User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20130129081336/@comment-188432-20130129192641

SmallerOnTheOutside wrote: Considering the neither Clara seems to remember the Doctor might indicate that they don't share on consciousness, although that's speculative, as either one could be lying. Point is: at the very least, the three Clara are in a similar situation to Auton Rory.

We cannot possibly write our articles from the position that "our source might be lying, so therefore we pre-emptively withhold judgement". God, if we did that, our wiki would literally fall apart. What's rule number 1? The Doctor lies.

Almost everything we know about, well, everything is because of something one character says to another. How do we know Peter Davison played the Fifth Doctor? Because he said to a guy who claimed to be "the original" that he was the "fourth" regeneration. They both could be lying for all we know, but we still put the articles at First Doctor and Fifth Doctor. How do we know Ace is from Perivale? Because she tells us she is, and she seems to have some passing familiarity with the joint when she goes there. Except, it's not actually Perivale we see but the real world Ealing. Nevertheless, she tells us it's Perivale, so we are bound to believe that what we see is in fact Perivale. The Eleventh Doctor claims to be in the Richard Nixon Oval Office — but the Oval Office we see looks nothing like the 1969 Nixon White House. Marco Polo gives us very confusing information about his life that doesn't square with historical facts. But we still report what he says in the serial of the same name, because that's the deal with our site.

We trust what characters say until such time as they are actually disproven, in-universe. This article on Clara is simplicity itself to write as a single article because of the magic phrase, "According to the Eleventh Doctor ..."

We don't have to make faulty comparisons to the Auton Rory. We just have to report what we know from the story, and leave it at that.