User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-197.87.135.118-20200927112456/@comment-6032121-20200927114712

…Yeah, this appears to be a long and rambling indictment of a thing that… the Wiki doesn't actually do?

Between The Doctor's early life and The Doctor's species the Wiki has been making every effort to faithfully represent early sources which depicted the 60's Doctors as having completely irreconcilable backstories relative to the whole Gallifrey business. Ditto for their being called "Dr Who".

However, while I am somewhat sympathetic to your radical view that modern stories which depict the First and Second Doctors as Time Lords are "abominations" — the thing is that they exist. This Wiki isn't here to rewrite Who’s history. Stories which say the Doctor was always a Time Lord exist, and in fact some of them are rather prominent. Just as stories where Dr Who is a human shouldn't be thrown out of continuity by later retcons, it would be a complete breach of T:CANON to act as though we should discount later stories for conflicting with those 60's yarns. It's just not going to happen.

By the same reasoning: the evidence may be sufficient to say that "the Meddling Monk", "according to some account", considered Earth his homeworld and was thus logically a human. However, this Wiki will never ever deny that Rufus Hound is playing the same character. You can't apply this weird double-standard! T:NPOV was principally built to prevent "TV is more canon than spin-offs"-type thinking. But it should certainly make short work of your "if later sources conflict with early sources, the later sources aren't canon"-type thinking.

Oh, and Scream of the Shalka is currently considered invalid because while it was intended to be the official continuation during production, its creators had given up on being the "canon" path forward by the time the story was released. See Thread:207499.

Had it been released one year earlier, without knowledge of the RTD revival on the part of its creator, and I can assure you we would consider it valid, as we consider so many side-steps in Who history. After all, we consider the likes of Doctor Who and the Time War and Genesis of Evil valid, as well we should.