User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20121212231649/@comment-188432-20121218022457

Rowan Earthwood wrote: Just because they're not part of the continuity this wiki has arbitrarily decided on doesn't mean they don't have their own continuity relevant to Doctor Who as a franchise.

Rowan, re-read what you've said. OS25 made this same sort of statement earlier. Seriously, re-read what you said. That doesn't even make any sense. It's like saying, "Just because it's not Christmas doesn't mean it's not Christmas" or "Just because I don't like my own gender doesn't mean I'm heterosexual."

The continuity section is about the narrative connections between the story you're looking at and all the other narratives out there. There cannot be such connections when we've said at the top of the page, "You can believe this is a part of the DWU. But we don't."

Here's a concrete example.

You can say at Dimensions in Time:

Dimensions featured the first meeting between Colin Baker and Nicholas Courtney in a televised, Doctor Who production.

You cannot say at Dimensions in Time

Dimensions featured the only onscreen meeting between the Sixth Doctor and the Brigadier.

If we start allowing the latter sort of pseudo-narrative connections garbage, before you know it the National Television Awards Sketch 2011 article will be trying to assert that Dot Cotton is Lady Eleanor's distant relative. Which is complete garbage.

But that's how this wiki goes unless tight control is applied. Don't believe me? Take a stroll through Forum:Discontinuity index. Why do you think we had to move all that stuff out of the regular articles?

Because it was junk. And the truth of the matter is that because these things aren't continuous, the only kind of section they can have is a dis-continuity section. And where do all the discontinuity sections go? Yep, you guessed it: Forum:Discontinuity index. And I'm certainly not opposed to someone puttin' the info there. (Well, once this link goes blue, anyway.)

Rowan Earthwood wrote: It seems strange and counterproductive to deliberately hide content from readers by exiling it to the talk pages. Most casual users won't check those.

You are ascribing some serious ulterior motives to me, aren't ya?  :) No, that's standard Wikietiquette going back at least 10 years on Wikipedia. I could have just deleted it, making it even harder to find. Indeed, as an admin, I have the power to delete the revision, which would have made the content entirely unfindable by non-admin, and pretty difficult for other admin.

So it wasn't an effort to hide anything. It was precisely the opposite — a pro forma, transparent, what-the-heck-you-do-cause-you're-a-nice-editor stuff. See this section of WP:TALK.