Forum:Overhauling non-T:NPOV compliant policies
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) elsewhere on the Wiki. 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 [+]Loading...["The Time Meddler (TV story)"] accurately to the original serial, acknowledging that the later soft-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, 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 [+]Loading...["Interference (novel)"] uses "K-9", use K-9. If K9 and the Beasts of Vega [+]Loading...["K9 and the Beasts of Vega (novel)"] 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 of that introduction is poor, implying that pipeswitching dab terms is disallowed, which obviously wasn't the intent of that introductory line — it does have merit in retaining. While we should use the names most accurate to the source in question, if we do have an ordinary 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)(Addendum: just recently Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse [+]Loading...["Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse (reference book)"] stylised K9 Mark IV's name as "K-9", but despite it being present in officially licensed media, the name is completely banished off the Wiki.)
Discussion
Not sure off hand if something predates this, but I remembered that Forum:Artifacts or Artefacts of Rassilon? is relevant here. Najawin ☎ 02:06, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- Najawin, I don't think you're supposed to discuss things here until it's an actual forum thread, as opposed to a sandbox. Aquanafrahudy 📢 07:03, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- I stand behind my comment made while this was a sandbox and I thought it was a forum. :P (Also, doing a little bit of archaeology, T:NAMING used to redirect to the "Naming of articles" section in the MoS (scroll down). It's the specific subsection that was spunoff to T:CHAR NAMES though. Indeed, this dates back to the original MoS in 2006. And it's one of those weird issues where I can't see anything because it's so early in the wiki's history. Maybe there was discussion off site, or wiki saved something on another server and it didn't get ported over. But there's no discussion about the MoS anywhere and no discussion about the PoV page User:OncomingStorm wrote the same day.)
- There are two types of IU sections that seem relevant here, broadly speaking. Summaries and biographies. Surely summaries should use the names present in the book, regardless of stylization elsewhere. Indeed, they often do, I believe. Is this always the case with biographies? I'm... less sure. Suppose we're discussing the biography of some Doctor, and in some paragraph we discuss his loyal companion K9. Then, five paragraphs later, in a completely different context, we discuss K-9. Have we done something wrong here? Maybe. I dunno. Try this with Lolita and Lilith and Lady Wakai. I think there's a case to be made that we might want to keep biographies readable for the fans that we try to serve. Especially, might I add, for cases where it doesn't reflect some sort of evolving understanding of the character, but instead simply a stylistic choice about how to represent that character (and/or their name) in a way that's fundamentally familiar to what we know about them prior. I dunno, ymmv.
- And I think there's also the issue of how to address BTS naming conventions here. If we're on The Monk and we refer to BTS facts about the character during The Time Meddler, what do we refer to them as? (Well, you can treat "monk" as a name rather than description, but the basic point still holds. This is more than just an IU problem.) Najawin ☎ 04:24, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
I'm heavily in favor of keeping a more standard approach to characters like the Doctor. Sure, it might seem cute when some wiki writers insert "Dr. Who went on an adventure" and such into articles, what it actually does is insert an implied difference, to the casual reader, between sources that do and do not do this. So, if one paragraph on First Doctor says "The Doctor ate an apple," then another says "Dr. Who ate some grapes," this actually violates T:NPOV in some subconscious way by implying, to the reader, that these statements do not describe the same persona. A reader might use this logic to assume that sections which use "Dr. Who" should be skipped, as they appear to be written stylistically different than stories which don't use this name. While this might match the head canons of a few of our readers/editors, doing this is counter-productive to the entire point of refusing to treat more obscure sources as "lesser" than the most popular ones.
Not to mention that even in sources where Dr. Who is the character's full name, it's not used nearly as often as we imply on this site! To use Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks) as an example, in Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., "Dr. Who" is said, out loud, one time. "Doctor" or "the Doctor" is spoken 11 times. So even the Cushing Doctor's page should, on occasion, just say "the Doctor" instead of "Dr. Who," because that is what people call him!
When it comes to other characters, such as K9, I suppose a minor difference would not matter. But it does become contentious again once we look at things like Bessie vs Betsie. Is it not confusing to switch between these two names? By making the switch, are we implying to readers that stories which use Betsie are "lesser" by not conforming? I think it's seriously worth considering. OS25🤙☎️ 08:00, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
- Just dropping in to highlight T:PERIOD, which tells us that we have to uniformly use "UNIT", for example, not "U.N.I.T.", even when sources use the latter. 18:28, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
- I myself wholeheartedly agree with this statement and I disagree that saying Dr.Who and the Doctor I plus they are different characters especially when it is on that characters biography or for anyone even vaguely familiar with the classic comics of novelisations (many of which have been reprinted or had audio readings in the audio annuals) not to mention several sources imply that the Doctor’s Real Name is Dr.Who. I am a strong Dr Who supporter. And in any article we should use the name given for that in that source. To avoid confusion we have the alias section of the info box if anyone is confused they can just click a link one tap away and see the alias info box under the first Doctor lists Dr. who (I myself believe the alias should be split into “other names:” for other names they are called which also happen to be their true name (as in Dr. Who and the Doctor) and keep “alias:” for nicknames and false identities I.e. John Smith. Is the whole function of that part of the info box to avoid this kind of confusion? We should just call someone what they are called in that source. On a side note judging by the new Faction Paradox website it seems they are moving away from the name Lolita toward Lilith for upcoming releases and this alias is just as true and Lolita.)Anastasia Cousins ☎ 18:17, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
- Personally, I just think that having an article switch between UNIT and U.N.I.T. at complete random doesn't serve any purpose except making the sit look ugly and inconsistent to casual readers. Same for K*9, K9, K-9 and so on. And I again insist upon my previous point - having some sections on an article say "Dr. Who did this" will only lead to confusion and readers presuming "oh, this bit isn't canon then." We can discuss Who as a potential last name without having to reinforce it every single time one of these old stories comes up. OS25🤙☎️ 20:24, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
- If someone thinks that a source calling the Doctor "Dr Who" means that it isn't canonical, then that's a. their opinion, b. the Wiki functioning correctly, as we're not meant to be dictating canonicity but covering sources equally so people can have the perogative to decide what they think "counts".
- And to that extent, if we're meant to be representing media neutrally and equally, it really doesn't make sense to go and say "this name is completely exiled from the Wiki and can never be used ever, except in pagenames of sources which use the name". To exile these alternate spellings and names is the same territory as "names from novelisations aren't valid".
- They're very interconnected subjects! We shouldn't be pretending that a source gives information it doesn't actually say, as, for a very prominent example, the name "Celestial Toymaker" is a large misconception about the character's actual name, "The Toymaker", and because of the misconception people believe the character was named after a slur. Now imagine we have T:TOYMAKER which forbade us from using the character's original name and only the retroactive one. Not only would this continue to damage the representation of the character, under your argument the original shouldn't be used "because consistency". May as well call the Rani "Ushas" in The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind [+]Loading...["The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind (novelisation)"] and so on.
- Now I do understand the argument about internal consistency in a single article, but while using these names would introduce a bunch of different spellings for a given character's name, this is honestly preferable to invalidating them all.
- Furthermore, at least with "Dr Who", we can probably fudge it a little bit as most sources that use "Dr Who" also use "the Doctor" so we can just continue to use the latter. 22:57, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
Conclusion
This proposal is worthy, but, as discussion outlined, its application and implications are deceptively complex — which, of course, one might say of T:NPOV itself. This does not fully excuse my delays in getting it formally closed, but I hope it will, in part, explain them.
Overall findings
To get the obvious out of the way, the basic proposal passes. In essence parts of it had already done so through the ruling at Talk:The Monk/Archive 1#Article made from whole cloth, which established that owing to the controversial nature of the character's name(s), each paragraph sourced to a particular work should use the name used in that source. Tardis:The Monk has been functionally defunct for, well, some significant amount of time now.
But once we sweep that one away, then, yes, as the OP outlines, it's inconsistent to reserve that special treatment for Peter Butterworth's mischief-making monastery-dweller. Arguably the way in which the Monk doesn't really have a name in his television debut — such that all subsequent claims are rival post hoc retcons — would justify a one-of-a-kind treatment, whereas an EU source mistakenly spelling "Bessie" as "Betsie" might be considered a different matter. But, ultimately, User:Epsilon is correct that this is not in line with the spirit of T:NPOV, which strives to privilege neither a supposed 'original intent' nor later 'retcons', but simply to cover all sources on a given topic as equally valid. To do anything else would be to editorialise and misrepresent. Moreover, whatever might have later become standardised, questions like "TARDIS" vs. "Tardis", "Time Lord" vs. "Time-Lord", or "K9"/"[[K•9]"]/"K-9" arguably fit the same pattern of rivaling interpretations of the original, spoken TV version, as do "Artefacts" vs. "Artifacts" of Rassilon.
Exceptions to the new standard
Epsilon was, however, correct to emphasise that:
…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.
As discussed at Talk:Susan Foreman, page names are the one area of the Wiki which is, to an extent, exempt from T:NPOV. The page on the Third Doctor's car cannot be named both Bessie and Betsie; it just can't be done. Were were fanatically committed to complete neutrality even in page titles, we would have to call it Third Doctor's car or Car (Doctor Who and the Silurians). But that's absurd. We don't do that. We apply the same logic as that behind the concept of "primary topics", and do our best to pick the more prevalent name as the "default". Extending this all the way to erasing variants from in-universe text, treating them as "mistakes", was an unacceptable stretch, but we do need a way of determining a controversially-named element's 'default' designation, and Tardis:Character names should remain for that purpose if nothing else.
And it isn't nothing else. As User:Najawin points out:
there's also the issue of how to address BTS naming conventions here. If we're on The Monk and we refer to BTS facts about the character during The Time Meddler [+]Loading...["The Time Meddler (TV story)"], what do we refer to them as? (Well, you can treat "monk" as a name rather than description, but the basic point still holds. This is more than just an IU problem.)
Between that and stories (particularly in visual media) which use a given element without naming them either way, we do need a "default".
Indeed, I find that Epsilon's original suggestion that in such cases we should "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" is simply too fiddly a burden to impose on the editing base, not to mention the subjective nature of the proposed standard ("Bessie" and "Betsie" were in use at the same time in different mediums; what should we default to when it appears in yet a third, unnamed?). As a matter of fact, if we went Epsilon's way, we might wind up falsely giving the impression that a given source supports an atypical name-variant when, in fact, it doesn't — while using the default, standard name would be glossed over without issue.
Hence, the basic conclusions of T:K9, T:TARDIS, et alt. should continue to be used to guide what names are used as the page titles, used by 'default' when no name is used in the source, and used by default in BTS sections.
Moreover, the provisions at T:DOCTORS permitting the use of "First Doctor", "Second Doctor", etc. even to discuss stories which do not use these monikers shall remain in force, although other aspects of the policy will be tweaked (both to clear away the clearly-inapplicable "ban" on calling unnamed Doctors simply "the Doctor", and to align with the newly-explicitly-ratified acceptability of calling the character 'Doctor Who' or 'Dr. Who' as appropriate). In a funny sort of way, this particular policy actually extends out of the spirit of Talk:Hatbox — our use of language on the Wiki is not itself necessarily to be based on in-universe language, as we also translate visual and contextual information which readers/viewers/etc are meant to grasp into written language. A TV story has no need to identify Peter Capaldi's Doctor more precisely than "the Doctor" because the audience sees Peter Capaldi and therefore knows it's the Peter Capaldi incarnation; stating that "the Twelfth Doctor travelled to Sherwood Forest" in our written account of TV: Robot of Sherwood [+]Loading...["Robot of Sherwood (TV story)"] at Sherwood Forest is not us adding anything to what the source tells us, but simply using a neutral, default descriptor ("Twelfth Doctor") to Wikify visual information. The "default names" discussed above for a broader range of concepts extend from the same idea.
Dealing with objections
The Najawin objection
Relatedly, let us deal with some objections. User:Najawin writes:
Suppose we're discussing the biography of some Doctor, and in some paragraph we discuss his loyal companion K9. Then, five paragraphs later, in a completely different context, we discuss K-9. Have we done something wrong here? Maybe. I dunno. Try this with Lolita and Lilith and Lady Wakai. I think there's a case to be made that we might want to keep biographies readable for the fans that we try to serve. Especially, might I add, for cases where it doesn't reflect some sort of evolving understanding of the character, but instead simply a stylistic choice about how to represent that character (and/or their name) in a way that's fundamentally familiar to what we know about them prior.
Not only is whether a given name-switch does or doesn't "reflect some sort of evolving understanding of the character", IMO, irretrievably in-the-eye-of-the-beholder, but there is actually precedent for this specific problem. The precedent no one seems to have brought up here, and I am surprised it didn't occur to our arch-FPite, is, in my view, T:HOMEWORLD. By policy we are already accustomed to such "flickering", writing things along the lines of:
- The Time Lords were known to regenerate. (TV: Planet of the Spiders [+]Loading...["Planet of the Spiders (TV story)"], etc.) Indeed, Intrepid, a half-Homeworlder, regenerated several times. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice [+]Loading...["Going Once, Going Twice (short story)"])
Writing such things in a manner which clearly conveys that different names refer to the same underlying IU concept is very much a solved problem, implemented across the Wiki. There is no reason that we cannot do the same for "K9"/"K-9" or the many aliases of Lilith-Lolita. Sometimes we trust in juxtaposition and the thrust of a paragraph to make the equivalence obvious; other times we might write things like
- Many accounts documented the Third Doctor's car 'Bessie', (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Silurians (TV story)"], etc.) also spelled 'Betsy' in a handful of sources. (COMIC: Timebenders [+]Loading...["Timebenders (comic story)"]) The Doctor drove Bessie during the car during the Silurian incident. (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Silurians (TV story)"]) Betsy again came in handy when he faced a group of Nazis who had slipped forward in time. (COMIC: Timebenders [+]Loading...["Timebenders (comic story)"])
When it comes to the biography or history section of the page on the controversially-named topic itself, where the problem might otherwise be most acute, this process is, of course, streamlined by the listing of all their variant names in the lead.
The Ottsel objection
User:OttselSpy25 has another concern, similar to but distinct from Najawin's hesitations about inconsistent naming qua inconsistent naming in the course of a biography:
Sure, it might seem cute when some wiki writers insert "Dr. Who went on an adventure" and such into articles, what it actually does is insert an implied difference, to the casual reader, between sources that do and do not do this. So, if one paragraph on First Doctor says "The Doctor ate an apple," then another says "Dr. Who ate some grapes," this actually violates T:NPOV in some subconscious way by implying, to the reader, that these statements do not describe the same persona.
This is a sympathetic concern, but, as User:Epsilon fired back: "if someone thinks that a source calling the Doctor "Dr Who" means that it isn't canonical, that's their opinion"; the Wiki is "not meant to be dictating canonicity but [to] cover sources equally so people can have the prerogative to decide what they think ‘counts’". T:NPOV and T:VS represent an ethos about a maximally objective way of covering our valid sources, not an agenda of trying to cajole, persuade, or 'trick' reluctant outsiders into personally accepting any particular piece of so-called apocrypha into their canon when they otherwise wouldn't be inclined to do so on the merits.
But it goes beyond that, as Epsilon's reply also went into:
And to that extent, if we're meant to be representing media neutrally and equally, it really doesn't make sense to go and say "this name is completely exiled from the Wiki and can never be used ever, except in pagenames of sources which use the name".
What does it mean for us to treat the TV Action stuff as 'equally valid despite contradictions' if we erase or downplay the contradictions? We shouldn't have to "disguise" stories about Dr Who and Betsy into conformist, timeline-friendly sources about the Third Doctor and Bessie; that comes across not as treating all sources equally but as treating variant sources as "on probation", valid only insofar as we can squint and pretend that they don't contradict.
Regardless, however, we shouldn't assume that anything that says "Dr Who" will be a John-and-Gillian yarn, and anything that says "the Doctor" will be a corporate-approved Big Finish lore vehicle. As Ottsel himself says:
Not to mention that even in sources where Dr. Who is the character's full name, it's not used nearly as often as we imply on this site! To use Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks) as an example, in Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., "Dr. Who" is said, out loud, one time. "Doctor" or "the Doctor" is spoken 11 times. So even the Cushing Doctor's page should, on occasion, just say "the Doctor" instead of "Dr. Who," because that is what people call him!
Well, quite so! We should use the names the sources use, not preconceptions about what characters are called "in general", and that cuts both ways. Cushing is only "exclusively Dr. Who" in fan parlance; he's "the Doctor" for much of Dr. Who and the Daleks [+]Loading...["Dr. Who and the Daleks (theatrical film)"] and for basically all of Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. [+]Loading...["Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (theatrical film)"]. Contrariwise, not to put too fine a point on it, but it's totally okay to talk about "Dr Who" even relative to much more 'mainstream' sources: after all, it's used in the on-screen credits of a majority of television stories, in the title of Doctor Who and the Silurians, and mentioned or referenced in dialogue or writing in several more, from The War Machines to World Enough and Time.
Of course, "the Doctor" should remain the go-to for all these sources, being far more prevalent; but the occasional turn of phrase along the lines of "Dr Who defeated Scaroth in Paris (TV: Shada [+]Loading...["Shada (TV story)"])" is a perfectly cromulent bit of Wikification under the proposed standard.
Between all that and the afore-reinforced use of "First Doctor" etc., right alongside "Dr. Who" or "the Doctor", even in yer TV Comic ephemera, I really don't think we're looking at the sort of dispiriting situation Ottsel envisions where accurate naming tips over into de-fact segregation of sources.
Afterword
Not much to say here, save that it may be a few more days before the relevant policy pages are all updated in accordance with the above clarifications, and certainly far more before all aberrant instances of modern names cited to stories that used other variants are purged from the Wiki; as with other far-reaching decisions whose implementation is bound to be incomplete for some time, these delays should not be construed as nu-T:BOUND grounds for reverting back to the old standards.
As always, thank to everyone who participated! --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 14:47, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
