Tardis:Wikipedia policy
Wikipedia uses a totally different perspective than we do. Their articles on fictional persons, places, things, or events are written from an "out-of-universe" perspective. We instead use precisely the opposite standard. This makes the outright copying of an article from Wikipedia highly problematic.
To exemplify the difficulty, let's examine just the lead of the article wikipedia:Liz Shaw:
- Dr. Elizabeth "Liz" Shaw is a fictional character played by Caroline John in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who and its spin-offs. A civilian member of UNIT - United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (later retitled: UNified Intelligence Taskforce for the new series), an international organisation that defends the Earth from alien threats, she was the companion of the Third Doctor for the 1970 season.
Really, none of this is usable to us.
- It's in present tense; we need past.
- We don't mention actors in the main body of articles. This gives Caroline John in the first sentence.
- In-universe articles should generally make no reference to the programme name in the main body. Here we have "long -running British science fiction series Doctor Who" right out of the gate.
- This makes a distinction between old and new series, which our in-universe articles don't.
- This takes a mile and a half to explain what UNIT is; we would just leave it at a link to UNIT.
- Wikipedia often has different titles than we do. Hence their links to companion and alien and science fiction don't work here.
As you can see, just the lead of this article would have to be so heavily rewritten to comply with our polices that we might as well just write a new article.
Real world articles
Articles about actors and other real world topics are written in the same perspective here as at Wikipedia. Still, there are bound to be any number of links made in the Wikipedia article to pages which don't exist on this wiki. Wikipedia articles also use templates that don't exist here. Again, by the time that you edit the article to fit our wiki, you could have just written the article from scratch.
Moreover, there's nothing particularly "magic" or "more authoritative" about Wikipedia. We're fully capable of writing articles to the same standard as Wikipedia.
Historical use of wikipedia on this wiki
You will still find some articles on this wiki that were taken from Wikipedia. This should not be seen as reason to continue such practices. Our goal is the complete rewriting of such articles, which are helpfully catalogued at Articles that were originally Wikipedia forks. If you're looking for a good editing project, go to this page, pick an article, and rewrite it.
