User:NateBumber

Hi! I'm Nate, a fellow wearing many hats: blogger; moderator of the Doctor Who and Gallifrey communities on Reddit; "Godfather" of the Faction Paradox forum; admin of the Doctor Who Discord and its flourishing wiki channel; janitor of the Faction Paradox and Obverse wikis; and occasional author! Nothing is canon, but the Eighth Doctor novels are canoner than NuWho, and I will challenge you to Rock Paper Scissors if you disagree.

Disclaimer: I do my best to stick to old-fashioned Wikipedian values, and I absolutely never intend to attack anyone through what I say on this site. If any reader takes unintended offense at anything I say, I sincerely apologize; feel free to contact me about it and I'll retract the perceived insult at the earliest opportunity.

Come join our growing community of wiki editors at the Doctor Who Discord! (When you join, just ping me @NateBumber#5584 to give you the Wiki role.)

Changes I'd currently like on the wiki

Big thanks to everyone who's helped with things on this list!

Renames

Main article: :Category:Articles that need renaming

• First Great Time War to 4-D War
• Melody Pond (Prequel to The Impossible Astronaut) to Melody Pond (The Impossible Astronaut)
• Mr Saldaamir to Mister Saldaamir
• Paul Metcalf et al. to Captain Scarlet et al.
• Sabbath (Movers) to Godfather Sabbath
• Time Winds to time wind
• Victoria to Queen Victoria

Mergers

Main article: :Category:Proposed mergers

• The Great Retrenchment into Great Retrenchment
• Oliver Morgenstern (Donna's World) into Oliver Morgenstern
• Sharon (EastEnders character) into Sharon Watts
• The Spare-Part People into The Spare-Part People (TV story)
• Tengobushi Assassins into Tengobushi
• Tomato plant into Tomato

In the below cases, one page has been turned into a redirect, but the edit histories still need to be merged.

• The Doctor (The Death List) into Thirteenth Doctor
• The Doctor (Contents) into Fifteenth Doctor

Bigger ideas

Main article: User:Najawin/Sandbox 5

For 817 days, there was no way to change policy on this wiki. Thank you to the brave admins who helped rescue us and to all the users who weighed in at Forum talk:Index!

I have plenty of ideas, but they're still cooking!

• Tardis:Merging policy is a well-written codification of the wiki's precedent regarding character and story merger decisions, but by bringing current practice into focus, it also highlights several ways we're falling short of our goal of serving our users.
  • Regarding characters, the key question should be "Is it more useful to readers to cover these on the same page or separate pages?", not "Is there continuity of consciousness?" The latter may be a useful consideration when mulling the former, but there's no reason to monolithically impose a single metaphysics of identity on the entire Doctor Who multiverse when the stories in question share those assumptions only sometimes if ever.
    • Characters and concepts with minor appearances or mentions in other realities simply do not need separate pages. It serves no one to separate our coverage of Moira (Shadow World) from Moira (The Pilot), Jevon (Ascension) from Jevon (Emancipation), or David Whitaker (The Thief of Sherwood) from David Whitaker (The Daleks). See my original subpage proposal for one potential fix.
    • For a wiki run by fans for fans, we sure do care an awful lot about licensing! If 100% of the audience understands that a character is intended to be another character, the useful thing for us to do is to acknowledge the connection, using our existing Time Lord messenger (Genesis of the Daleks) method of in-universe disambiguation if necessary. The Homeworld principle already hints at this, but a broader policy would also allow us to acknowledge the obvious intentions in cases like the Mistress (The Choice) and the Imperator. See Sandbox 3 for a longer potential list.
  • Regarding stories, our treatment of multi-parters is a mess: either we flatten all 12 episodes and 3 months of The Daleks' Master Plan into a single page, or we plug our fingers in our ears and flat-out refuse to acknowledge that series 13 is a multi-part story called Flux. This lack of nuance has negative practical effects regarding
    • citation. According to our fellow reference sources like DWM and TCH, 100,000 BC is the name of the serial whose first episode is "An Unearthly Child". However, in violation of the principles articulated at Talk:Main Range, we call the whole serial An Unearthly Child instead.
    • character disambiguation. Contrast Andy Stone (The Dalek Book) with Tecteun (Once, Upon Time), or Nurse (Children of Earth) and Father (Children of Earth: Day One).
    • counting. See Talk:Season 23 for an argument over how to count the parts of The Trial of a Time Lord, where our nuanceless approach almost led us to diverge from the consensus numbering used by every other reference source!
    • clarity. Since we lack pages for individual episodes, it's hard to cover the many stories which have adapted "An Unearthly Child" without touching on the other parts of 100,000 BC.
    • convenience. Just look at how hard it is to figure out what exact date Sara Kingdom debuted on TV in The Daleks' Master Plan, or which of the story's two authors wrote that episode!
• The 1960s gifted us multiple overlapping but often mutually-exclusive understandings of the character called "Dr. Who". Right now we cover some of these individually but mash the rest together into a confusing conglomerate on First Doctor. We could straighten out our coverage considerably. See Talk:Dr. Who.
• To dam the endless stream of disturbing pages like "12-years-old girl from Nice, France", we should follow Wikipedia's precedent and restrict page creation in the Main namespace to registered editors. This would not affect any good-faith IP editors, who could still create talk pages and edit existing articles, and who are already mostly uninterested in creating pages in the Main namespace. It just makes sense that by the time a user wants to create an article, we require them to provide a talk page where users can advise them on formatting and so on.
• Timeline pages have never made much sense to me. If three stories are all meant to be set immediately before a fourth, we gain nothing by squeezing them into a linear order. This problem is inherent in the idea of a timeline, and it guarantees that there will never be an end to the edit wars in our timeline section. Matters of chronological sequencing are much better addressed in the "Notes" sections of story pages, "Chronology" sections of event pages like Shoreditch Incident, and/or the "Relation to other realities" sections of reality pages like Virgin reality.

Sandboxes

Main article: /Sandbox