Template talk:Dreyfus

Prop delete

He's the first incarnation according to Big Finish, and there is no evidence to discourage what thy are saying.BananaClownMan ☎ 19:46, January 7, 2018 (UTC)

I've removed the delete tag, as it is causing havoc with the template's use on other pages. I am posting its text here:

delete|Is it an incarnation separate from that played by other actors, in particular, by William Hughes? Do we know for sure which incarnation it is? Is there a subsection of The Master page dedicated wholly to this incarnation?

Shambala108 ☎ 21:47, January 7, 2018 (UTC)

Hmm, do you, User:BananaClownMan, mean to say that all the changes made to multiple pages are based on an out-of-universe statement by Big Finish Productions? I listened to The Destination Wars and did not find any statement regarding where in his regeneration cycle the Master was at the time. If I missed something, please provide a quote. Otherwise, Tardis:In-universe perspective demands that all the relevant edits be undone. Let me quote that policy directly:

Use only valid sources — which is to say narratives — to write your article. Material from reference works, deleted scenes, or documentaries can only go in "behind the scenes" sections.

I would, therefore, greatly appreciate it if you either provide in-universe proof of the fact or remove the fact from the pages you edited.

Now, I am glad that the template caught my eye and we have the opportunity to check everything thoroughly. But beyond it, what is the purpose of this template? And why is this template named after Dreyfus rather than Hughes, who, according to you, played the same incarnation. Hughes was much earlier (in all senses). What is the watershed moment separating them? Quite bluntly, why should there be a template to describe just one story? And how is it possible to assign comic and prose stories published much earlier and, hence, without any notion of Dreyfus ever playing this role, to the period supposedly covered by this template. How can an editor of The Dark Path, published in 1997 and featuring material in the same subsection on the Master's page, supposed to know to use this template, which is based on an actor debuting in the role in 2017? What is the connection between Dreyfus and The Nameless City, another story featured in the same subsection? Amorkuz ☎ 22:02, January 7, 2018 (UTC)

Forgive me if I am wrong, but is it not stated on pages like James Dreyfus that he is playing the First Master, and that the Master stories template includes him as "First"? Anyway, I made this template for links to the Renegade Time Lord part of the Master's life before Delgado, and in preparation for any further use Big Finish may have for the Dreyfus Master, like Macqueen and Jacobi, who both received templates after just one outing as the Master. I only added it to the Master stories template because, well, Sound of Drums is a flashback cameo, Dark Path is either a nother flashback or a dream manifestation, and The Toy is set just before the Master flees Gallifrey. For all intend and purposes, The Destination Wars is the only "Master story" he's truly in, and it is the Dreyfus one. On a personnel note, I too dislike the idea of Dreyfus being the same incarnation as Hughes; if he and the Doctor are both in the same incarnation, and both went to school at the same age (8, maybe?), why is the Master so much younger than the Doctor? I think it would be best if somewhere down the line its revealed Dreyfus is a different incarnation, but that's just me.BananaClownMan ☎ 17:29, January 9, 2018 (UTC)

Sorry for a delay in answering: I needed to do some research on the matter. So first of all, it appears that we both were wrong in some way regarding the purpose of these templates. I wrongly claimed that one actor-named template should not include other actors, and you proposed as an example {{Pratt}}, the existence of which directly contradicts the forum discussions that led to the creation of all these templates, which can be found here: Forum:The Master and Forum:The Master - 1 article. Those debates resulted in the following note at Tardis:The Master.

the template {{Delgado}} refers to all appearances of the Master set between the novel The Dark Path and the final moments of The Keeper of Traken.

{{Pratt}}, which you created some time ago, points to the subsection The Master#A body in decay, which is smack in the middle of the period of life that, by the policy, should be covered by {{Delgado}}. The situation is muddled quite a lot by the fact that the list of allowable templates is generated automatically, so every template added to the Category:The Master templates gets automatically added to the list. An ordinary editor has no chance of making sense of this.

Jacobi had to recently be moved upward in life to account for the recently released audios, and {{Macqueen}} still points somewhere in the middle of the period that should be associated with this actor. In short, there is currently a mess.

The reason for this mess is that there has been a lot of new Master stories inserted in different parts of his lives. So the categories developed in the old discussions have become too coarse at places. Here you have a point. However, it is wrong to develop the navigation for such a central and recently in-demand character haphazardly or unilaterally.

These templates, as follows from their OoU names, are used exclusively for navigation. In other words, they carry zero narrative significance and serve as an easy way of linking to particular subsections of the overlong monster that is The Master page. The initial names and anchors to link to were agreed by a community discussion. While there arguably is a need to update that agreement, it has to be done by another community discussion. It will serve two purposes: it will make sure that everybody has a say and it will create awareness of how to use these templates. One of the main reasons I reacted so strongly to the {{Dreyfus}} was that I had no idea how I am supposed to use it. And some sample uses went completely against my intuitions. Remember that the only purpose of these templates is to make linking easier. To achieve this end, I strongly believe that Tardis:The Master needs to be updated to list all new templates and what they signify both narratively and in term of the subsections of the Master page.

To make this usable, it is necessary to base each template on some recognisable event that is not going to be changed by later stories. If these templates require updating every year, they are pretty much useless because there will be no uniformity in their use either across editors or over time. The actors' names were chosen at the time, I believe, because they really provide a watershed-like moment for the writers. Because Delgado, Jacobi's and other portrayals were original, future writers based their narratives on them. When the Master regenerates into Jacobi in a Titan comic story The One, it is Jacobi's face we see. In other words, Jacobi's incarnation has proved over time to be a stable staple of the Master's life. Gomez's Missy is also completely narratively delineated, no fuzziness there in the sense that there will not be disagreement among editors on what that could mean. However, Dreyfus Master is less obvious and does merit community discussion. Pratt also has to be discussed because using it requires changing policy.

I think this discussion is long overdue and propose you to initiate it at Panopticon. You clearly spent a lot of time researching the Master's life and can, therefore, identify the best watershed events that are stable enough to be used in these templates. It is quite possible that most of your already created templates will persevere (perhaps, renamed) but this time with the blessing of the community. The important thing to remember is that we do not need a separate template for each actor. We do not need to find artificial points that separate Dreyfus from Hughes. (Perhaps, the departure from Gallifrey might provide a true watershed.) And we may not really need a template pointing to the beginning of the Master's biography, to the first Master from birth. In terms of navigation, it simply seems superfluous to me. Amorkuz ☎ 22:35, January 13, 2018 (UTC)

Do not use this template

Please do not use this template as its scope and usefulness are currently under review and it is quite likely that the template will be deleted. Amorkuz ☎ 01:10, January 8, 2018 (UTC)