Talk:Fifth Doctor's regeneration (The People Made of Smoke)

Usefulness of this page

I think this page opens up an interesting discussion of how we can treat regenerations going forwards. I recently made Template:Regenerations of the Doctor with the heading "the Doctor's major regenerations" with the belief that the 'core' regenerations of the Doctor are what are most valuable to readers. Certainly, everything in that template has been and will be returned to many times, leading to a density of information best conveyed on its own page. I'm unsure, however, if this page's contents couldn't simply be part of Fifth Doctor's regeneration.

A hope of mine, generally, is that the regeneration pages could be used to trim down on the "Day to come" sections of various Doctor pages, categorizing things into whether they foreshadow the incarnation or just the act of regenerating itself. Eighth Doctor's regeneration seems poised to cover multiple different versions of the one event. And, well, Third Doctor's regeneration will have to deal with Interference, which already has its Infected timeline (Interference) page; I would propose there to cover both deaths on the main page, with the timeline page for the distinct "event", given that the infected timeline is always shown as a timeline alteration. I would propose the same thing here, although I'd love to hear people's thoughts. CoT ? 18:40, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

I will note that someone I know IRL was completely confused about the "Day to come" sections and found them entirely unhelpful. I explained that they were sort of a tradition at this point, and the person insisted that it wasn't a good one. Najawin ☎ 19:17, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

I agree that "A day to come" has been a problem – I've certainly been guilty of perhaps overzealous "trimming down" attempts in those sections, lest Vortex Butterflies be the first story cited for every future Doctor until the end of time – and this seems like a very promising solution. Regarding whether undone or reversed regenerations should receive separate pages, I propose that we treat Fifth Doctor's regeneration as both (a) the page to cover the regeneration in The Caves of Androzani, the primary topic; and (b) secondarily, an in-universe disambiguation page not unlike The Doctor's ninth incarnation, with "A day to come" information as well as {{main}} links to aborted or undone instances. This "primary topic, but also overview page of secondary topics" pattern has proved useful in a number of other scenarios, and it seems like it would be parsimonious here as well. – n8 (☎) 02:16, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

That's a very good point. Gets concretely to the matter of things and is big picture thinking. These pages are useful in their own sense and will grow even more so going forwards. Thank you. CoT ? 23:37, 13 April 2023 (UTC)