, like this one, were based on Memory Alpha and Beta, the wikis for Star Trek. I haven't used them much as I'm not too familiar with Star Trek, but the little I have has shown me they have a good way of handling this. I just searched a random topic like we might have here: Milk. And I can immediately see they have some boxes in a template called Bginfo that illustrate some necessary background context without disrupting the article. This seems like a good way to not shove everything to the "Behind the scenes" section, which generally is better suited for… actual BTS info. And in fact, we also have some precedent for something similar… the only instance I know of is the rather amusing, and very clearly necessary, instance on the page Urine. For smaller notes, I'm rather a fan of the new and long-needed Template:Note (as can be seen in use on Daleks, invasión a la Tierra año 2150)— but as I understand it there are some who wish to address this in other threads, so it might best be reserved.

Lastly, I'd like to say I also agree with the part about introductory sentences. The use of intro sentences that provide no definition or explanation is actually a particular pet peeve of mine; I think even in a case where we have nothing beyond a mention, "X was something mentioned by the Doctor when…" is better than "The Doctor said X was…" And usually, we can infer a lot more than that even if we still didn't allow common sense real world connections. I'm glad to see an example I was thinking of, at Revenge, was actually changed to a great example of a solution. Chubby Potato ☎ 02:47, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Alright. Did some more of the historical research. So T:NO RW is really in the oldest forms of T:VS, which means that we need to talk about the places where T:VS actually comes from. Forum:BBV and canon policy is the most prominent, but it doesn't explicitly talk about NO RW. The discussions that resulted from this forum thread can be found at User talk:Tangerineduel/Archive 2#Canon policy rewrite and User talk: CzechOut/Archive 4#Canon policy rewrite, but the "canon policy rewrite" Czech floats already assumes NO RW (as it should). But where, historically, is the precedent for this on the wiki? I'm sure there's more, but the work I've found off hand is Forum:Wanted pages with similar names, Talk:Cobalt bomb, and Forum:Near-human - to greater or lesser degrees. From Talk:Cobalt bomb:

We work with in-universe references, we don't 'imagine' or speculate anything. We work with what the source material says. User:Tangerineduel

I second Tangerineduel, The temptation with articles about things that exist in the real world is to give a short summary of what is known about that thing in the real world, and then to write about its use in the DW universe. In reality, though, the way forward with this article is to avoid the real world cobalt bombs, for th emost part. Instead, provide details about how the cobalt bomb was used in each of the cases listed. Offer descriptions of it in each one of those instances. Then, in a very brief paragraph at the very bottom of the article, you can state, in a few sentences, the differences between the fictional cobalt bombs and the DWU ones. User:CzechOut

So this was how we handled RWK as far back as 2010. Note here that Czech's comments about how to write articles are quite generic, and don't just apply to things that are contradicted by DWU facts. They imply that we should avoid RWK in articles generally.

Historical comments about T:VS that it was impacted by are Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon?, Forum:Is A Fix With Sontarans Canon?, Forum:Is Dimensions in Time canon, Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?, and it was implemented during the discussion of Forum:Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time.

I'm only working on 2012 at the moment, but a quick perusal of the inclusion debates and panopticon threads after that shows that the policy doesn't deviate much from this understanding during the forums' existence, arguably expanding in scope - as the {{map}} template is given explicit language to note that the references we show users might be false. (See Thread:119147 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I) There is some discussion in Thread:125313 ibid about the interaction of T:NO RW with production errors, but this is already an OOU section on a page, so it's not quite the same thing. In researching this I also came across User talk:OverAnalyser, which has notes from multiple admins about T:NO RW due to their repeated violations of the policy, leading to them getting blocked three times, finally permanently for violating this policy.

Your addition of real world information and information that is not derrived from within the DWU may not appear vandalism, but it erodes the accuracy of information on this wiki as a DWU source. User:Tangerineduel

let me highlight your central thesis:

"Simply put, when reality and the depiction contradict, the depiction rules. But when reality is not challenged by the depiction, reality is reality."

That's completely opposed to T:NO RW, which says in part:

"Don't go any further than what the DWU source actually tells you." [...]

You've used that most dangerous of phrases in your explanation: "it's reasonable to assume". But we're trying to keep assumptions to a minimum around here, because they may not, in fact, be reasonable. [...]

Doctor Who recently filmed in Central Park. That doesn't make Frederick Law Olmsted a part of the DWU. It filmed in the Louvre, but that doesn't mean we know for a fact that the DWU Louvre contains great Egyptian works, even though the real world Louvre certainly does.

It is essentially a happenstance of scheduling and good location management that Doctor Who is occasionally able to shoot at the real life locations called for by its scripts. [...]

The rule must be the same no matter where filming occurred. It must also be a rule that applies to stories where filming never occurs, such as novels and audios. We therefore go with the most conservative, narrowest interpretation of what the narrative gives us. User:CzechOut [Bolded emphasis my own at all points]

Again, please don't bring real world "common knowledge" into in-universe articles. You really do need narratives explicitly using the phrase "City of London" in order to assert it here. I've therefore deleted that article and your recent references to it. You can recreate, but the article can only cite instances of explicitreferences to the City of London. Good luck finding that, though. User:CzechOut [Emphasis present in the original]

I highly recommend everyone read through the whole thing, as well as Thread:135579 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon II. I think it's abundantly clear that this "near maximalist" interpretation of T:NO RW has been the official one for effectively the entirety of the wiki's existence. We can change it! I support changing it! But let's be very clear that this has been the policy up until pages for synonyms were merged in, say, I think, 2021, and that was a fringe case.

Nah, we knew she was a TERF in 2019, it was filmed in like 2020.

On the subject of Urine and Revenge, yes, there are pages that violate policy on T:NO RW and have definitions that aren't from the DWU. I remove them when I catch them, it's explicitly in violation of Thread:238917. I'm currently leaving those since we're actively discussing the issue. But I do think that even under a changed version of T:NO RW these definitions should go. They're just not helpful and the reasons Tangerine and Czech give at User talk:OverAnalyser are quite convincing for this in particular, imo. Najawin ☎ 04:48, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Definitions actually being provided in the DWU is extremely uncommon; the only example I can think about is PROSE: Introduction and links defining astrology as a stylistic choice. This is very much the exception, so it isn't remotely realistic to expect the DWU to define concepts.

The thing is, we all go on and on and on about "the DWU not being the real world", and cite Marco Polo or Sarah Jane Smith fluffing the alphabet (which I think is a production error anyway, even if it is fun to muse about its in-universe ramifications) to that effect... but how common actually is this? Outside of historical inaccuracies, can anyone actually provide an example of a real world object differing in-universe? I personally don't really believe that the DWU is some majorly differing version of the real world, and it is more of a case of being the real world until otherwise stated. Just go over most of our Category:Cultural references from the real world category, the majority of these do not differ. I am not proposing we rampantly allow real world information, rather to the contrary, I fully support @OttselSpy25's belief about T:NO RW being a good policy, but I think we should also keep in mind, in the vast majority of instances... the DWU is like the real world.

I do feel it is something worth pointing out, that real world information can be divided between historical/cultural details and just real world information about what an essay is.

It is also worth considering that authors, when writing DWU fiction, generally expect the reader to have a real world context of what they're reading; an author would 1000% expect the reader to understand basic real world concepts, rather than expecting the reader to be a literal alien reading their novel in a void who has never remotely looked at earth before. If you ask an author if their story was to imply that hot chocolate was in fact cocoa beans heated by lightning or some random shit as they didn't provide the exact definition of what the drink is, they'd hit you repeatedly with their shoe. Let's be realistic. In this regard, I feel @CzechOut's thoughts on Assimilation² not spelling out what a phaser does or how the tricorder operates is really good, and should be applied more broadly.

In practise, how should we go about this. This is a theory of coverage that I feel we need, as many a thread has been denied from passing, at least in part, as the wrinkles haven't been ironed out.

I feel with historical info from the real world, we should continue to do what we do. No "oh but the real world says Personname Surnamename was born in 1433". But we should be able to acknowledge... basic details. Like their job or something. So we can say "Personname Surnamename was an explorer", else otherwise we'd end up stripping the categories from the pages and end up having hundreds of people in Category:People from the real world! Hell, even assuming people from the real world are human is a breach of T:NO RW, which frankly is insanity. There may be no precise rule on how much information we can assume, but I feel we should be able to assume "they're human, they're an explorer, their gender", etc etc etc.

Same goes for objects from the real world.

To quote Douglas Adams...

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

This level of abductive reasoning, based upon what we know from a DWU source and the context of the reference the author intended should be enough for us to at least define a concept at a basic level. If we know that a character is called a widow after her husband dies... we should be able to reasonably and rationally agree that a widow is a woman who lost her husband. That isn't unreasonable, is it?

I do not feel as if the mini-lead on revenge is overdetailed and I feel that is a reasonable lead to have. Urine is a little more questionable given it mentions toxins which may be veering on a level of specificity too great for us to allow... but frankly, I do not actually care too much about the definition of the Tardis Wiki's page on urine being slightly too detailed; there are greater things for us to worry about, to be perfectly honest. (I get these are just two examples, but I am applying my reasoning to them so you can see my opinions in practise.) Furthermore, take a look at Game of Thrones. If I am not mistaken, the current lead is real world info that have never been stated in a valid (or even invalid!) source, so it should be stripped, however we should be able to acknowledge, given the context of the references, we should be able to say:

Game of Thrones was a fantasy book and television series.

Or if that is too specific:

Game of Thrones was a book and television series.

It would not do if we treated it as an anomalous entity that we know frighteningly little of other than it is associated with dragons and a bloke with shaggy hair and a lass with flowing blonde hair and subsequently lumped the page in Category:Cultural references from the real world.

The way this policy has been applied has always been a bugbear to me, and I openly and proudly admit to non-maliciously ignoring T:BOUND because as a self-respecting Wiki editor I absolutely could not agree with having cannabis, hashish, and marijuana (three pages for the same cruking drug) or loo roll and toilet paper. A policy that is enforced in such a way to make the Tardis Wiki have multiple pages on goddamn toilet paper is a policy that needs to be ignored. (And it isn't even the policy that states this, it is, as asserted by others above, something that has only come about in practise.) So all in all, I ignored an application of a policy that isn't even, by Fandom's Global Policies, a policy and therefore isn't even enforceable.

This is something important I feel must be stated, and sorry if this comes across as Admin-y, as I am not attempting to make an Admin like ruling, but I do feel the need that we must all acknowledge this. A thread is not policy until it is codified on a policy page. A policy must also be easily accessible.

The thoughts of a random admin five, ten, fifteen years ago, that are not written down on a policy page and are not even accessible to be read given the original Forums imploded and the only archive is in one admin's sandboxes... is not something us, as volunteer editors with lives and obligations and crises and passions, should be in anyway beholden to. I would love to dedicate time to carefully evaluating the intricacies and nuances of an old admin's thoughts in a thread, but this is unrealistic. If we can manage to achieve this, sure, I'm all ears, but I really feel that our priorities must lie in the now, in the current consensus of the editors (and readers if we can gather this data!), rather than the ifs and maybes and what wases. It is good to look back on how a given policy was formed, and look for insights as to why it exists, but I feel this is often a burden to me. If I see a policy that needs to be changed because it is hurting aspects of the Wiki, we should focus on improvement first and foremost; when I write an OP, what I want to do — what I feel best — is to write the OP about how I want to make the change, not spend hours looking through old threads considering the whims of @Xxx_Doccy_Who_Has_A_Canon_And_The_Shalka_Ain't_xxX's thoughts on why some random story's decision to ignore the continuity of a previous story is extremely good evidence of the entire genre that the source belongs to should be completely stricken from the Wiki.

Not to say this in bad faith, but a lot of old policies were created with biases, and generally do not hold up to the modern standards of the Wiki. This isn't to say all old policies must be deleted, but the burden of considering every last old thread shouldn't be laid upon the modern editor's shoulders.

I do applaud the dedication and commitment to researching the history of policies, and I do feel as if it should be encouraged if an editor is up to it, but I also feel that it shouldn't be necessary, either. It's the cherry on the cake to the thread, but a cake without a cherry is still a good and scrumptious cake.

Although, of course, I do acknowledge T:BOUND and how it clarifies that a policy as decided on in a forum, even if it is in a state of unwrittenness, is still policy. I don't mean to disregard that!

Sorry if this seems rantish, but I feel that we, as a Wiki, should generally be looking forwards, not back.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

16:02, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I want to say first of all that I respect Najawin's dedication to finding the history of this topic and the opinions admins of the past had on it. However, I will say that none of these opinions should stop us from improving policy, as I don't even believe most of these takes would be enforceable under T:BOUND.

Here's my take: there's three kinds of "policy." 1) Policy which is written down in the Tardis: subspace, 2) Policy which exists through how our rules are enforced and the current opinions of the admin team, and 3) Policy which existed through how our rules were once enforced and the former opinions of the admin team in the past. It is the basic conceit of the new forums that the third thing is to be all but thrown out - and all three can be reconsidered in the present day.

Either way, my take is essentially that T:NO RW has had such a wide range of implementation and potential readings that we should change the wording to make the intended use more justified. My issue is that the written policy implies this: Tardis Wiki favors in-universe information due to instances where the DWU and the real world are different in DWU fiction. But in certain implementations, the implied policy has become: Tardis Wiki favors creating implied differences between the real world and the DWU by separating information when this was not intended by the creators.

So, for instance, a former reading of policy might say something like this: "A photo of Donald Trump, presented without identification, can not be stated to be the same person as Donald Trump in-universe. It might be the case that there is another person in-universe who looks just like Donald Trump while Donald Trump looks like a totally different person in the DWU."

Whereas a good reading of policy would state: "This photo of Donald Trump is not identified but logically was intended to be Donald Trump due to the audience being intended to use basic real-world context while interacting with this piece of media."

Again, I am in-favor of covering differences between our world and the DWU when that was the intention. But when that clearly wasn't the intention, it makes no sense. We shouldn't imply that an audio recording of Martin Luther King was intended to be some other dude when that was certainly never the intention of anyone involved in the show. Obviously there will be exceptions - but those exceptions should not define policy. OS25🤙☎️ 16:20, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I still agree with all Epsilon and OS25 say, but I think part of what I said has been overlooked. I brought up Urine not because of the introductory sentence about toxins, but because of the clarification about the infamous typo from the Delta and the Bannermen novelisation. That's why I brought up the Memory Alpha template which serves a similar purpose. When User:SOTO added that quite necessary clarification to the page, their edit summary read: Checked the source. Adding BTS clarification (this format has a long tradition on the wiki, even if it's fallen out of favour recently with everything usually going in the BTS.)

I haven't been here long enough to be familiar with this "tradition" but I think it should come back to being in favour. This makes the article easier to read and allows Behind the scenes sections to actually be about production info, real world trivia, and the like. Chubby Potato ☎ 21:01, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I think you raise a good point for the more extreme cases, but I'd say a solution in like this is probably not needed in most of the instances we've discussed. I'd disagree with such a note being made on [[The Beatles]] every single time a Beatles song played in an episode but was not identified. But perhaps it would be fitting to say on [[Spider-Man]]:

The Ninth Doctor once told Rose Tyler that his Spider sense was tingling. (PROSE: Winner Takes All)

While not stated in the story, the Spider-Sense is one of the powers of Spider-Man.

Incidentally, while looking for an example of this, I found one of the oddest readings of T:NO RW: the fact that Roald Dahl and Roald Dahl Plass do not reference each other in the main article. We take it to be speculation that Roald Dahl Plass might be named after Roald Dahl. OS25🤙☎️ 21:17, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Well that is at odds with Terrance Dicks (in-universe)/Terrance Dicks Library.

Also with urine... that "peeing over"/peering over" thing, c'mon, that is a typo. I no way was it intended for Seven to have a wee over a shelf, that is absurd. We don't take production errors as in-universe info in other sources, we shouldn't do that here, even if the typo is humorous.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

21:28, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I personally would also put it more along the likes of Planet of Fire accidentally showing papers which identify that Peri Brown is a man... To me it's very much about intention, but that's a very grey area I understand. OS25🤙☎️ 21:47, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Re: In-Universe definitions - Vegetable is another. But this is precisely why we shouldn't place OOU definitions on pages. Because they do occasionally happen, if rarely. It makes the website worse as a resource for DWU information, as people will be unable to distinguish between those definitions that are actually stated in DWU sources and those that are just added by editors because, uh, well, reasons? They wanted to explain to people in the opening sentence what something was and couldn't wait until the BTS section? We have {{wikipediainfo}}, there's just no excuse to insist that these pages must have definitions. They absolutely should be removed.

Outside of historical inaccuracies, can anyone actually provide an example of a real world object differing in-universe?

You mean aside from Cobalt bomb? Cats, dolphins, bees, crows. I believe a filming location in The Lazarus Experiment was said to be somewhere different. The idea that the president elect would be on a flying aircraft carrier meeting the PM. Physics is different, trust me on this. (See the BTS at Quantum physics for some of my frustration on the subject.) Happens all the time. What on earth are you talking about Epsilon? The DWU is radically different from our real world, they're only similar on the most cursory visual glance.

So all in all, I ignored an application of a policy that isn't even, by Fandom's Global Policies, a policy and therefore isn't even enforceable.

I mean, c'mon. T:BOUND. Look. Everyone understands the situation of the forums being inaccessible and the wiki being in a weird state. But this was policy. You were aware of the usual interpretation of T:BOUND to refer to "the way we currently do things is itself binding policy" and this was certainly the way things were being done. Nobody is suggesting we return to this near maximalist interpretation. But let's be serious, it was policy, and it was policy that was brought up right before the forums went down in the form of the various Zygon Isolation threads.

A thread is not policy until it is codified on a policy page.

Incorrect, by the very rule you linked. Technically the 2013-2020 forums might not be considered policy atm, but, like, c'mon. This wiki has a whole host of norms and policies that govern it sometimes affecting small handfuls of pages. It would be wholly impossible to write all of these down. T:BOUND very much applies.

I don't even believe most of these takes would be enforceable under T:BOUND.

The only think changing these, OS25, would be the merging of synonym pages in 2021/2022 (not sure when that was off hand). This was clear policy up until early 2021, and definitions on pages absolutely still get deleted whenever possible with that prior ruling upheld - see Shambala's comments on the issue that you cite and at Talk:Widow. Like, an admin will have to adjudicate, but I don't see a T:BOUND argument here for a change except the merge.

It is the basic conceit of the new forums that the third thing is to be all but thrown out

I don't believe this is true. It's certainly to be reconsidered though. The wording you're suggesting here implies that it's largely rubbish, rather than largely something that we've taken for granted as doxa for too long.

Look. I think we can all agree that the policy has gone too far. But some of what is being suggested here goes much too far the other way. The DWU is weird and we shouldn't try to imply that there's more similarity between it and our universe than we know exists. The definitions are a bad idea. The pictures being treated like we do Big Finish promo pics are a fine idea. People know what they are, they're not idiots, they come to the show having some background knowledge. Finding the line will be hard. Najawin ☎ 23:06, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

My statement was made in reference to Forum:The New Forums, where it was directly stated that the age of old quotes and forum debates makes them worthy of being re-discussed (or ignored) by new discussions. I still insist this is the case - if a quote about enforcement of policy is older than five years old I don't think it carries more weight than the words of people present in the current discussion.

As per the simple nature of definitions - what is the issue? "A vegetable was a food" "a chair was a piece of furniture where people sat" "Widow was a term for someone who was once married to someone who had passed away." These are specifically definitions given in the context of terminology usage in stories. We are not giving definitions from how the real world may define these words, we are giving a brief explanation as per how these phrases are used within stories that we cover. OS25🤙☎️ 23:42, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Can't do a full reply as I am away from my computer but the whole "under current precedent of T:BOUND precedent counts as policy" was a major catch-22 and technically was complete BS as Fandom's global policies supersede this; you cannot have a policy that breaks global policies and justify it because it is on a policy page. You could have a Wiki with a policy page saying deadnaming is okay, doesn't mean it actually is though, and it would result in major bans from Fandom (rightfully cruking so). And the best part was T:BOUND said nothing of the sort!

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

00:07, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

It went like this:

Fandom: unwritten policies are unenforceable.

Tardis Wiki: oh we have an unwritten policy that says unwritten policies are policies so we can enforce them because we say so.

Absolutely lunacy.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

00:16, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Epsilon. I quite agree that how T:BOUND worked at the time was quiet counterintuitive. But Forum:Temporary forums/T:BOUND Reform enshrined just this! It's now policy! Explicitly! Feel free to open a new thread to revisit the issue; it's outside the scope of this thread. We just codified the very policy you don't like into an actual policy page. Moreover, much of what I cited was in forum threads (and everything that wasn't was referred to in forum threads, save Talk:Cobalt bomb), so met our internal standard for when something was considered clearly visible. The wrench in this, was, of course, the forums being down. Which everyone understands and acknowledges. If you want to seriously suggest that policy must be codified on a policy page rather than merely on a talk page or a forum thread, which isn't FANDOM or local policy, please, make a thread for it. Najawin ☎ 00:28, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm basing my comment off of that too OS25. Not immediate dismissal, but an attempt to reconsider them in light of the modern wiki, where previously we might have just accepted them as obviously true and something we needed to argue against through standards that were impossible to meet.

As for definitions, we have a dilemma here, in the classical sense. Can the definition you want to place on the page be inferred from the statements made in the DWU? In the sense that the instances of use in the DWU logically entail the definition, I mean. If so, there's no need to place it on the page, it's redundant. If not, it's misrepresenting what the actual sources tell us.

Consider Widow. The article's comments, at least on the TV side of things, now that I'm actually doing a fact check on it, are largely invented whole cloth.

Following the murder of his wife, Caroline Lake, Jackson Lake found himself a widower. (TV: The Next Doctor)

Episode doesn't say this. It just says "And a new history begins for me. I find myself a widower, but with my son and with a good friend." - You can infer this connection, given how his memories returned, and the references to family. But it's not stated. And even if we do infer it, it's a different word! Or with

Jackie Tyler became a widow after her husband Pete was struck by a car. (TV: Father's Day)

Nowhere is this said in the episode. Nowhere is there a DWU notion of "widow" that applies to Jackie Tyler outside of this article on the wiki. It's entirely something that we have dragged in as real world context to this show and have decided that it must apply because, by Jove, the DWU and the real world must have the same terms that mean the same things.

For this reason I can't trust the audio descriptions, especially because they were added by the same user as who added the Jackie Tyler tidbit - so all we have is that a planet had a bunch of widows in a day and Jackson Lake found himself a widower. How on earth does this imply a definition?

And just to head off a potential objection at the pass, are we helping people or confusing them by telling them that Jackie Tyler "bec[omes] a widow" in Father's Day? Like. It's strictly speaking true that she loses her husband in that episode. But the episode doesn't use the term. And it ignores all the other stories where people are married and lose their partner - why are we focusing on just Jackie and these people in these specific audios? It's misleading, and this list will always be incomplete. Talk:Earth - List of appearances/Archive 1 establishes that lists that will be too long and will never be kept up to date should be deleted. I can't imagine that this will be different. We need to focus on the actual stories that use the term and what those stories actually say. Do we need to ignore obvious context they expect us to drag in? No. But we have {{wikipediainfo}} for a reason. Why on earth do we need to write a sentence or two explaining something that everyone probably already understands, if they don't understand it there's wikipedia, and if you don't want to do that, you can still do it in the BTS? There's just no reason for it, and it actively harms our ability to convey when actual DWU definitions exist. Najawin ☎ 01:01, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm not swayed by the argument that old interpretations of policy supersede this forum space or are even specifically relevant. Many of the complaints made here sound like talk page discussions to me and don't have much to do with the actual issue at hand. I still do not see the issue with simply stating a basic definition at the start of some articles. Sure, some concepts like Cat have distinctions in-universe not known to our world. Despite this, something like "A cat was an animal known to live on the planet Earth" is still totally accurate and, despite being a description which fits our world, also gives very fundamental info to the reader which also helps the page flow better. OS25🤙☎️ 01:45, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think I claimed that they supersede this forum space, since I don't think that! But it seems hard to deny that they're relevant. If we want to change policy, we should always endeavor to understand what policy was and why it was the way it was, even if we completely ignore it moving forward.

I'm unconvinced that "A cat was an animal known to live on the planet Earth" helps the page flow better, it seems to just be an introductory sentence that could be replaced with another on the relevant page. But since you disagree, let's try another approach. I brought up a dilemma before, yes? "Can the definition you want to place on the page be inferred from the statements made in the DWU? In the sense that the instances of use in the DWU logically entail the definition, I mean. If so, there's no need to place it on the page, it's redundant. If not, it's misrepresenting what the actual sources tell us."

You agree that you want to take the first horn of this dilemma, right, you want to place redundant information on the page simply to make it flow better? And, to clarify, what is your position on definitions that are not logically entailed by the DWU information that we have on hand, like the definition of Widow that people keep trying to insert? And, finally, how do you expect readers to know the difference between actual DWU definitions and definitions that editors just randomly decided to put into pages because they thought it "helps the page flow better"? If we constantly put in these "contextual" definitions, and, believe me, if we allow this to happen they'll be on every page, there's one user in question who has been repeatedly blocked for adding them and is probably about to be permanently blocked for doing so, it will be near impossible to separate them from actual DWU definitions and it will minimize the impact that happens when an actual factual DWU definition appears on a page. Najawin ☎ 02:28, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think we always have to understand the history behind policy, like sometimes it doesn't add much to the debate.

"A cat was an animal known to live on the planet Earth" was a theoretical intro sentence. If Cat didn't have a well-cited intro, this is the kind of intro I would suggest. Thus I brought that up as an example of an intro which should not be against policy.

I don't see it as a dilemma. I want to put information on the page to make it a page. Pages without intros are not pages they are bodies to an article with no beginning. A page like Essay just isn't complete and for no reason which actually helps the site. Again, we're just talking about pages on simple words - mostly nouns.

I guess I just don't hold this huge belief that all Doctor Who fiction is trying to build up an illustration of a world which looks like ours in nearly every single way but secretly might be a little bit different in a way we can't see! I don't believe in a Doctor Who universe where widow secretly doesn't mean what it seems to mean in every single situation where it's used. And indeed - I think that we do know the definition of widow because we've seen it used in media wherein we see it used in context.

As per the difference between a definition which might come from an actual source - well... Those definitions will have a citation? As they do right now? But the more important note is that fiction doesn't need to define things like chair and widow because fiction is typically not created to be adapted for a fan wiki. Thus we should not expect or even request that stories give us definitions for nouns that are used in very basic contexts. Unless we get a full dictionary which is somehow DWU, expecting in-universe definitions for words which were never going to have different definitions in the first place is a fool's errand and not at all accurate to the intentions of the source material. OS25🤙☎️ 02:40, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

So it's certainly theoretically possible that there are circumstances where prior discussions aren't relevant to current usage/discussion of a policy, and so we wouldn't need to consider them. But: A: This isn't true here. B: Whether or not this is true it's still a good rule of thumb to follow. And C: It might not even be possible to know if it's true without actually doing the research in the first place. I'm really not sure why you're so against considering the history of our policies so much. Nobody is insisting that they're binding here, just that we should always consider them, this doesn't seem like a tough ask.

I mean, it's literally a dilemma, in the strictest sense of the term. It has two horns! But let me ask you. Why is Essay incomplete? It lists all the information we have about essays, right? I'm not sure what sort of definition you can give that's logically entailed by what we have other than "An essay is something that can be written". But this is already entailed by the page! So why is it necessary?!

I guess I just don't hold this huge belief that all Doctor Who fiction is trying to build up an illustration of a world which looks like ours in nearly every single way but secretly might be a little bit different in a way we can't see!

Okay, you're just straightforwardly wrong. Cats, bees, dolphins, crows. We know that the DWU is wildly different than our own. Yes, authors write things with some level of understanding that we will drag RWK into stories that we consume, but we shouldn't write the wiki in a way to pretend that the text says more than it does, or what it clearly implies.

And indeed - I think that we do know the definition of widow because we've seen it used in media wherein we see it used in context.

We literally have not. We've seen it used once, unless those audio stories actually use the term, and that usage doesn't actually give the relevant context. We've maybe seen widower in that context. But the two terms are not synonymous, and even then you have to do some inference.

As per the difference between a definition which might come from an actual source - well... Those definitions will have a citation? As they do right now?

A: But sometimes these definitions are followed by other facts from the same episode, eg, (Definition)(Fact)(Cite). You're proposing, I guess, (Definition)(Line break)(Fact)(Cite). This is not exactly an intuitive difference for many of our readers. B: Even if we double cited and got rid of this issue, the fact would remain that many people would just take for granted that anything said in the body of an IU page is, well, sourced - even without an accompanying citation. Do you honestly think otherwise?

Thus we should not expect or even request that stories give us definitions for nouns that are used in very basic contexts.

But I'm not doing this. Nothing I've said requires this to be the case. The tension here comes from your view of how pages should be written. You think pages for things used in very basic contexts are incomplete without an actual definition. I explicitly reject this notion. Just as authors expect us to drag RWK into any consumption of a story and view/read/listen to it with a basic understanding of the world we inhabit in mind, as wiki editors we must expect our readers to do the same, while noting that the DWU is weird, and our limitations in knowing everything about it. We cannot have it both ways. Either people use RWK in engaging with all DW adjacent media, including our own wiki, or they don't. If we need to provide further context, there's wikipediainfo and the BTS section. Najawin ☎ 03:22, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Right. Thoughts on this. I don't think that we should allow arbitrary real-world information into our in-universe articles. As far as I can make out, nobody who has participated in this thread so far has said that. (I don't think, sorry if I've mischaracterised anybody's opinions.) As far as I can make out, the original OP primarily proposes that we should be allowed to connect things that are obviously connected, merge things that should be obviously merged, so on. From my understanding of it, this has absolutely nothing to do with T:NO_RW, but instead constitutes an abolition of T:HOMEWORLD. I'm in support of this. It's intuitive and makes logical sense, and will altogether make our wiki a better source. What's also implied within this, however, is being allowed to make inferences from the text (i.e. if a cat appears, somebody says "dirty animal", then the Doctor steps out of his Tardis and says "We're on Earth" we should be allowed to say "A cat was an animal that inhabited the planet Earth). However, I don't think that there is anything in current policy that prevents us from doing this. So I'm slightly confused. If I've made any egregious mischaracterisations of anybody's opinions, I'm very sorry, and please do correct me, but this is what I have gotten out of this thread. Aquanafrahudy 📢 12:05, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I believe I'm agreeing with OS25 when I say that I like articles to have lead sections, even if they're only one sentence. Najawin, I think this is just a point of disagreement: I object to your dilemma in that I dispute the hypothetical redundancy, because in my view it's entirely appropriate for an article to open with a short section which provides an overview of its topic, often including information which will be restated in more detail later on. I note that in general practice T:NO RW has an exception carved out for page titles, which are allowed to be reasonable inference; I wonder if any of this could be resolved to the majority's satisfaction by simply extending that exception to single lead sentences? Personally, as a reader, I find it rather disorienting for articles to launch straight into a glorified list of references without any opening statement, and I think in most cases I would take a real-world-identical summary sentence merely as a reassurance that the DWU has not generally defined the subject differently. Also, not all Doctor Who media is in direct communication. As an example, let's suppose that one story stated that all Earth mice were actually aliens who have a plot to take over the planet by 2035, and the Doctor has always known this. Obviously, previous stories which mentioned mice weren't written with this in mind, because in actuality the idea didn't exist yet. Later stories might take it up, but they also might not – it could just fade into the infinite ranks of "stuff which would theoretically have big implications but in practice just isn't true most of the time", and this would be the case even if mice are never specifically stated later on to be mundane. If this hypothetical Mouse Plot story were the only instance of an actual "definition" (so to speak) of mice, current policy would require hypothetical Mouse to use only Mouse Plot Story as a source for its basic information, but this would lead to some really bizarre readings of any throwaway line mentioning mice, and effectively end up placing ludicrously undue weight on a single story over more sensible interpretations of countless others. Basically, although the Doctor Who universe does demonstrably differ in many respects from ours, Doctor Who stories (being intended for consumption by an Earth audience) are mainly meant to be read with a fair amount of real-world knowledge filling in definitions, and our curious silence on implicit similarities that are very much intended to be assumed just ends up making the wiki read oddly. Starkidsoph ☎ 13:05, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

That's very sensical. Also, your example of mice is... largely accurate, considering that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (implicitly set in the DWU) asserts that Mice are the most intelligent species on Earth...

Also, I know T:BOUND has been changed but I will ignore it if it means this Wiki has to have Loo roll, bog roll, and toilet paper as separate pages. I'd rather get banned than defend that level of insanity.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

15:13, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

My take is that these definitions are implicitly in-universe already. When someone says "Oh, Jessie is a widow" we know that they're saying Jessie's husband/wife died. Thus that story is establishing that widow means when your husband/wife dies. There is not cause to speculate that it means something else - we can assert the definition, even if a simple one, simply by knowing how to interact with the media in question. OS25🤙☎️ 16:15, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I think this has very little to do with the Homeworld Principle on first glance, could you clarify?

in my view it's entirely appropriate for an article to open with a short section which provides an overview of its topic, often including information which will be restated in more detail later on.

This is a textbook example of redundancy. You may insist that such redundancy is merited, but it's redundant.

I wonder if any of this could be resolved to the majority's satisfaction by simply extending that exception [of page titles] to single lead sentences?

Absolutely not. And this is why I bring up all the precedent and suggest people read it. Page titles have no similarity to what we're discussing, this is discussed in Thread:238917 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Time Lord Academy. It is a necessity of wiki software that every page be named something. Hence conjectural titles are allowed. It is not the case that every page must have a definition. This is something people are randomly insisting on because, I dunno, they don't want to use {{wikipediainfo}}. The two cases are wholly disanalogous, I cannot emphasize this enough.

and I think in most cases I would take a real-world-identical summary sentence merely as a reassurance that the DWU has not generally defined the subject differently

But if the DWU hasn't offered any comment on this fact, we're just misleading our readers. A definition at vegetable and one at widow would have the same strength of evidence (ie, one is sourced, one is not), but most readers would read them the same. Even, it seems, you.

effectively end up placing ludicrously undue weight on a single story over more sensible interpretations of countless others

By "effectively end up placing ludicrously undue weight" you mean we place equal weight on the stories and we see what this implies. You suggest we bring in more RWK in order to get around T:NPOV. Absurd. If we change T:NO RW, let me just note in strongest terms my opposition to this idea. If a DWU source contradicts RWK at any point that RWK is right out. How was this point not immediately torn apart? Was the fact that User:Starkidsoph disagreed with me enough to stop people from pointing out how risible this was?

our curious silence on implicit similarities that are very much intended to be assumed just ends up making the wiki read oddly

Except if this is true, then our wiki has these same intentions of assumptions. You can't have it both ways. If people consume media with RWK, wouldn't they do the same with ours? It seems the only argument here that gets around this is the idea that it's stylistic, but there are concerns of accuracy that just trump any stylistic arguments, imo.

Also, I know T:BOUND has been changed but I will ignore it if it means this Wiki has to have Loo roll, bog roll, and toilet paper as separate pages. I'd rather get banned than defend that level of insanity.

Epsilon, synonym pages have been merged to the best of my knowledge. The issue we were discussing is whether the "near maximalist" interpretation of T:NO RW was policy. It was. Like. C'mon. This one really isn't debatable.

When someone says "Oh, Jessie is a widow" we know that they're saying Jessie's husband/wife died.

Then they know we're saying that on the page for widow. You cannot have it both ways. But this is clearly nonsense. Saying someone is a noun does not establish that this noun means the same thing as it does in the real world. See, for instance, Cobalt bomb. Or Deduction. Or President-elect (of the US), I guess. If you give me further context to connect that word to the actual RW meaning for you to even have a chance at this line of argument.

Thus that story is establishing that widow means when your husband/wife dies. There is not cause to speculate that it means something else

Again, since we're discussing "widow" specifically, let me remind you that the term has been used, as far as we can tell, once, at least once that the page actually reflects. And it doesn't provide any context that would tell you what the term actually means. Najawin ☎ 21:25, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

It absolutely gives context for what the term means, because it's used in a way to indicate what it means. Let's give an example. If I say, in a piece of fiction:

Sadly, Emily was a widow.

Then we can say, in my fictional world, that Emily has a husband or wife that passed away. That's not conjecture - it's how words work. Thus, we can also say that in my fictional world a widow is someone who had a husband or wife that died. There is no speculation, there is no inventing of information - because by this word being used in this way we have proven that "widow" means in-universe what we think it means.

Again, it is beyond unhelpful to expect these stories to define every noun they throw out. We can have it "both ways" and we should.

President-elect actually proves my point. In that case, the word was used incorrectly by the writer - thus we would define it based on how it is used in valid sources. Your argument that any of this is violating T:NO RW continues to ignore that we would be using the context of the original stories to define terminology, thus we are not simply pulling definitions from the real world. OS25🤙☎️ 21:35, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

It absolutely gives context for what the term means, because it's used in a way to indicate what it means

You are inventing hypotheticals that have nothing to do with the actual use case that we know of. The sole use case we know of does not give context, no. Go look at a transcript for School Reunion (TV story)!

Then we can say, in my fictional world, that Emily has a husband or wife that passed away. That's not conjecture - it's how words work. Thus, we can also say that in my fictional world a widow is someone who had a husband or wife that died.

If this were any more circular it would have an event horizon. Your premise is that "a widow is someone who had a husband or wife that died". It's also somehow your conclusion? The way you would avoid the charge of circularity is simply by saying that you're moving between levels of fiction, but in this case "Then we can say, in my fictional world, that Emily has a husband or wife that passed away. That's not conjecture - it's how words work." is literally just question begging - it may hold for some instances but not others. This is just rhetoric. Give me an actual argument.

Again, it is beyond unhelpful to expect these stories to define every noun they throw out

Nobody has suggested this. Not a one. The idea that this is necessary comes from your desire to have these in-universe definitions on basic pages and my insistence that if this happens then they need to be sourced. But I explicitly deny that we need to have these definitions in the first place, and you deny that they need to be sourced. It would be just as inaccurate for I to suggest that you are insisting that stories do this as it is for you to suggest that I am insisting it. Nobody thinks this. Which I already explained.

We can have it "both ways" and we should.

We can be logically inconsistent and hypocritical and we should? I think you might want to reflect on the positions that have led you to claim this.

President-elect actually proves my point. In that case, the word was used incorrectly by the writer - thus we would define it based on how it is used in valid sources.

So meaning comes from IW use when it's used in ways that are inconsistent with RWK, but comes from RWK otherwise? I cannot imagine how you think this proves your point.

Your argument that any of this is violating T:NO RW continues to ignore that we would be using the context of the original stories to define terminology

Your hypothetical is literally [Person] is a [noun] - therefore we can understand what noun means because we know what it means from the RW because that's how language works - there is no context anywhere in sight - you appeal to nothing except RWK and "it's how words work". Be serious. This is a clear violation of T:NO RW.

If you want to stitch together a hypothetical where someone was a widow and in a scene prior has a dream about her dead husband or goes to a support group for widows and they all talk about their dead husbands, you know, I'd probably give it to you. I'm pretty borderline on the widower issue, as opposed to the widow one. But literally [Person] is a [noun]? C'mon, no. You can't begin to pretend that's not a blatant violation of T:NO RW, and it certainly doesn't take into account "the context of the original stories to define terminology", and you absolutely are "simply pulling definitions from the real world". Najawin ☎ 22:33, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Najawin, your precedent is interesting and informative, but given that the title of this forum thread is "Loosening T:NO RW", we are actually allowed to say we think the policy should be changed. I agree that everything I proposed contradicts current policy, because I'm proposing a change to the policy. Furthermore, I know that I'm disagreeing with you; that's why I said "I think this is a point of disagreement". Your logic is internally consistent, but so is mine, because we are presenting equally valid but incompatible viewpoints, and it's okay if neither of us changes our mind; someone (presumably an admin) will, in due course, make a decision. "Articles should open with definitions" is basically a stylistic preference, but one which is widespread enough I think it should be taken seriously along with its opposite.

A point where I actually disagree in the sense that I think you're wrong is "If people consume media with RWK, wouldn't they do the same with ours?" – I would argue that a fan wiki is read very differently from a story, because the purpose of a story is not (generally) to provide a comprehensive overview of a topic and answer any questions neatly. The very existence of fan wikis is predicated on them serving a function which the media itself does not, namely consolidating many separately-presented pieces of information into a coherent whole to fully describe elements of a fictional universe. If a reader goes to an article entitled "Frog" wanting to answer the question "Is there anything canonically [sic] weird about frogs in Doctor Who?", and the article opens with "A frog was one of several amphibian species living on Earth", or whatever, I don't think they would say "Ah! Clearly frogs have been featured prominently in a Doctor Who story, where it was established they are normal!". Rather they would go "Okay, there isn't a big thing of Frog Lore that I need to bear in mind when watching Doctor Who, I can just assume all mentions of frogs mean what I think they do". If you disagree with this supposition about readers' interpretation, as I suspect you might, then we may be at an impasse; only time and the input of other editors will tell whose viewpoint is more widely held to be plausible. Starkidsoph ☎ 01:08, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Of course we're allowed to disagree with the conclusions of past threads/discussions. I don't think anyone is disputing this. I'm not saying that Thread:238917 constitutes binding precedent for why definitions shouldn't be allowed moving forward. I'm saying that it explains why definitions at the beginning of a thread and page titles are wholly disanalogous. And it does. They are fundamentally different entities. If you want to argue for conjectural IU definitions no analogy can be made to page titles.

I would argue that a fan wiki is read very differently from a story, because the purpose of a story is not (generally) to provide a comprehensive overview of a topic and answer any questions neatly.

Well neither is this the purpose of a wiki, so I don't see an issue. You've attached a very dangerous assumption there that I don't think any wiki meets - that of answering questions neatly. This just isn't true - if you have a question that isn't to be found in the source (such as, for instance "are frogs secretly sapient?") the wiki will not answer it in either direction. Why would it?!

Which leaves us with the idea of "comprehensive overview" - is a story a comprehensive overview of a topic? In one sense no, unreliable narrators, things happening out of frame, but, in a sense, yes. It is a comprehensive overview of the things depicted in the story. In the same way, this wiki is a comprehensive overview on subjects that are depicted in stories as they are depicted in those stories. The wiki does not pretend to comment on the history of Sontar during the times it's never been depicted in a source. It does not pretend to be comprehensive in any sense past collating those facts that have been given to us from sources.

If a reader goes to an article entitled "Frog" wanting to answer the question "Is there anything canonically [sic] weird about frogs in Doctor Who?", and the article opens with "A frog was one of several amphibian species living on Earth", or whatever, I don't think they would say "Ah! Clearly frogs have been featured prominently in a Doctor Who story, where it was established they are normal!".

Featured prominently? No. At one point explicitly stated that this was the case? Yes. Of course they would. We've tried to police off unsourced statements from the wiki for >15 years. Why on earth would someone think that a statement on an IU page is just nonsense we made up to just reassure them that nothing too weird has happened with frogs?

Look. I get it. People aren't super thrilled with a lot of the old reasoning for some of our old rules. And I think the current official interpretation of T:NO RW is a bit too far. But I beg, I implore, everyone to actually read all the sources I cited above. This was not something that was decided on a whim and with poor reasoning as with some of the decisions we complain about. User talk:OverAnalyser in particular shows that this policy was incredibly well thought out. You might not ultimately agree with all of the conclusions, but there are very clear reasons for why the policy is what it is. Najawin ☎ 02:49, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Sorry about my last post, it was a fundamental misunderstanding of both the OP and the discussion. I hadn't realised that people were talking about adding arbitrary real world information to in-universe articles. I had assumed that they were just talking about such instances as Martin Luther King, which I had assumed was T:HOMEWORLD, as I had thought that the reason for having multiple pages on it was that, if you see what I mean. I've had a thought about it and realised that it was, of course, a conflagration of both. Same with Loo Roll, Bog Roll and Toilet Paper. T:HOMEWORLD stops us from merging them, and T:NO RW stops us from overriding T:HOMEWORLD. Except that we could just make an exception here? Or use a less-strict interpretation?

With that out of the way, onto T:NO RW. My question is this: how on earth would adding real world information to our in-universe pages be at all helpful to the casual user? I mean, if somebody comes to Fish, wanting to know how fish have been represented in the DWU, and it says "Fish were aquatic creatures that originated from Earth. Some were vertebrae and some were I vertebrae." they will assume that such has been stated in the DWU. Moreover, if the continuity-aware writer were to come along and see this, they might be put off from writing a story which stated that fish actually came from outer space. This is fundamentally misleading to our readers, and highly damages our credibility and usefulness as a wiki. Introducing arbitrary RW information into our in-universe articles is not a good idea. Aquanafrahudy 📢 14:41, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

When have Doctor Who writers ever let continuity get in the way of a good story? If they come to the Wiki wanting to look into fish, and see that we say "fish are from Earth", they can just... ignore that, or have in their stories "fish seemed to come from Earth, but in fact, they did not". Have you seen our page for dragon? There are a ton of conflicting accounts where some writers treat them as real beings and others as fiction and myths.

And I strongly pushback the notion that "Fish were aquatic creatures that originated from Earth" is quote on quote "arbitrary real world information"; it is a pretty bloody obvious inference by the time you have a story that shows a fish in a story set on Earth. We should the DWU as "reality until stated otherwise" not "the most insane super-fancy hardcore sci-fi universe until stated that it's not". I will put money on all the authors who have ever contributed to DWU fiction as using reality as a basis for stories. That is just how fiction in general works, unless if you're reading a particularly high-concept piece of speculative biology.

And to restate, I'm not supporting adding really precise definitions that go into detail about their anatomy, just the obvious info. We can use abductive reasoning! If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck! And if we rule against real world information being stripped from the Wiki, you all do realise this will mean that we cannot even say that most characters are human? Yes they look like humans, but who are we to tell? We are using real world information, i.e., our abductive reasoning, to make that assumption. Who is to say that all these companions of the Doctor aren't changelings or Tenzas? Abductive reasoning plays a huge part in this Wiki that cannot be understated, and to completely banish any and all real world information from the Wiki would result in this Wiki becoming the absolute most pedantic, infuriating mess of "ABSOLUTELY NO ASSUMPTIONS BECAUSE THAT IS REAL WORLD INFORMATION!"

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

15:16, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you Aqua. Indeed, this is precisely the reasoning that Tangerine gave!

addition of real world information and information that is not derrived from within the DWU may not appear vandalism, but it erodes the accuracy of information on this wiki as a DWU source.

I understand the T:HOMEWORLD comparison on the page merging issue though. But, yes, this is intended to go quite a bit further.

it is a pretty bloody obvious inference by the time you have a story that shows a fish in a story set on Earth

Does this imply it isn't arbitrary Epsilon?

We should [treat] the DWU as "reality until stated otherwise"

I cannot imagine someone who is so aware of the DWU honestly believes this. The series you do a lot of work with involves a fictional character who is aware that they are fictional and a stuffed panda that's alive. No. Just no. This is madness Epsilon.

And if we rule against real world information being stripped from the Wiki, you all do realise this will mean that we cannot even say that most characters are human?

Except nobody here has suggested that we fully remove RWK. People have suggested that adding unsourced definitions that are rife with speculation is a terrible idea. You understand there's a difference, right? Najawin ☎ 20:23, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Having read through this debate, an important concern I have is… hang on, is User:Najawin against ledes in general? Set aside real-world-based ones for a moment — what on Earth is with all this concern about "redundancy"? Surely it's normal and expected for TARDIS to begin with a synthetic summary of what TARDISes are, boiling down information which will be described in more detail, and sourced, later on in the page. Wanting to change that would be a massive change well beyond the boundaries of a thread called "Forum:Loosening T:NO RW", surely.

Accordingly I do not consider it up for debate that a page such as Widow is liable to have a one-sentence summary at the top — once it grows beyond a stub with one or two DWU instances of the word, anyway. We should at a minimum be able to say "[Character A], [Charatcter B], [Character C] and more, many of whom had a dead spouse in common, were described or described themselves as widows", or some other phrasing sticking exactly to the state of the evidence. Sure, that's "redundant", but so is "Skaro was the home planet of the Daleks"! That's just how we do things here! The question this thread is in a place to discuss is whether the real-world meaning of the word can come, to one degree or another, into how we phrase that lede. Not whether we're going to have one. I mean, really now.

As to that question in itself… I have a practical point to make, and a precedent to bring up. Talk:Hatbox. The key issue is that, being a Wiki written in English, we can naturally use English words to describe things we can observe, setting aside the DWU usage of the words themselves. We are habilitated to say that, say, Pete Tyler was Jackie's "spouse" even if we've never seen a DWU usage of the word at all. Limiting Wiki-writing itself to nouns that have been used and defined in DWU sources would be actual insanity and I don't believe anyone is arguing for that.

But that leaves with the apparent paradox that we would be able to write a descriptive, "conjecturally-named" "Widow" page describing people who were widows (whether or not they were ever called such) only until we find a DWU source for the word "widow" that fails to define it as such, at which point… we'd have to limit the scope of widow to instances that use the word, and banish the previous page's contents to, I don't know, Female-presenting person with a deceased spouse.

(Perhaps it's not intuitive that we should have a page about "widows" regardless of DWU usage of the term, but the argument is the same for objects such as hatboxes and the proverbial blender. Indeed, an extension of this problem is what we see with the historical figures in Lie of the Land and the like: we risk an issue where calling "unnamed President in Story X" "Donald Trump" is only fine until a different source uses the name "Donald Trump" without identifying him as the President in Story X, at which point it's suddenly no longer fine.)

We've explicitly banished this scenario in policy with regards to cross-overing fictional characters e.g. John Steed, and although I'm not sure how to set the boundaries, it seems sensible to grant the same privilege to real-world elements. I don't think I would support a significantly wider T:NO RW reform. This is too much — you should never find yourself mentioning other "page-worthy" elements in one of these real-world based ledes, even by the most generous reading of th eproposed changes, come on. But it's fine to ascribe Snow and Daenerys to the page Game of Thrones until proven otherwise, we've established — because if we didn't have any name-drops of GoT we could write a conjecturally-titled page by that name for "a series that the Doctor and Nardole owned posters of". How to phrase this in policy, I don't yet know.

As a side-note, I don't think Deduction is an example of a DWU/real-world discrepancy by any sane analysis. The Doctor in The Snowmen is using "deductions" to mean "that thing Sherlock Holmes does where he draws conclusions about the world from tiny clues", which people in the real world do all the time. Unless one commits to dying on the hill of hardline prescriptivism, the word "deduction" in vernacular English just also means "abduction" now, sometimes, in certain contexts. It's a controym. Deal with it! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 08:34, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Ah. Apologies. I am not against ledes in general. See:

You may insist that such redundancy is merited, but it's redundant.

Ultimately ledes are a stylistic choice, and if these stylistic choices imperil accuracy or otherwise undermine our duties to our readers then our stylistic preferences have to be ignored. Mere stylistic choices lose to almost all other considerations, imo.

Perhaps it's not intuitive that we should have a page about "widows" regardless of DWU usage of the term, but the argument is the same for objects such as hatboxes and the proverbial blender

I don't think the arguments are similar off hand, could you elaborate? "Hat box" was referred to in text, and the blender argument refers to a specific object that we are denoting "blender", this is a class of objects that isn't referred to in universe, in your hypothetical. (Let me note here that I obviously am going to appeal to the idea that pages and categories have different rules. So it's perfectly fine for Jackie Tyler to be in the category "Widows" but not mentioned on the page "Widow".)

But it's fine to ascribe Snow and Daenerys to the page Game of Thrones until proven otherwise

Quite honestly, I think I'm fine with this. Look at Manga. I removed "Mangaka" for being a bit obscure but left it in that state. But yes, the wording will be hard.

Deduction

Much like begging the question, you will pry this from my cold dead hands. Prescriptivism is correct for technical terms. These are technical terms. >:( Najawin ☎ 09:14, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarifications!

To elaborate on the blender/hatbox situation — the hatbox case as I recall it is this: that we had, on the one hand, on-screen hatboxes in Partners in Crime (explicitly depicted as boxes in which hats are contained) that were not called such; and on the other, prose sources for the word "hatbox" that did not define that word. Hat box had been created under the "blender" paradigm, as us just using a descriptor of our own for a depicted, but unnamed, thing. The substance of the controversy was whether we could merge this page for "unnamed type of boxes that you put hats in" with the page for "type of box called Hatbox whose function has not been made explicitly clear". By happenstance, the conjectural page used a space and thus avoided a direct naming conflict at first. But in essence, this was the equivalent of a DWU source for the word "blender" turning up (without context or definition) some time after the creation of a conjecturally-named page for blenders.

To restate the conundrums: we're agreed that in the absence of any stated DWU name, it's fine to have a page called Blender describing instances of "devices for blending stuff" in the DWU. (Not a category, because there's very little cause for individual instances to get pages of their own!) But then suppose that a DWU source comes along that mentions "a blender" without explaining what it is. If we document that name-drop on Blender, but also keep all the appearances of "unnamed things which in the real-world we call blenders", aren't we breaking your proposed taboo on assuming the real-world definition of words whose only DWU name-drops do not include useful definitions/context? What shred of T:NO RW would we be preserving by refusing to start with a lede like "Blenders were kitchen appliances used to blend other stuff", when we're already taking that definition as a given in what information we include in the page at all?

And I think all of this applies to Widow (unless you want to lean on the fact that both "blender" and "hatbox" are to some degree "self-explanatory" words, I suppose). If no DWU sources for the word "widow" existed, it would be fine to say in plaintext that Joan Redfern was a widow; I don't know if anyobody would bother to create it but it would be okay, naming-wise, to have a page named widow about the concept of having outlived one's spouse as it is represented in the DWU. Now let's say a DWU source for the word "widow", which does not define it, is found. What do we do with that preexisting widow page? I say again that if we still think the instances of windows-not-named-as-such belong on the page, concerns about assuming the definition become rather moot. But also, again, that booting all those instances off a page which started as a list of these instances under a conjectural name would seem extremely strange.

(Another potentially relevant precedent is DARDIS, for an analogous dispute that was held over an imaginary, DWU-only element. DARDIS was the name used in the script for the unnamed Dalek time machine thing in The Chase, and so would prima facie be a valid name for the page about the unnamed machine by a pretty broad precedent e.g. Zaggit Zagoo bar. But then we have The Quantum Archangel, which mentions the DARDIS without explicitly linking it in-story to the Dalek time machine, and time was that because of this, we had a DARDIS page exclusively about the Quantum Archangel name-drop, while forcing ourselves to cover the Chase machine on a completely different, unsatisfyingly-named Dalek time machine page — although I believe that decision was bolstered by the erroneous belief that it was purely a fan nickname, as opposed to something from the original script as we now know for certain. This was silly and we eventually stopped doing that. Again, same conundrum, same solution of "yes obviously we can assume the word means what it means IRL unless shown otherwise".)

Re: "deduction", whatever value judgment we make, can we at least agree that The Snowmen is, until proven otherwise, just depicting the Doctor as falling into the common real-world malapropism (if that is what we must call it), not intending to show that in the DWU serious epistemologists would also use "deduction" differently? Like, if we had a DWU source for the real-world technical definition we wouldn't say that it was an "according to one account" thing between it and Snowmen, we'd say "Deduction was technically defined as XYZ. (PROSE: Fulfilment of the Najawin Agenda) However, some people, including the Doctor, used it more loosely, to instead mean ZYX. (TV: The Snowmen)". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 13:13, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Wow, that was a lot to read. I agree that we should be able to call a spade a spade and identify Martin Luther King Jr when Martin Luther King Jr appears. By the same stroke, I agree with Najawin about avoiding conjectural definitions for dictionary terms. While Scrooge's analysis is compelling, my main concern here is citational clarity: it remains plainly confusing to me that the source cited following a sentence might not in fact be the source for that sentence, even if the sentence and the citation are in separate paragraphs; to the extent that our citation policies don't already prescribe that the "citationlessness lede" clause should only apply to leads that are clearly separated from the rest of the page by a section header, that's a problem with our policies, not a loophole we should seek to exploit.

However, I do understand the strong preference from some users that "in media res" leads should be avoided whenever possible. Let me echo Chubby Potato's recommendation by reopening one of my previous suggestions: opening with a definition, but presenting that definition in a clearly demarcated way using a designated template – if a box at the top of the page is too obtrusive, maybe a different citation style with a clearly-stylized link to Wiktionary. The intention would be to convey "This definition isn't explicitly spelled out in any DWU source, but it's what we're assuming for this page." This would avoid the appearance of speculation or misattribution while also future-proofing us against cases where the words are later radically redefined in the DWU. – n8 (☎) 14:15, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm unconvinced, because, as I expect Najawin to concur (he's alluded to it already), that can just be achieved by a {{wikipediainfo}} or {{wiktionary}} tag as it is, while being much less disruptive to the reading experience. And again, I deny that this thread should have the power to alter how we use ledes on the Wiki as a whole, and unless you also get your wish on in-universe pages, I don't see why we should treat "kitchen appliances for blending stuff" on Blender differently from "machine for transporting matter across large distances" on Transmat.

(But I'm not opposed to officialising the "only use an unsourced synthetic lede if it's directly followed by a section header" principle. Why wouldn't that be sufficient? I find it eminelty practical, though I'm not as convinced as you are that the current way is likely to create real confusion.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 14:27, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

There's no need for it to be disruptive to the reading experience! I'm suggesting something like this: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Widow?oldid=3556805 (hopefully with better stylization, of course.)

I agree that my "only use an unsourced synthetic lede if it's directly followed by a section header" principle would help in some cases, but it seems pretty clearly insufficient since many or most of the pages we're talking about, such as Widow, are far too short to justify separate sections. – n8 (☎) 15:52, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Nah, I think any page with enough distinct items to warrant a synthetic lede is also large enough to warrant at least one overall heading. I wouldn't blink at a "History" heading separating the lead of "widow" from the series of instances, in this case. That would be my proposed policy. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 15:55, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

The omission of citations in ledes is justified by the logic that detailed citations for each part of the lede will be available in the article's main body, and I'm concerned that exploiting this omission to smuggle in uncitable information undermines that logic. I've seen misconceptions (and even citogenesis!) spread from the wiki countless time in this fandom, and taking even a little extra care to be clear in where information comes from can save future readers / researchers from countless headaches. So my position remains that it's all or nothing: we include dictionary/RW information with a clear indicator such as ^W, or not at all. – n8 (☎) 16:15, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

@Najawin, it is not madness to assume the DWU is the real world until proven otherwise. I am fully aware of things like cats being Gallifreyan in origin or many of the other things like mermaids being completely real; but the belief that the DWU is based in reality is not incompatible with that! Paul Magrs's works may have things like mermaids, sentient puppets and toys, etc, but his works juxtapose this magical reality against realism, as to every Fester Cat there is a John Lewis, to every Panda there is a Škoda. And the rest of the DWU is like this. You may have Adipose roaming the streets of London, the very same London that has a Betfred, a Boots, The Entertainer, and so one. The fun of Doctor Who is seeing the world we are familiar with have fantastical elements to it, it relies of the familiarity that the audience has with the real world. The world as depicted is not an alien world where streets go up and down, blenders separate the ingredients in food, hatboxes are plastic bags that store shoes, etc etc. The DWU is fundamentally based in reality, that is just how a television series filmed generally in contemporary locations.

Something like John Lewis or Betfred will never have anything happen to them in the DWU, like if they're run by aliens or something, as the BBC would never allow that in fear of legal repercussion. Why would it be so bad to say "John Lewis was a department store" or "Betred was a bookies"?

I feel rather opposed to citing Wikipedia to "real world knowledge" leads (especially when said definitions are self-apparent from the source that features them) as if we can cite Wikipedia, then that'll heavily affect T:VS. That would, in my opinion, actually open the floodgates to Wikipedia being cited elsewhere on the Wiki and would lead to confusion.

Having an article that goes "A Widow was a woman whose spouse died. [line break or section header] Jackie Tyler was a widow. (PROSE: Meet Rose, etc.)" is not that extreme. It's not like we're writing paragraphs of detail about how being a widower may entitle you to benefits from the government or the social perception of widowers.

And if this thread is to rule against no "real world info", of course that means it'll be stripped from articles. I doubt the Wikipedia citation will be viable. Just take a look at Eevee. Because we cannot acknowledge that Eevee originated from Pokémon, we end up writing ourselves into corners by writing stuff like "They were the namesake thing in Let's Go Eevee. (HOMEVID: Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor)"

I find it to be insanity that acknowledging Eevee to be a Pokemon is going to be misleading to readers because "Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor didn't technically identify the creature as one"; I will guarantee you absolutely fucking nobody on the face of the planet will get even slightly mislead because the TARDIS Wiki dared use our eyes to say that Eevee is a Pokemon when literally every single person who has ever watched that movie will be able to identify that scene as a massive reference to Pokemon.

The readers are not aliens sitting in space, completely devoid of all information about Earth except for a single copy of the Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor blu-ray.

Frankly, I would argue that it is the current way of practise that we make these inference and/or real world info guided leads. I know a few of us may correct them when we see them, but I am sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles that currently do this. And that is not a bad thing, that is basic human brain functions.

When we see something, our brain fires up our neurons that associate what we're seeing with past memories. If we see an Eevee toy in The Curse of Clyde Langer, anyone who is familiar with Pokemon will go (Ryan George voice) "that's the thing from the thing!" To deny us to associate things using real world knowledge is absolutely absurd because that is just how our brains work.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

17:15, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Don't mind me, just a page break

@n8, I should clarify that I do not support including arbitrary real-world details in these ledes — only what we can glean from the DWU sources that we are ascribing to the page, whether we do so because they use the word or because they use the thing itself unnamed. Essentially, I am proposing to take the bolded phrasings we'd use in the lede of the conjectural article ("Widow"->"many women whose husbands or spouses had died were described in various accounts, often bemoaning blah blah blah…") and, when we are given a non-defined source for the word, to append that name to the beginning of it ("Many widows, i.e. women whose husbands…").

Actually, we speak of uncited ledes, but maybe that would be a case for citations in the lede, as we do when an unnamed TV character is named by a later source, say.

"Widows, (PROSE: Thingie) women whose spouse had died, were encountered by the Doctor on several occasions, often bemoaning society's attitude to blah blah blah. (TV: Human Nature, PROSE: Second Source, etc.)"

Wouldn't that be pretty effective, and minimise risk of anybody thinking that any DWU source explicitly defined the word? Indeed it would clue the smart reader to the fact that sources other than Thingie may well not have used the word at all, something not conveyed by a Wikipedia template or the like. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:44, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

The Hatbox situation was different in that the term wasn't conjectural (aside from spelling, it was spoken). And when we looked at subtitles in at least one instance the space shouldn't have been there in the first place.

What shred of T:NO RW would we be preserving by refusing to start with a lede like "Blenders were kitchen appliances used to blend other stuff", when we're already taking that definition as a given in what information we include in the page at all?

So your argument here seems to have presupposed a few steps. I'm not opposed to these steps, but it's important to cover them to explain why we have a bit of an issue here. First:

we're agreed that in the absence of any stated DWU name, it's fine to have a page called Blender describing instances of "devices for blending stuff" in the DWU

The usage of the verb "blending" here is us applying RWK to a text (in the technical sense, you know what I mean) that very likely doesn't use the term. You have already made inferences about the objects based on RWK.

If we document that name-drop on Blender, but also keep all the appearances of "unnamed things which in the real-world we call blenders"

We don't have to do this. As stated, this isn't analogous to the Hatbox case. We probably should - though if we do we should note that the usage of the term is conjectural for the cases of the "blending objects". But we are once again dragging real world knowledge and constructing this page through a combination of RWK, DWU knowledge, and basic reasoning.

Now we turn to the question of definitional ledes. Why might we be skeptical of them still? At every point we've added some small amount of reasoning and RWK, and I think it's hard to argue that a choice of verbs will mislead readers, unless this choice is wildly off base. It's possible to argue that putting the two types of blenders on the same page will mislead readers, but so long as we note where everything is conjectural, I think we have a decent shot at that working. But with definitional ledes we're adding unsourced information to the top of the page that states in no uncertain terms what a particular noun is. I can't see a way we don't mislead people. Nate's attempt is a valiant effort, but our readers, 9 times out of 10, won't understand the difference. (And, yes, {{wikipediainfo}} is sufficient.) And I don't see a way to easily tag these as conjectural, given that some of these definitional ledes wouldn't be conjectural. It misleads users by priming them to think of all definitional ledes in one way, when there are some that aren't that way and are actually sourced. This is a critical issue with your more recent proposal too Scrooge. How can we impress upon readers that these inferred definitions are not the same as definitions actually given by the text?

And I think all of this applies to Widow

I just don't. Huh, maybe I'm the less Platonist one in this discussion. Never had that happen before. (I also don't quite see the relevance of the DARDIS sidebar. We're largely agreed on merging pages, I thought.)

deduction

Cold. Dead. Hands.

The fun of Doctor Who is seeing the world we are familiar with have fantastical elements to it, it relies of the familiarity that the audience has with the real world.

Is this like a British thing? I can't say, as an American, that I've felt particularly familiar with the world the show portrayed when it came to the US. And I've been to NYC a few times!

And if this thread is to rule against no "real world info"

Who is arguing for this Epsilon? Who? People are suggesting that specific parts of RWK go too far, but everyone agrees that reform is needed. Najawin ☎ 20:28, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

I guess at the end of the day what's rubbing me the wrong way here is the idea that we're meant to assume a sort of bad-faith use of the English language when covering content. Wherein an "essay" is some mysterious other thing and a widow might be someone whose spouse has died but also might not be. If that's the case, then how far can we truly get into any specific fiction without coverage consistently being stuck in a traffic jam? Where each word now has an absolutely nebulous meaning because we've never been given a DWU dictionary? OS25🤙☎️ 20:47, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

I think there's a radical difference between having a lede based on a conjectural definition and conjecturally using terms to make an article even slightly coherent. The second is necessary - as you seem to agree, the first is a purely stylistic choice, and since there are very real concerns about misrepresenting what DWU sources actually tell us, stylistic choices just lose.

Nate references citogenesis above. We all know that real DWU authors use this site for research, yes? We should be very careful about what we represent as to be the case given that. Najawin ☎ 21:00, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Authors do use this site for research, yes, but they're not going quoting it verbatim. They may use it to see what has been done before, but that wouldn't stop them from going through with an idea. I find this hypothetical situation very silly, to be honest, where we are assuming that not only an author is going to use this site for research, go to the page widow specifically and then have their story exactly informed about whether or not we say "a widow was a woman whose spouse died". That will never happen. That is not an issue here and to speculate that it might seems entirely unrealistic to me.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

21:44, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

A particularly continuity obsessed writer could easily mistake a conjectural definition for something explicitly stated when they could have previously had space to play in. Najawin ☎ 21:48, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

It is not conjectural to say a widow is a "woman whose spouse died". That is basic human language. A continuity obsessed writer is not going to specifically fixate on the definitions of common English nouns.

Also I guess it may be a non-Amercian thing to sense familiarity in the contemporary settings of Who; I struggle to think of any instance of Who media featuring everything from Targets to Wallgreens to the very transport infrastructure and the way buildings are constructed. As a Brit I recognise the majority of shops glimpsed on screen, having been in many myself. It would be nice to see... not necessarily niche, but quintessential and everyday elements of non-British cultures.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

22:35, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

The usage of the verb "blending" here is us applying RWK to a text (in the technical sense, you know what I mean) that very likely doesn't use the term. You have already made inferences about the objects based on RWK.

Well, yes. But only to the degree that one has to to discuss visual information in English at all. You seem to be treading dangerously closely to the reducti ad abusrdum I formulated earlier, where we’d only be able to use words in Wiki writing if we are absolutely sure that they mean in the DWU what we assume them to mean in the real world. That would, as I have said before, strike me as actually, literally insane. We absolutely cannot only use words in “DWU-approved“ contexts on the Wiki. Maybe page names and the like warrant a higher standard, but for writing ordinary in-universe prose itself? The idea so impractically far-fetched, to my mind, that I do not think we can even begin to contemplate the idea that it’s some kind of null hypothesis that needs refuting. We don’t do that because it would be somewhere south of “demented” and trending very very close to “literally not humanly possible to implement”. I realise you’re not actually arguing *for* it, but you seem to think it’s worth refuting and I say: no! In no possible universe do we do this or ever seriously consider doing so! We don’t need to waste time arguing about why we’re not doing the obviously mad thing!

We don't have to do this.

We don’t literally have to, no. That’s why I said “if”, and discussed the alternative later on in the post! But the alternative is very strange indeed, and fairly impractical, though not literally impossible. If “[[Widow]]” would be fine to have as a conjecturally-named page for “the never-explicitly-named status of a woman whose spouse has died” before we find any DWU source for the word at all — and again, I believe prior discussions on e.g. the [[Blender]] have established that much as the standing policy! — then it’s very unhelpful and counterintuitive to then say that all this information would need to be moved to some other page (for which a satisfactory alternative title would be very difficult to find, since it was already at the intuitive conjectural title) as soon as a contextless DWU name-drop of the word is found… but it’s suddenly fine again if we get a further DWU source that defines the word. I don’t know. We could physically do this but it seems like such a pedantic, unhelpful way to run a Wiki…

You speak of being helpful to writers checking our pages to check the state of the DWU thus far, but it just seems to me that this would be much worse. Obviously if a writer boots up Widow they’ll expect a list of all the noteworthy DWU widows, not a strictly-delineated list of people-who-were-explicitly-called-widows that leaves the unnamed-dead-spouse-havers to a different conjecturally-titled fork like Bereaved spouse or something. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:47, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Something may be conjectural and yet still be intuitive and/or true. These things are not in conflict!

A continuity obsessed writer is not going to specifically fixate on the definitions of common English nouns.

Multiple examples here have concerned the status of animals in the DWU, from mice to frogs to fish. Might they take seriously our comments as to the status of these animals in the DWU? I think it likely!

As to the subject of everyday elements of non-British cultures, I can attest that Against Nature does this well, but I would say that it uses them as a thin facade over the actual goings on of the world. The world of Against Nature features some familiar elements to our own, but it is far stranger than ours and we should take nothing for granted. In my opinion, of course. Najawin ☎ 22:53, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

I realise you’re not actually arguing *for* it, but you seem to think it’s worth refuting and I say: no! In no possible universe do we do this or ever seriously consider doing so! We don’t need to waste time arguing about why we’re not doing the obviously mad thing!

But people here are suggesting another obviously mad thing! :P But no, the reason I bring it up is because in each step we're bringing up more and more RWK and we need to justify this to some extent, imo. I think we can justify the first two, I don't think we can justify the third step you're making.

and again, I believe prior discussions on e.g. the [[Blender]] have established that much as the standing policy!

I don't actually think they have? The blender discussion doesn't seem to do this, maybe the MLK discussion does, and you did a lot of page mergers, but I don't know if there was a talk page discussion establishing them. I'm not arguing this is wrong, I think we should do this. But there's wiggle room here and we do need to do a little bit of justification.

Obviously if a writer boots up Widow they’ll expect a list of all the noteworthy DWU widows

Why? We use categories for that. Pages and categories are not the same thing and have different rules. This sort of list is better served by a category. Najawin ☎ 23:05, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

As I've already mentioned, writers of DWU fiction are never limited as to what came before. According to some accounts, dragons are very much real, and in others, they're just myths. You would have to be the most boring writer ever to give up on an idea just because the Tardis Wiki said that "mice are a small rodent native to Earth" or something, and they must also suck at research if they exclusively rely on the Tardis Wiki. And the improbability of this even happening makes me even more opposed to this strict adherence to only the most explicit, spoon-fed info from a given source.

Basing an entire policy around a mere hypothetical is something we should avoid; remember T:SPOIL?

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

23:20, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

@User:Najawin, I would direct you again to Talk:Hatbox, where my closing post specifically affirmed that "whether we can put an item-which-we-know-is-a-hatbox-but-isn't-named-as-such on the same page as a hatbox-which-is-named-as-such-but-whose-function-is-not-explained" was "firmly within the agreed-upon 'Blender' exception to T:NO RW", as a distinct matter from "whether a 'hat box' is the same thing as a 'hatbox'". (I note in the interest of transparency that in that closing post I seemingly refer to earlier consensus on this point whose ins and outs I have forgotten by now. But it was certainly policy from then on at the latest, and that was two and a half years ago!) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:25, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough on Hatbox, that was very much not the actual reality of the page, hence my forgetting it!

I don't think what Epsilon is describing is particularly improbable. I remember seeing a Big Finish bigwig who had to tell newer writers to be careful when using the wiki because they didn't have the rights to everything mentioned on here. (Might have been Dorney.) Najawin ☎ 23:33, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone mind if I put up a subheader around line 350 in the Discussion section? (Where Scrooge tags Nate.) Would help with page lag in the editor, but some people/comments might need to have two tabs open. Najawin ☎ 06:09, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I've not yet had time to properly read through the comments, but just thought I'd add my thoughts on this having read the opening post. I somewhat agree with this. T:NO RW should be loosened to allow for some level of conjecture when we have incomplete information - photographs, voices, partial names etc. T:NO RW really shouldn't be utilised to the extent that we are creating multiple pages for the same individuals, or relegating vast amounts of information to the BTS sections, as this really isn't helpful for readers. I would personally like to go in a direction of no real world information unless for purposes of conjecture. When real world information is used for the purposes of conjecture, I think it would be wise to add a footnote or similar just to say where we have used conjecture and how we have come to the conclusion that this photo/statement belongs on this page. This would allow us to accurately place information relating to the real world, without going overboard. 66 Seconds ☎ 09:04, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I think there's a difference between articles on concepts that are original to Doctor Who and those on real-world things that have appeared in DW. The reason you'd expect a moderately comprehensive list of widows at "Widow" is that there's not really much else to put there – a detailed exegesis of the word as used in the real world is clearly pointless and overreaching, and there isn't any kind of in-universe biography to follow through as in "Sontaran", so really the only way for the page to be useful at all is to [YMMV briefly outline the concept and] provide a list of appearances of this essentially real-world phenomenon. And for writerly research purposes, a statement amounting to "This real-world thing is basically how it is in the real world," whether having been expressly stated in the DWU or not, is more like a negative space, serving as the go-ahead to either take the concept as read or do something fun and new with it. Whereas the history and lore of the Zygons is something that it's actually possible to tie in to, or spin off, or run roughshod over, with the understanding that some people might actually care how your story relates to what went before. Starkidsoph ☎ 13:52, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

@Najawin, it would be very helpful if a second header is put in. When opening the editor on my phone, as I was doing last night, it was lagging a lot, with my keyboard glitching as it wasn't able to input characters as fast as I could type them.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

13:59, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Done.

The reason you'd expect a moderately comprehensive list of widows at "Widow"

Would you? That sounds more like the duty of the category "Widows". We certainly don't have even a slightly comprehensive list of chairs at "Chair". It seems we want usages that contain the term or have affected the narrative once we know what they are.

there's not really much else to put there

Then don't. Look at Klein-Gordon field. That's something from the real world. Damn there's a lot to say about that subject. Barely mentioned in passing, I put a small BTS note to better explain it and moved on.

And for writerly research purposes, a statement amounting to "This real-world thing is basically how it is in the real world," whether having been expressly stated in the DWU or not, is more like a negative space, serving as the go-ahead to either take the concept as read or do something fun and new with it.

It's literally a positive space - you are explicitly affirming a definition that does not exist. You're literally commenting and providing a definition in the in-universe section of the page based on out of universe information. You are providing false information to readers and potential writers, trying to justify it by saying that it's like you didn't do anything at all, and your reason for this is... Because you don't feel the page is complete without it? You don't think we're conveying a ton of information? Sometimes there's not a ton of information to convey! Najawin ☎ 19:00, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I've just noticed that some of our pages on colors, such as Burgundy (colour), have little squares illustrating the color in question. Is this not another illustration in precedent of presuming a good faith correlation to real-world terminology? The patches of color are not cited in any way, it seems to just be a way of saying "This is the color that this word means." OS25🤙☎️ 21:28, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Those pages have consistently caused controversy because they're effectively just the invention of one (two?) particular IP user(s). They've been deleted in the past by admins and have been discussed on admin talk pages before. See User talk:NateBumber/Archive 4#Unregistered contributor for a very brief discussion. They are, if anything, reasons to be more strict. Najawin ☎ 22:07, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

That's not quite accurate. Yes that IP user has created pages for specific shades, but we've had the more basic colour pages for years, and @CzechOut was the one who created the {{color}} template!

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

22:26, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, but those were for colors specifically referred to as such in the show, iirc. (EG, Cybermen = Silver) Najawin ☎ 22:45, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Potentially to motivate discussion, while doing research for my R4bp thread I found Thread:119147 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I. Somewhat relevant. Najawin ☎ 04:39, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Interesting addition – I hadn't really been thinking about locations so much, but they do often rely on assumed knowledge in a similar way to common real-world concepts, and it's perhaps more visible there when the real-world information is rather important but not as universally known as the writer might assume. Two questions:

1. Is the lead first sentence of Aberdeen itself using real-world knowledge? Aberdeen#Behind the scenes seems to suggest so.
2. Is it in our best interests as a website to be continually directing our readers to Wikipedia for trivially simple bits of information which are not only implied to be true in-universe but necessary for understanding any references to the topic?

Starkidsoph ☎ 22:45, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes and no. You can actually see a dot on the map representing Aberdeen, so the BTS note is wrong. We know where Aberdeen is on that map. We don't know where the "North Sea" is (the term isn't used on the map) nor do we know that it's in Aberdeenshire (also not used on the map).

Which, of course, raises the question. What information here is implied to be true and is necessary for understanding the topic? I don't think its relationship to either the North Sea or to Aberdeenshire are this. Maybe to South Croydon, but, like, that's really obvious to get without adding any RWK. Najawin ☎ 23:29, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Just a quick note regarding Aberdeen. North Sea does also appear on the map. The lettering is in blue, making it very faint against the light blue of the sea, but it's there. I imagine that Aberdeenshire may have come from elsewhere, and two statements have merged into one (possibly Revenge of the Judoon - though I haven't read that book). 66 Seconds ☎ 08:47, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Ah! I saw lettering on the map, but I didn't make out that it said "North Sea". (To be fair, I was streaming the episode real quickly just to see the actual scene.) Thank you for that. Najawin ☎ 14:27, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Hey, just wanted to stick my nose in to point out T:LEADS, because theres been all this talk about ledes and such and I can't see any reference to it (though admittedly this is very dense and i'm kinda just skimming out of interest). I find it interesting that the only way to follow T:LEADS for a page like Widow is to break T:NO RW, and vice versa. Unless I'm misinterpreting, but imo, the first line of Widow is not a lead, it's a data point. (PS I'm leaning more on the side of LEADS as a loosedned exception to NO RW for readability reasons but i'm here as an observer so...) CodeAndGin ☎ 06:16, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Given the policy as defined at T:LEADS the first sentence of Widow would qualify as a lede, given the rewrite above I've been suggesting. Why? Because it would be the entire page. It's the only bit that doesn't violate T:NO RW! Compare to Howling Halls, which I know Czech was aware of when he wrote that.

But I'm curious. Has anyone actually suggested that ledes necessitate violating T:NO RW? It seems that many people want to write ledes that do, and many people dislike this idea, so there's been a lot of discussion on this idea - "definitional ledes", but I didn't catch comments that suggested that any page necessarily has to have a lede that violates T:NO RW. That seems... Incorrect? Especially given the criteria in T:LEADS. Najawin ☎ 06:49, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Thinking of closing this at last, but it's been a while — does anyone have any new perspectives/footnotes to earlier thoughts to bring forward? --Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 08:24, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I think perhaps some of the disagreement and the way in which discussion has stalled here is that we're discussing like 3-6 different things here, not just 1, but they're so entangled in common parlance, or in how the wiki currently operates, that it's difficult to draw coherent distinctions between them without being highly technical. And so people will agree on one or two of these, and there's broad agreement there. But there's notable disagreement in other areas. And our failure to "carve real world knowledge at the joints" has made this discussion pretty messy when it might have been served with more conceptual clarity. imo. I don't envy your closing post trying to draw these distinctions if you don't just throw it back to try again later. Najawin ☎ 07:47, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

I guess my only final note, although I've said something like this before I'm sure, is that T:NO RW should exist to confirm intent of authors when depicting the DWU. It should not be used to invent differences not intended. T:NO RW has historically been used to very nearly imply that the contents of DW stories are mischievous, and that the DWU might actually be different than what is implied. I think this represents a form of speculation, something we officially do not allow. OS25🤙☎️ 19:00, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I'd also like to heavily emphasize User talk:OverAnalyser - which I don't think got a ton of attention in this thread. It goes into great depth as to the underlying reasoning as to T:NO RW and our rules against speculation and the interaction between them by primarily Czech and to a lesser extent Tangerine. It's not a forum thread, it's not binding, but it's a good look into the mindset that would be overturned if any changes were made, and the reasons for why things are the way they currently are. I, personally, would like to see the closing post engage with it. But that's ultimately personal preference, due to how high quality a resource I think it is. Najawin ☎ 20:01, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Just popping in from Talk:Isaac Newton, another case of "we have to pretend that we exist in a void and therefore cannot acknowledge that authors intend for us to use real world context to fill in information that is pretty damn obvious".

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

20:20, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, that talk page has been very clarifying. I had understood the scope of this thread to be filling in gaps in our sources, helping us improve our coverage by using real-world knowledge sparingly to connect dots in the absence of any information to the contrary. I stand by my above comments in support of OttselSpy25's original proposal. But at Talk:Isaac Newton, proponents of these changes have instead tried to use real world evidence not to connect unspoken dots but to actually overwrite the pecularities of the DWU so it more closely resembles the real world. I'm still figuring out my admin shoes, but since I've already participated in this forum thread as a user, I'll feel free to be maximally frank: "a source didn't explicitly say [real world fact], but surely the author thought it implicitly, so this should be used to counterbalance another source's divergence from the real world" would be a disastrous standard to set and would make the wiki measurably worse. If our readers wanted to learn about the real world, they would go to Wikipedia. – NateBumber (☎) 22:06, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

See the above comment from User:Starkidsoph

[...]As an example, let's suppose that one story stated that all Earth mice were actually aliens who have a plot to take over the planet by 2035, and the Doctor has always known this. Obviously, previous stories which mentioned mice weren't written with this in mind, because in actuality the idea didn't exist yet. Later stories might take it up, but they also might not – it could just fade into the infinite ranks of "stuff which would theoretically have big implications but in practice just isn't true most of the time", and this would be the case even if mice are never specifically stated later on to be mundane. If this hypothetical Mouse Plot story were the only instance of an actual "definition" (so to speak) of mice, current policy would require hypothetical Mouse to use only Mouse Plot Story as a source for its basic information, but this would lead to some really bizarre readings of any throwaway line mentioning mice, and effectively end up placing ludicrously undue weight on a single story over more sensible interpretations of countless others. Basically, although the Doctor Who universe does demonstrably differ in many respects from ours, Doctor Who stories (being intended for consumption by an Earth audience) are mainly meant to be read with a fair amount of real-world knowledge filling in definitions, and our curious silence on implicit similarities that are very much intended to be assumed just ends up making the wiki read oddly.

I believe the only two that commented on this were Epsilon, who considered it sensible, and myself, who called it a blatant violation of T:NPOV, which I maintain to be the case. Najawin ☎ 22:16, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

[Edit conflict] I disagree with that @NateBumber; the DWU is like the real world until stated otherwise, as authors intend for us to fill in the blanks. But to have a peculiarity, and then say "oh but a bunch of sources released before this peculiarity don't technically show anything that explicitly contradicts the newly-introduced peculiarity, so therefore they support the peculiarity", despite those original sources being written with the real world in mind... is an interesting take. And it's not that I disagree with the coverage of the peculiarity — in fact I wholly support it — but I disagree with the fact that we're allowing it to overwrite a bunch of sources that could not have anticipated the change! The authors don't have time travel so they could not have been written with the change in mind.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

22:19, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

It's not that they support the peculiarity, putting aside our disagreement on the DWU being our universe until proved otherwise. It's that they simply do not comment on the issue so they fail to contradict it. Najawin ☎ 22:32, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh, if possible I'd ask that the closing post provide direction on color pages / minute differences between articles of clothing pages. I find something like Ebony (colour) vs Black to be, frankly, ridiculous, and both of those pages are of questionable length/veracity to me. (See the above discussion about Cybermen = Silver for what I think is reasonable.) They've been deleted in the past and were then recreated by the same IP user. We should really have a policy on where the line is here. Najawin ☎ 07:30, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Will do. (Though as far as current policy, as I recall they were originally typically deleted because the IP user hadn't learned to Wiki-format properly as much as anything else; and thereafter, they've existed for long enough that I would certainly understand them to be covered by New T:BOUND for the time being.) Still working on closing this, and replying to the R4BP thread for that matter, I've just been… very, very, very busy. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 13:28, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm also going to bring up real world landmarks seen in episodes. As far as I can tell, the Gherkin... has never actually been named except in The Time Traveller's Almanac ^[+]Loading...["The Time Traveller's Almanac (reference book)"], yet the Wiki runs with the name as if it had been used in every episode. So how does the policy as it currently stands impact identifiable buildings like skyscrapers? I've just created 122 Leadenhall Street and I have no idea how the policy covers pages like that.

Now, we could just say "an egg-shaped building", but that is hardly helpful to most readers, and becomes trickier when they have more conventionally boxy shapes. So another reason why the policy needs reform.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

21:25, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

On a related issue, I'd like to point to Eevee and Talk:Stovepipe hat. Najawin ☎ 01:01, 30 March 2024 (UTC)