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Proposal
The rules regarding our use of verb tenses in articles are described in Tardis:Point of view, Tardis:In-universe perspective, and related policy pages in our Manual of Style. For the most part, these rules have served us very well. However, in some areas the scope of our coverage has changed since these rules were written in 2012, resulting in awkward and confusing results in some cases. By tweaking the rules in four specific circumstances – four changes, ordered below from tamest to boldest – I hope we can improve the wiki's usability while still retaining the style that has guided us from the beginning.
Real-world individuals
On our articles for real-world cast and crew, Tardis:Out-of-universe perspective wisely suggests that we avoid sentences that require the present tense. For instance, rather than introducing Mat King with "Mat King is a British director", which future editors would have to manually update upon his (hopefully distant) death, T:OOU instructs us to instead choose an alternative formulation like "Mat King directed the episode Hide in Doctor Who series 7".
However, due to the policy's heavy emphasis on the burden of changing the tense on pages, this has led to the misconception that real-world pages for cast and crew are forbidden from using present tense. As a result, some of our cast and crew pages introduce their subjects with the format "[Actor] was a British actor" – implying that they've died!
T:OOU should be rewritten to emphasise that using past tense in a way that seemingly announces a real-world person's death is at least as undesirable a failure case as using present tense in a way that imposes on future editors. In cases where it absolutely cannot be avoided without creating an inaccuratei mplication, present tense should be allowed in real-world pages and in the real-world "behind the scenes" sections of in-universe pages.
Future material
We've always covered material on series pages like series 14 (Doctor Who), and since our spoiler policy thread, we've also started creating articles for future stories, future cast and crew, and – on spoiler subpages – future appearances of returning cast.
However, due to policy and longstanding precedent regarding tenses, we continue to use past tense on all of these pages: for instance, "Series 14 was a series of Doctor Who", or "[REDACTED] portrayed the Fifteenth Doctor". Referring to future releases in this way is confusing at best and actively misleading at worst.
I propose that we change our rules to allow the use of future tense when referring to unreleased stories. The same applies to series pages: on Doctor Who we already begin the lead with "Doctor Who is" rather than "Doctor Who was", because it's an ongoing series with future releases. That said, we should continue to use past tense when referring to stories and series which are fully released.
Present tense in leads
One silly-looking result of our tense requirements is the use of past tense when it comes to introducing common words from the real world, such as "An arm was a body part" or "Yellow was a colour". When Wookieepedia does this, they at least have an excuse: Star Wars begins with "A long time ago…" But Doctor Who has given us no such affordance, and as a result our adoption of a strict "end of universe" perspective is both awkward and confusing.
We could resolve this awkwardness by allowing the use of present tense, only in the first sentence of an article, if and only if that sentence is the definition of a word present in dictionaries in the real world. This would allow us to come out and say that "Yellow is a colour" and "An arm is a body part", while still keeping the past tense in Doctor Who-specific terms like time rift.
Real-world perspective in leads
On Samsung's Doctor Who channel, the slideshow of Doctor incarnations gives three facts about each, the three facts that viewers are most likely to want to know.
- Their incarnation number.
- The actor name.
- The years they were the main Doctor.
And yet, this last key detail isn't findable anywhere on our incarnation pages!
One flexible potential fix for this, and other similar situations where our in-universe coverage style prevents us from highlighting important real-world information about a major character or concept, would be to put a short out-of-universe box at the top of their pages, the space currently usually occupied by cleanup templates. On Jo Grant it might say,
I'm still workshopping this idea, but I mention it in this thread because, of course, it would require an exception to the past tense requirement on those pages in the case of actors who are currently portraying a character. Looking forward to feedback! – n8 (☎) 21:59, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Discussion
to be added