Forum:Overhauling non-T:NPOV compliant policies
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
Opening post
Okay, so on this Wiki, we have several policies, such as T:TARDIS, T:K9, T:DOCTORS... which are completely incompatible with Tardis:Neutral point of view.
Media doesn't matter. One of the most important aspects of this wiki is that all media have equal weight here. Television is not the most important source of information on this wiki. That which is said in a short story in the 1967 Doctor Who Annual, or a Faction Paradox audio drama, is just as valid as the latest episode of BBC Wales Doctor Who.
...Now let's take a look at some of these policies about naming conventions. For example, Tardis:K9/Background states: "Still, conforming to the general T:NAMING rule that the more common names shall apply, the rule we've adopted here is that K9 "wins"." So apparently sources can "win" over others. Riiiiiiiiiight. (Also, I can't see anything in T:NAMING, or in previous revisions, that states more common names trump literally any and all variations thereof. Now, T:CHAR NAMES does say something along these lines, but more on that later.)
T:DOCTORS is unusual as it doesn't even reference stylisations of the character's names such as "Dr. Who"; I think it's technically allowed, though I have faced pushback before from usage of Dr. Who (An Unearthly Child). T:TARDIS seems to be convinced that we should only use one stylisation and stick with it... for stylistic reasons? (That's not a very good reason if you ask me, nor is it befitting to Doctor Who which in all aspects has proven to be anything but consistent, from lore to the design of spines on Target novelisations.)
Now, in recent times, the Wiki has gotten better at reflecting media on their original merits over the retcons that have been introduced later; we've pages like Planet (An Unearthly Child), we cover alternating accounts of character's identities like the War Chief, etc. Most relevantly, we cover the bloke who used the alias "Monk"'s role in The Time Meddler accurately to the original serial, acknowledging that the later retcons are "according to one account"; we deal with the discrepancies between the character's names — such as the Monk, the Meddling Monk, Mortimus, etc — all equally, not prioritising one over the other, using what the source being cited uses. This is seen as Tardis:The Monk, a policy which this Wiki has had since August 2012... which, while it postdates Tardis:K9, was created at the same time as Tardis:TARDIS and Tardis:Doctors! So we've been able to cover names equally for over a decade, except... where we don't want to.
More recently, we have really cemented the precedent of covering sources outside of later retcons in Talk:The Monk/Archive 1#Article made from whole cloth. An IP editor, increasingly frustrated about the Wiki's action of completely disregarding the original 1960s lore (e.g., the monk was human!), litigated his issues on the character's talk page. While they swung too far in the opposite direction by saying that any retcon meant that a new character had been created, it did result in @Scrooge MacDuck forming a ruling on what to call the character: "we should probably strive to use the names given by each individual sources in individually-sourced statement."
This proves to me that these policies need reform. They weren't consistent upon creation, and they certainly are not consistent with policies like T:NPOV now. So, you may ask, what do we do now? Now, I have a few thoughts on that.
Why these policies should remain... in some form
However, before I get into how I'd like to change these policies, I'd like to write about what I want to keep.
We should, after this thread, retain the policy as outlined by T:CHAR NAMES wherein we use the most commonly used name of a character to title our pages. I think it would be hugely impractical otherwise, as it would lead to confusing and ambiguous names. After this thread, I feel the policy pages — T:K9, T:MONK, T:DOCTORS and T:TARDIS should be redirects to T:CHAR NAMES, as they are all, truly, the same policy but worded differently between characters; it would be easy to have any important detail about the nuance of a given character's name in a subsection of T:CHAR NAMES. The only page I'd be unsure what to do with it Tardis:K9/Background, as that is actually quite an interesting read about the character's name. Perhaps it could be slightly retwritten to work outside of a policy page and then moved to the behind the scenes section of K9?
But, I feel the need to clarify something: this thread is designed to affect how we refer to characters in the in-universe sections of articles, not the names of the pages themselves. They're two similar, yet distinct, faces of the same coin. The current policy pages kinda flit between both of these faces, hence why I do need to write this section, rather than wholly saying it should be dismissed.
What should change
If all these (well, maybe not one of them, I'll explain in a sec) are merged into T:CHAR NAMES, we firstly need to make it clear that that page concerns both page names and what we can refer to the character as in the in-universe parts of the Wiki. Then, the general ethos of the page should be:
- Generally speaking, use the same stylisation as the source you are citing uses. If Interference uses "K-9", use K-9. If K9 and the Beasts of Vega uses "K9", use K9. If the source in question doesn't show the stylisation — perhaps it's a television episode or audio drama, and for some reason the name isn't given in the credits — then default to the stylisation most common to the time period in which the source was released; so if contemporary fiction styles the character's name as "K-9" even if this source doesn't show his name, use that stylisation.
Otherwise... I think T:DOCTORS should remain separate. Or at least have a more detailed section on T:CHAR NAMES. While the current policy is heavily flawed, which the top of the page saying "When referring to an incarnation of the Doctor please include the number of the incarnation in some way. Avoid pipe switching to simply "the Doctor"." which is incompatible for every Doctor from the Fugitive Doctor to Dr. Who to The Doctor (The Cabinet of Light) — especially as the wording implies that we can't pipeswitch dab terms away! — it does have merit in retaining. While we should use the names most accurate to the source in question, if we do have an ordinarily ordinal Doctor, who isn't referred to as "Dr. Who" in the source, then we should avoid pipeswitching the name. While I don't think, in most cases, it would be too confusing to just refer to the Doctor as "the Doctor", there are a good number of possible instances where the pipeswitch would be confusing, so I won't be directly tackling that in this thread.
Is this a double standard? Maybe? But I feel it'd be best to take this undertaking in smaller steps rather than larger ones. However, if everyone agrees on this, if a consensus forms, then I wouldn't object to it being tackled in this thread.
Also, with T:DOCTORS, "first Doctor" should be moved to the "correct" side of the chart and "first Dr. Who" should also be added, as we should maintain a way to reference which Dr. Who is which, although it shouldn't be standard to do so.
Thoughts?
18:15, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
Discussion
to be added
