The Panopticon/Reviewing novelisation policy
Regarding novelisations, Tardis:Valid sources currently says,
[Per] Forum:Doctor Who Novelisations - canon or not?, some excerpts [are valid:] If the passage specifically contradicts established facts on television, then that passage is disallowed. But if the book gives a new fact not contradicted by television — such as a character's name — then it's allowed.
In celebration of today’s release of Penguin Books’ novelisations of Rose, The Christmas Invasion, The Day of the Doctor, and Twice Upon a Time, I think it’s time to revisit this policy.
To start, let’s take a fresh look at the deciding discussion. It was started by User:Tangerineduel in February 2009 to question the then-current policy of total novelisation nonvalidity. Tangerineguel notably cited Paul Scoones’ criticism of The Universal Databank, which treats TV stories and their novelisations with equal validity, as reason for novelisations to be given a lesser priority than their televised counterparts. Another admin briefly described how they’d always cited novelisations; then, after a comparatively lengthy digression about the no-longer-extant “Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors” sections, User:Skteosk noted that Scoones’ criticisms simply don’t apply to this wiki: unlike in Databank, we transparently cite sources; someone can see if a name or plot element is derived from a TV story or its novelisation just by looking at the links at the end of the line and checking for a TV or PROSE prefix. In other words, the given justification for keeping novelisations as “less canon” simply doesn’t apply.
And then, the original discussion just kind of … ended. No one commented for a year; the thread was closed; and somewhere along the line, Tardis:Canon policy was amended to include an earlier phrasing of our current policy, which has been essentially unchanged for the last decade. Since then, our wiki has taken up a new perspective on the word “canon”, a more streamlined view of validity, and a firmer stance on what it means to maintain a neutral point of view, but the novelisation policy has gone unexamined, leaving us with a mess of inconsistencies in how we handle different stories.
For instance, look at the different ways we treat adaptations in different media:
- When an audio story is an adaptation of a novel, like with the Novel Adaptations or Bernice Summerfield series 1, it’s called (audio story) and has full validity alongside the original.
- When a television story is an adaptation of a novel, like Human Nature, it’s called (TV story) and has full validity alongside the original.
- When a novel is a loose adaptation of a TV story, like Shakedown or Dr. Ninth, it’s called (novel) and has full validity alongside the original.
- Only when a novel is a more straightforward adaptation of a TV story, like the Target novelisations, it’s slapped with (novelisation) and given selective validity.
To me, that looks like a violation of T:NPOV. And in fact, the inconsistencies go further: despite T:VS specifically listing character names as an example of something from novelisations that’s valid,
It's not generally our policy to rename something on the basis of a novelisation. Yes, we can include information from the novelisation, but articles shouldn't be named on the basis of an obscure work, like a novelisation. Tardis:Manual of Style#Naming of articles clearly states, "The titles of articles about individual characters should be the name by which the character was most commonly known in the Doctor Who universe . . ." This character is most commonly known by her first name only, thus she should be called just Miranda.
Note that the quoted line from Tardis:Manual of Style (now actually on Tardis:Character names) actually concerns commonality within the Doctor Who universe, so the real-universe obscurity of a story should be irrelevant here – as it should with all of the wiki, per T:NPOV: “That which is said in a short story in Doctor Who Annual 1967 is just as valid as the latest episode of BBC Wales Doctor Who.” (Besides, infinitely obscurer stories have been used as sources for names before: R. Asquith was renamed after an Easter egg in the Security Bot video game!)
Holding that in mind, I posit that naming a page Miranda (Doctor Who) rather than Miranda Gerhardt is just like naming a page Clara (The Bells of St John: A Prequel) rather than Clara Oswald. (Or should that be Clara (Asylum of the Daleks)?) After all, surely Ms Oswald is far more commonly called “Clara” than “Clara Oswald”, inside the Doctor Who universe? But for some reason, this logic doesn’t extend to Miranda Gerhardt, or Cass Fermazzi, or Bert Walker -- not to even mention characters like Sardor, Hodges, and Sekkoth, all of whom are simply given job titles like “soldier” or “pilot” rather than their proper names.
The authors involved in today’s releases – Steven Moffat, Russell T Davies, Paul Cornell – stand as a testament to the important role the Target novelisations played in exposing a whole generation of Doctor Who fans and writers to Classic stories they’d never have otherwise enjoyed or been inspired by. I think it’s about time we give the novelisations the promotion they deserve: proper classification under the (novel) dab term, and equal standing with all the other valid stories on this wiki.
