Forum:Clarification on what a pseudo-historical is.

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I'm probably over-thinking things, but, for the most part TV: The Eleventh Hour is set in primarily set in 1996 and 2008. As 2008 is "the past" relative to the airdate (even though I'm sure it's intended to be a contemporary story), it would theoretically be a "pseudo-historical story", by the definition of the page. Is it just me or is that definition in use too general? Does it really apply to anything prior to the year of airing or is it more than that? -- Tybort (talk page) 20:59, July 26, 2011 (UTC)

There's a good deal in what you say, although I suspect you are probably overthinking it. When I was a kid studying history and current events in the early 1960s, history ended with World War Two. Current events began immediately afterwards. Is 1996 contemporary? No, but given the sort of story that WHO covers, what with the UNIT Dating controversy, it is semi-contemporary. What about THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT/DAY OF THE MOON? Not so much contemporary, more historical. What about the events of the Second World War? Want to ask my father, who's a WWII veteran? DALEKS IN MANHATTAN?

Still it might help to consider the concepts of 'contemporary" and "semi-contemporary" in the defining article. Boblipton 21:25, July 26, 2011 (UTC)

Not sure what you're trying to get at with the UNIT dating controversy. From what I gather, the only story of that era that MAY be set in the past was The Web of Fear. Otherwise they're either contemporary or near-future. Or both somehow.

Also, obviously I'm discounting stories made in the 1960s, but set prior to "our" present day. Sorry if my wording was a bit confusing. I'm pretty sure (at least by their airdates) that the two specific examples you gave would be historical to a 2000s/2010s audience. -- Tybort (talk page) 21:53, July 26, 2011 (UTC)

My apologies for lack of clarity. I'll try again. A historical event, broadly speaking, is one that occurred before the referent's birth. The events of 1969 are not a matter of history to me, they're things that happened in my own lifetime. Likewise, my father, should he watch DALEKS IN MANHATTAN might well have opinions on the matter based on his experiences in New York in 1930, when he was thirteen. He might concede that changes in society might push it into the classification of a historical -- or in the case of DR WHO, a pseudo-historical -- story, but those events are just as contemporary as he is. Boblipton 22:00, July 26, 2011 (UTC)

It's all a little bit too dependent on reader perspective.

I suggest just getting rid of the category and replacing it with an article that goes into depth of defining it, more so then the few paragraphs in the category.

Much like the Gothic stories (okay, I admit I did write most of the article), but it does define the concept better than the category ever did. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:36, July 27, 2011 (UTC)

The question of deleting the category is a "chicken or the egg" kinda proposition. If you can define "pseudo-historical" in an article, that means you have created the basis for a category. And if you have a category of pseudo-historicals, then you can easily create a dynamic list of them on the pseudo-historical article. Like so:

If you don't like the text on the category page, fine, change it. But don't delete the category. You can do such wonderful things with categories.

Tyborts got the wrong end of the stick, though. He seems to be laboring under the false apprehension that category page text is subject to the same constraints as a regular article. It's not. The point of category text is to help people to make judgements about where to place pages. It's not an article, in the sense that it's not bound by the need to provide references. The point of the text is merely to help with page organisation.

Now, it appears that the text doesn't help with The Eleventh Hour, and that's because I simply didn't consider TEH at all when I wrote the text. TEH is quite unique in that regard, because it's got such an odd setting. You only find out after the fact that it was set in the very near past. It's rare enough to have a story set in the slight past; it's even weirder that you don't find out the setting of an episode within that episode. It takes until Pandorica, or at least 'Flesh and Stone, to figure out that "Amy's time" is 2010. So it's in the slight past, but we don't know that until several episodes later. Very weird episode.

I think you'd have to say that while it does meet the definition I threw up there, it's probably not what most people would consider a pseudo-historical. If you were to write a proper article about this topic, I'm not sure you'd find anyone else's definition would be sufficiently robust to specifically exclude TEH, cause it's such an outlier in the history of DW narrative. But neither are you going to find any reputable source calling it a pseudo-historical.

Still, we need to look for a better definition. We need a proper article so we know what to put in the category, so that the article, in turn, can be populated correctly. Circular, ain't it?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 07:49:17 Tue 02 Aug 2011 

I will write an article, or rather likely two articles, a Historical stories article and a Pseudo-historical stories article as in researching this both terms get thrown around so it'll likely be easier to write two while I'm researching.

At least pseudo-historical and historical stories have parameters which you can use to define them, more so than gothic stories did, so I'll hold off from prop deleting the category. --Tangerineduel / talk 08:03, August 2, 2011 (UTC)