The Panopticon/Merging Cybermen Pages
I am going to be making a radical suggestion that, at one point, I would have been heavily against. Furthermore, it certainly would have, at one stage, not made sense to do what I'm about to suggest. But no more.
Once upon a time, we as a wiki had two kinds of Cybermen that we were able to clearly identify: the Cybermen from Pete's World (who were the variant featured in nearly every single story being published with the Cybermen at that point) and the Cybermen of Mondas (who were seen as the "Classic Series Cybermen," and were rarely heard from at that time). Because of this, we had various precautions which we used to identify if a Cyberman was based in that of Pete's World or Mondas:
- Mondasian Cybermen usually have chest boxes, and look like the Cybermen of the classic series.
- Pete's World Cybermen look like the Cybermen seen in the new series, and feature a Cs on their chest, indicating the company Cybus Industries.
Thus we set-off on our journeys as a wiki, going as far as to create pages for any versions of the Cybermen that couldn't be solved by the above clues. For a time, a page was created entirely for the Cybermen featured in Blood of the Cybermen, and Category:Cybermen (unknown origin) continues to exist. Apparently, it is a big problem for us if a story doesn't outright list off whatever planet this sect of Cybermen came from.
The problem is that as these stories have continued to exist, both of the rules listed above have ceased to exist. TV: Nightmare in Silver was the first culprit of this discrepancy -- clearly showing a Pete's World Cyberman from the revived series. Despite this, the episode described the events of the Cyber Wars as fought by the Mondas variants of the classic series. Behind the scenes, Neil Gaiman speculated that the two once-distinct races of Cybermen had met each other and had totally assimilated into one race.
This is (obviously) totally behind-the-scenes info that does not belong on any in-universe pages, but the point is that because of this story it would no longer be seen as controversial to illustrate the two Cybermen as one-in-the-same, and the designs themselves would no longer be clearly seperated.
For instance, COMIC: Assimilation² featured the Cybermen working with the Borg. The Cybermen, based on our checklist above, are clearly based in Pete's World. However, in flashbacks they are revealed to certainly be Mondasian in nature, and thus they are featured on the page Cyberman (Mondas). Basically, at this point, all of our rules sort of no-longer exist, and all Cybermen stories are Mondasian by default.
COMIC: Supremacy of the Cybermen is even more of a conundrum, clearly showing several factions of Cybermen facing off against many different Doctors -- from one all the way to twelve. And despite the fact that these are all illustrated to be the same group of Cybermen (from Mondas), the Pete's World design is shown to be unambiguously a part of this new-age of Mondasian Cybermen.
Most damning however is the latest episode, TV: The Doctor Falls, which clearly shows that Cybermen from Mondas will naturally evolve into Cybermen who look identical to those seen in series 2.
Most writers have grown to see the continuity between what Cybermen came from where to be irrelevant and uninteresting. If they're going to write about Cybermen in any setting other than Mondas or Pete's World, they are frankly not even going to think about which version of the race they are writing about. They're just writing about the Cybermen, nothing more and nothing less. The separation between the two races just no longer exists, and trying to justify which Cybermen started where via placement of Cs and how big chest boxes are is frankly just fan-ridden speculation.
In the latest episode, the Twelfth Doctor goes as far as to discuss the history of the Cybermen and directly list events of the classic and revived series has happening to the same species.
Telos! Sealed you in your ice tombs! Voga! Canary Wharf! Planet 14! Every single time, you lose! Even on the Moon!
They always get started. They happen everywhere there's people. Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14, Marinus...
Basically, the Doctor here is directly stating that the Cybermen seen in both series are all the same species, and that all one could say is that there are numerous instances of the Cybermen starting off in various different places, with many different origins. He even basically compares the difference between which universe the Cybermen came from to the discrepancies between stories like AUDIO: Spare Parts and COMIC: The World Shapers, also explaining why the Cybermen came to exist on a colony ship separated from Mondas.
Making a page called Cyberman (Pete's World) is akin to making a page called Cyberman (Mondasian Colony Ship), or Cyberman (Marinus), or Cyberman (the ones that missy made).
Frankly since we now have direct evidence that the entire species is no longer split in the continuity of the show, and that it's just different sects created in different locations, I don't understand why there is any longer a need to keep the pages Cyberman (Pete's World) and Cyberman (Mondas) separated.
