Forum:Eighth Doctor Books and Audio, which take place first?

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Assuming both are canon, do the Big Finish Audios featuring the Eighth Doctor (the monthly releases and the new EDAs) or the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures take place first (from the Doctor's perspective). TemporalSpleen 18:02, February 3, 2010 (UTC)

Have a look at Theory:Timeline - Eighth Doctor, this a timeline this wiki uses in order to assist in the placement of stories in the Timeline sections of articles. --Tangerineduel
13:38, February 4, 2010 (UTC)

I suggest that the wiki timeline should be changed, this is because of new accounts such as the company of friends that suggets the big finish audios take place after the books and comics. i think that BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures take place first (with the comics filling the gap between the eight doctors and vampire science) then after gallifrey is presumably restored after the gallifrey chronicles the Big finish audio adventures occur with the new gallifrey in place and romana being set back to the regeneration she was when she assumed office (2nd). Revanvolatrelundar 16:12, February 4, 2010 (UTC)

Well, Theory:Timeline - Eighth Doctor says it's based on the Doctor Who Reference Guide. And it should be noted that the DWRG itself has changed its mind, along the lines that Revanvolatrelundar suggests. As for it being "the timeline this wiki uses", um, says who exactly? I don't recall a vote on that. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 17:44, February 4, 2010 (UTC)

The Reference guide has changed since i last looked i must admit, but i still believed the BFA's should be placed after the BBC books in the timeline.Revanvolatrelundar 18:28, February 4, 2010 (UTC)

I don't really know how it came about, I think as Doug86 was working through the Timeline sections the user in question came up with a list that could be referred back to. Perhaps a re-wording at the top of all the timeline articles along the same lines as the History of the Daleks page is in order something like: "This is one attempt to place all the appearances of the X Doctor in a concise timeline. The Doctor's history is somewhat convoluted at times." --Tangerineduel 14:43, February 5, 2010 (UTC)
I suppose I find it a total waste of time and space to even have timeline pages at all. I think they make us look like amateur, and pull focus from doing the things that this wiki can do with authority. It's just insane, to me, that we have an "official" 8th Doctor time line, but still don't have a page for every credited character from televised episodes, or still don't have plots for most stories across all media.
I know "The Ultimate, All-Inclusive Timeline" is one of the great quests of fandom, but every attempt I've ever seen to organize events fails, especially when you read the fine print. If you go beyond the DWRG's simple timeline and read the placement details on the stories, they say something like "placement arbitrary", or "placement based on a costume a companion is wearing", or whatever.
I suppose the thing that really rankles with the 8th Doctor stuff is how flimsy the "evidence" is. For years, DWRG had this two-tiered approach and then one episode of one BFA release made them switch to a single chronology. It's not exactly rock solid proof. Something could easily upset that applecart in a future BFA release. The Company of Friends wasn't meant to "solve" the continuity problems of the Eighth Doctor's era. It was just a fun celebration of the various distinct phases of his multimedia-ed existence. And the fact is, you can still say that The Gallifrey Chronicles effectively allows there to be multiple realities in which various versions of the Eighth Doctor exist. I dunno: the single chronology thing, much like finding a timeline for DW in general, feels like an exercise in forcing something that doesn't need to be forced. Like Moffat and Cornell have said, how can you have a canon (read: time line) with a show about a time traveler? He can just go back an change things.
Moreover, DWRG's recent switch causes an actual workload problem for us. If we're going to say that it's based on DWRG then we now have to change it, since they've changed. That would ostensibly involve changing lots of pages that have their timeline sections based on DWRG's efforts. And then, when a new play comes out in 2012 that contradicts The Company of Friends, DWRG will switch it all around and we'll have to, as well.
The much easier and more reasonable thing is to say that it is the official policy of the wiki that we don't engage in minute timeline tracking, because so very much of it is speculative, and stories in one medium have at times been deliberately written so as to contradict stories written in another medium (I'm lookin' at you, Gary Russell). So all these X Doctor - Timeline pages should be struck down, deleted, binned and banished, never to return.
Then we change the nature of these "timeline sections" on individual story pages. Trying to track a story versus stories in other media is not only fraught with difficulties (see, for instance, the section at Galaxy 4 (TV story)), but it's also not what the average user to the site cares about. They want to be able to place it ideally between televised episodes, then between adventures within that medium's run of stories. If there are obvious connections between, say, a BFA and a ST short story, by all means mention them, but never fail to place a story within the context of the timeline seen on screen, or within that range of product.
For instance, when I originally encountered it, the timeline at Galaxy 4 had tried to hamfist these short stories stories between G4 and Myth Makers. The timeline made no note of the fact that there's a direct connection between the end of G4 and the beginning of Myth, such that there is no likely place for stories between them. Nor did the timeline section note, at any of those "conntected" stories, that there was no hard evidence to put them between G4 and Myth. So we were stressing the "continuity" of dubiously-connected short stories practically no one has heard of, over the obvious connection between two televised episodes. Why? Solely because the DWRG's First Doctor top sheet said so. This is a no-no, but it's something people are tempted to do on this wiki. And I have no idea why they'd want to.
If we accept the notion that this wiki is being created for people who don't know that much about Doctor Who, we'd do things differently, I think. We'd certainly say, for them, that the foundational element of DW is the television series. Maybe they haven't seen all the episodes when they come to this site. Maybe even they only know about the new series and want to explore the old. In any case, without having read a thing about our canon policy or understood the intricacies of DW canon, they will (rightly) assume that DW begins at its televised episodes. Therefore, the timeline sections must at a minimum make a reference to a story's position relative to a televised episode. Then, if in a medium other than TV, it should make a reference to its position between two adventures in that medium. Any dating that's possible to stories in other media should be done in a subsection.
Take, for instance, Castle of Fear. It's timeline section should go something like this, I think:
Timeline
Relative to televised episodes
Relative to other Big Finish Productions audios
Relative to stories in other media
As it stands, we just put it between A Perfect World and The Eternal Summer. Imagine, though, the new fan of Doctor Who using our site. They've heard from somewhere about this thing called "Castle of Fear". Maybe they're interested cause it stars John Sessions, who has a following of his own. So they look it up in our database. Are they really going to be able to make any sense out of the timeline we're currently giving? We assume that most people know the Fifth Doctor audios come between T-F and AOI, but that's actually a rather big assumption. A lot of people who've come to Doctor Who via BBC Wales don't even know who Nyssa and the Fifth Doctor are — especially if they missed "Time Crash" — much less that there's this little gap in the television series where she could've been traveling with the Doctor alone. So I think it's important to try to frame where an alternate media story happens in relation to the TV series on every single page. That's how we should be using our editing time on the subject of timelines — not making up these ridiculously subjective, often-changeable timeline "tables" like Theory:Timeline - Eighth Doctor.
And, speaking specifically of the Eighth Doctor, I think it should be standard on any page about the Eighth Doctor that the "Relative to stories in other media" subsection say one thing: The placement of Eighth Doctor stories from different media is highly problematic. The comic, novel and audio stories featuring the Eighth Doctor were not written with the intent of establishing a single continuity. It's not even worth wading into the pool. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 16:44, February 5, 2010 (UTC)
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