The Dalek Wars installments regularly featured in Doctor Who: Battles in Time magazine have long been regarded as invalid by the wiki as "non-narrative" material. I believe this should be overturned and that they deserve to be included as valid sources, which do comply with the "four little rules".
What (I think) went wrong[[edit] | [edit source]]
I'm unaware of any previous discussion which took place on this matter, and if one exists which addresses my points then please direct me to it. But as far as I can tell, the Dalek Wars series was excluded mostly because of poor attempts at integration way back when - including by myself - than because they are truly "non-narrative". Here's what I mean, using my attempt at adding story info to the page on Aridius almost 10 years ago:
- The Daleks later returned to Aridius, still remembering their encounter with the Doctor there. They wanted revenge on the Aridians and wiped them all out along with their Mire Beats. (DWBIT: #41 - Dalek Wars)
Ghastly, isn't it? And it was a pattern repeated on other pages before all in-universe Dalek Wars info was excised. But if the citation had read like (PROSE: The Sagarro Desert Storm), and linked to a proper story article, I feel like the series would have had a better chance of staying included.
In-universe sources[[edit] | [edit source]]
Based on the poor-quality citation, it seems to be that Dalek Wars has been excluded under the assumption that it goes against the first of the four little rules - Only stories count.
Yet Dalek Wars isn't just a series of reference guides like, say, the Dalek annual features like The Dalek Dictionary, Inside a Skaro Saucer or Anti-Dalek Weapons. They have titles, and do follow a plot line with a beginning, middle and end, however brief they may be (and if Vrs is valid, then that's hardly an issue). They're short stories, not out-of-universe sources.
The stories are often anchored into the Doctor Who universe by presenting the story as an extract from an in-universe work of history, a newspaper story, a blog post or even a Dalek communication log. In that sense, they're hardly any different from stories like The Turing Test, Dead of Winter, or the vast majority of The Companion Chronicles. So they should satisfy Rule 4 as well. (And because Dalek Wars released as part of DWBIT magazine, Rules 2 and 3 go without saying - just like their sister DWBIT comic stories.)
There was always a "Search & Find" activity involved. However, each story still worked independently of the activity, and if The Adventure Games could get away with it (think that quiz in TARDIS), then these should too.
Proposals[[edit] | [edit source]]
- The DWBIT Dalek Wars page should be made valid and revamped.
- A rename may be in order, to something along the lines of Dalek Wars (series), in the vein of Short Trips (series), and to distinguish it from the in-universe page on the Dalek Wars.
- Story articles should be written for each of the individual short stories.
- As an example of what these may look like, I've put together one such article as a test at: User:TheCoud'veBeenKing/Sandbox III
- In-universe information should be integrated and re-integrated into the relevant articles and appropriately cited by linking to the new story articles, rather than their parent DWBIT issue.
Again, unless there was a previous debate in the past that I've been unable to find, I feel like a re-evaluation of these stories in long overdue. It would be a shame if they stayed excluded as valid sources because of poor editing practised and misunderstandings from a decade ago, and not because they truly violate any of the inclusion rules.