Tardis:Don't wikify your own material

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T:WIKIFY OWN

Due to the generation-spanning nature of Doctor Who, many official creators currently active are also Doctor Who fans in their own right — and may decide to become editors of the Wiki insofar as they are fans. However, if you are such a creator-editor, we ask that you respect some common-sense limitations in key areas.

It's not a big deal if you're new to the Wiki and make a mistake. However, intentional, blatant breaches of this policy will be held to be severe cases of disrupting this Wiki to prove a point, and most likely result in bans.

Background

Fans, writers, Wiki-editors

It is the nature of the Doctor Who fandom that fans grow up to write actual stories set in the Doctor Who universe, up to and including on television. All three showrunners to date of the BBC Wales revival of Doctor Who, Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall, were Doctor Who fans long before they wrote for the show, and involved themselves in fandom activities. The same link is observed in other media, where production companies such as Big Finish Productions and BBV Productions explicitly grew out of the legacy of a fan audio series, the Audio Visuals, and Big Finish organise a yearly contest aimed at giving fans the chance to pen an official Doctor Who audio script, the Paul Spragg Memorial Contest.

While this porousness between the DWU and its fans is one of the franchise's greatest strengths, it poses an unusual challenge for our Wiki: some fans go on to become both Wiki editors, and creators of actual stories.

There is nothing wrong with this: it is a natural result of shared philosophies. Tardis is an encyclopedia "by fans, for fans" — but the same phrase could describe Big Finish Doctor Who audio series. However, some standards need to apply.

The issues

There are possible lines of conduct which would render a creator's use of the Wiki improper. First, as documented at Tardis:What Tardis Wiki is not, "we are not here to give you somewhere to host your advertisements"; writing about one's own work on the Wiki would risk being an exercise in self-promotion, commercial or otherwise, rather than fair coverage of the text as it stands, adopting a neutral point of view.

Additionally, without going issues of willful misuse of the Wiki's platform, a writer wikifying their own story is not a good idea. Our valid sources policy explicitly disallows authorial intent from being used on in-universe pages. This becomes a problem because as a writer, it can be hard to avoid having your own authorial intent tint your reading of your own story. A sentence whose implications seem clear to you, because you have it all worked out in your head, might be ambiguous to a truly neutral reader. We cannot allow information from your own writer's notes, or earlier drafts, to alter the way we cover a story.

The rules

What not to do

In discussions between administrators and writer-editors, four main rules have emerged.

RULE 1: Don't create or edit a real-world page about yourself.

At heart, this one's just a logical extension of T:NO SELF REF. Your user page is all yours, but if you warrant a real-world page as a person involved with the "behind the scenes" of Doctor Who, don't create or edit it.

RULE 2: Don't edit pages about stories which you wrote, or which you otherwise worked on.

See the reasons explained in the "The issues" section above. This includes positions like script editors, special effects artists, and even actors: anyone whose work had a tangible incidence on the finished product.

RULE 3: Don't write in-universe statements sourced to stories which you wrote, or which you otherwise worked on.

Obviously, penning a Short Trip that features a cameo by the Fourth Doctor shouldn't stop you from writing about the events of The Masque of Mandragora on Fourth Doctor#Biography. But if your story has anything important to add to the Fourth Doctor's history, do not attempt to add it to the "Fourth Doctor" page yourself.

RULE 4: Do not argue in the Forums for your own story's inclusion or validity on the Wiki.

If a work to which you contributed comes under review as part of an inclusion debate, you should abstain from taking a side in this debate, at least on the Wiki. It would probably be best if you did not post in the thread at all. If you find that you truly must post something, be sure to first include disclaimers about your special relationship to the work under discussion.

Naturally, these rules can only be enforced if the connection between your Tardis Wiki user account and your professional name is public. We cannot force you to make this connection public, or reveal it if we should discover it; this would constitute doxxing. However, the rules still theoretically apply to you even if you are a writer whose Wiki activities are performed "anonymously". Although we cannot enforce this, we appeal to your decency and honesty, with good faith that you will exercise self-restraint.

What to actually do

Sometimes, a creator-editor, who is prevented by the rules from editing a given page, will still spot genuine errors or gaps in this page. There's no "bias" involved in noticing that the page about you misspells your last name on Line 3, or even in noticing that even though your story introduced Davros's secret daughter, she's still not listed in his infobox several months after release.

The solution is not simply to keep quiet, but to seek out other editors and inform them of the edit you wish performed — as if you were a normal editor who has noticed a mistake on a locked article. This can be done by posting on the talk page of the article, or, if you feel your request is urgent, by contacting an administrator or other trusted user on their user talk page.

You should make your identity clear and outline the nature of the desired edit. If it is not something "obvious" like a typo, try to make an objective case for why this edit should be performed; why this is a good idea that could have occurred to anyone, not just to the author of the story.