Tardis:Merging policy

Merging articles is the process of collating the information from two different articles onto one page, after which an admin can merge the histories of these two pages, to truly make them one. (If this is a task for your consideration, it should not be taken lightly.) This merging policy clarifies the framework by which we decide which pages will be merged, and which should be covered separately.

Going through several cases, this page outlines the main concerns which come up when we need to make these decisions. First, the question of when to separate characters and how to resolve conflicts. Next, standards for evidence are gone over, with more detail on what we're looking for: the connecting links. And finally, the problem of stories: what makes a unit, what should we do with chapters and serials, and where does an adaptation begin, where new versions of older stories are concerned? Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.

One character, one page
Since policies, broadly, should aim to be universally applicable, we'll start with an easy one. To stay true to our aim always to employ an in-universe perspective, groups of individuals should never be covered on a single page, even when this means the pages about the singular characters will contain largely identical information.

For example, Male art lover (City of Death) and Female art lover (City of Death) are different people in the DWU, even if they've never been seen apart. (In the real world, you'll never mention the one without the other in the context of the Fourth Doctor serial, but in-universe, they presumably have their own unseen lives.)

Continuity of consciousness is key
Personhood is a tricky thing in the DWU. It is this wiki's stance that identity carried over between characters (leading to just the one page) is determined by continuity of consciousness rather than purely physical concerns — and this carries in both directions.

Consequently:
 * Rory Williams in TV: The Pandorica Opens, despite having been resurrected as an Auton, has all the memories of the dead "real" Rory up to that point. He loudly declares that "he is Rory", which the Eleventh Doctor confirms. Later, when Rory is resurrected again as a human after Big Bang Two, he has his memories of being an Auton. Therefore, we cover "both Rories" on the same page, as a single, linear biography.


 * Professor Yana, John Smith and Ruth Clayton are what the bodies of (respectively), the Tenth Doctor and the Fugitive Doctor get up to while their Time Lord consciousnesses and memories are locked away in biodata modules. Despite being physically the same as their Time Lord counterparts, they have different memories and personalities, and consider turning back into Time Lords to be equivalent to dying. (Bodies deserve to have indepedent lives, too!) Therefore, they get their own pages.


 * As a final example, the Ganger Doctor in TV: The Rebel Flesh is a complete copy of the Eleventh Doctor. But while he has all of the Doctor's memories, they branch off at his conception. Where the original Doctor goes, when they're apart, has nothing to do with the Ganger Doctor. While they may have been two vessels for the same basic consciousness, by not sharing new experiences, the two Doctors have gained independence. And this means they get their own pages. (We consider they've earned it, too.)

Alternate realities
Parallel universes, alternate timelines and palimpsest universes are a tricky business in Doctor Who, with most stories using such devices disagreeing on the mechanics involved, and the degree to which versions of the same character in two different realities are "the same person". In such cases, unless the narrative makes it blatantly obvious, common sense based on philosophy of personhood and continuity of consciousness will tend to fail us.

Instead, it is recommended that as a rule of thumb, if there's no more to say on the separate page than what can already be stated on the prime version's "Alternate timelines" subsection, it's not worth creating a separate page for the alternate-timeline version. For example, the briefly-glimpsed Cyber-converted Susan in Prologue: The First Doctor is really best described at Susan, while the version of Susan from Auld Mortality's universe, who appears as a major character in multiple stories, is worthy of her own page. Other factors which might tip the scale towards a separate page include interaction between the alternative character and their "prime" counterpart, which is hard to discuss on a single page, or the alternative version being given their own name.

Conflicting evidence
Finally, when some valid sources suggest that two characters are one and the same, but others disagree, we do not merge the pages, but merely make note of their alleged identity on both pages — with duplicate biographical information as necessary.

Christopher Marlowe may or may not have also been William Shakespeare in the DWU, and it would be in breach of T:NPOV to favour one version over the other by merging the pages completely. Both the Doctor and the Master have, at one point or another, been alleged as the true identity of Merlin: where would that leave us?

Valid sources
This may be obvious, but merges between two in-universe pages, about concepts from valid stories, can only be carried out based on narrative evidence from valid sources.

It's not enough that we're told that the Old man (Beige Planet Mars) is actually the Doctor for us to move the information to the "Undated events" section of that latter page. We'd have to have a story that makes the connection in so many words, or otherwise makes it glaringly, unambiguously obvious what is going on (e.g. the "old man" stepping into "his blue box" and reminiscing about "when he travelled with Jo", or some such).

Crossovers present a special case. The Star Trek crossover Assimilation² is written for an audience which knows a phaser on sight, as much as a Doctor Who audience is expected to know a Dalek on sight, or indeed, that a general audience is expected to know a hatbox on sight. As such, rather than let pedantry render our coverage more confusing, we go ahead and cover such elements from the over-crossing franchise at their "proper" names, even if they're not explicitly named in the DWU crossover. This runs into merging issues when separate sources mention the over-crossing element without explicitly describing it. For example, an unnamed John Steed appears in Party Animals and The Sleuth Slayers, while the name "John Steed" is mentioned in Timewyrm: Genesys and City of the Daleks. In such cases, common sense should prevail and allow us to cover all valid references and guest turns by the non-DWU character on a single page.

A Rose, by any other name
Because the DWU isn't like other franchises, it's not all owned by one entity: various essential building blocks of the DWU are owned by licensors other than the BBC, who can then lease them out to authors and producers to create fully official Doctor Who spin-offs works, under their segment of its expansive mythology.

It is thus essential to understand that the boundaries of these legally-copyrighted elements are not the same as in-universe boundaries between concepts. The most obvious example of this is that the name "Dalek" and the iconic Raymond Cusick design are not owned by the same companies: the BBC own the former, while the Terry Nation estate own the latter (counter-intuitive, right?).

But there are subtler cases. For example, if a story is licensed to use Bernice Summerfield but not the BBC-owned character of "the Doctor", and has Benny mention some detail regarding "a time traveller" with whom she once visited Project Eden in 2157, then, through the in-universe connection made in PROSE: Lucifer Rising, we can state that those details belong on our page about the Seventh Doctor.

Let's clarify what is meant here. One instinct, in these cases, would be to provide coverage at, say, Time traveller (Example Story), where we act as though this is a completely different person from the Seventh Doctor. However, because Lucifer Rising provides our missing link — in this case, names the setting, and links it to the year which would be referenced — there is no sense in covering them separately. By this method, another story with the correct license can "cover" for the ones without.

The anchoring of the thread
With this in mind: sometimes, non-BBC-licensed spin-offs can go one step further, and make active use of a concept recognisable as a BBC-owned element from mainline Doctor Who... under a different name.

For example, the Faction Paradox series continues the story of the War in Heaven, a time war established in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures as being fought between the Time Lords of Gallifrey and the Enemy. In PROSE: Lungbarrow, the Time Lords were established to have ruling clans known as the Great Houses. The Faction Paradox series licensed the concept of the "Great Houses" from Marc Platt, and of "the War in Heaven" from Lawrence Miles — and carried on writing about the War between the Enemy and "members of the Great Houses", whose homeworld is now only ever mentioned as just that... "the Homeworld".

Because stories licensed to use both terms, "the members of the Great Houses" and "the Time Lords", already equated the former with the latter, only one page is required for "Homeworlders" and "Time Lords", and information about "the Homeworld of the members of the Great Houses" belongs on Gallifreyan history, just as it would if all those sources had the license to use the name of Gallifrey.

What this means is that a bridge term can link two stories with the same concept. The requirement is that one story might have rights to both legal properties.

The presence of this link is essential. One novel, licensed to use both "facets", can establish that both angles are on the same fictional concept. Without this, we must separate our pages. The Book of the War does everything in its power to convince you that the War King used to be the Master, but there's never been a story licensed to use both "the War King" and "the Master" which explicitly drew this connection in a narrative context. Therefore, in the absence of our coveted bridge term, the War King he is, and the War King he shall stay. This is why he has his own page from the Master, where only "behind the scenes", we can reveal this connection.

What is a story unit?
This may seem like an odd question to ask, but what is a story, as defined on the wiki? What we've come up with is a broad rule, which serves us well: if it's given its own story title, this suggests it might merit its own separate page. Now the particularities of production and release, according to medium, play into how we treat this first assumption.

What turns a story into a "story"? When does an anthology become a novel, and where's the line between a chapter and finished story? In fact, when a story is officially released and which story titles to use for disambiguation are both questions which depend on us having some answers here. So let's dig into it.

The problem of serials
Broadly speaking, the original 1963 run of Doctor Who was made up of serials. This means that each week, a new episode would come out, and this would be one part of the ongoing narrative we've decided to call the completed "TV story".

As covered in greater detail at T:SERIALS, the first problem we encounter is that early William Hartnell episodes actually get their own names (and serials like TV: An Unearthly Child and The Daleks didn't have these titles at time of broadcast). What we've decided is that you can link to these episodes individually for citation purposes, but the wider serial remains the only page for these stories. Basically, TV: The Gunfighters is the "story unit", and "Don't Shoot the Pianist" is one episode, or "chapter", of the overarching narrative. This will come up later.

By contrast, we decided in 2010 to cover Torchwood: Children of Earth as a collection of stories, rather than as one 5-hour special with five episodes, with titles of the "Day One" variety. This has meant Miracle Day is actually covered as series 4 of Torchwood, and Flux is series 13 of Doctor Who, not one extended TV story with six chapters. Each episode stands on its own, as its own story.

The main factor which comes into these decisions, from the outside, is the next level of division. By our definition, episodes make up serials... which make up seasons. Just like with The Trial of a Time Lord, our high-level category for TV is the season, so we've decided it should be subdivided. So we see separate story titles, again, and find six independent stories which together form a story arc (though marketing might tell us otherwise).

A matter of coherence
Meanwhile, for comics, there are three broad shapes for edge cases, which tend to re-appear:
 * 1. The Forgotten is a six-part comic story, compiled in issues beginning with TF 1. Even though the Doctor's memories are strongly featured, with smaller stories playing into a framing device, the story isn't divided up that way. Most of the issues in fact present two small stories, crafted into the overall narrative with the Tenth Doctor trying to remember his past incarnations. So they might have their own names, but they don't have their own identities.


 * 2. Prisoners of Time, on the other hand, dedicates each issue to a new incarnation of the Doctor, in which each month's main TARDIS team is the focus this time, with only cliffhangers to lead into the endgame for this particular miniseries. In a later collected edition, Titan gave them each their own story titles, so we split the page in 2016, beginning with Unnatural Selection. After all, the main connecting link between these stories is the mysterious disappearance at the end of every issue, not any overarching narrative.


 * 3. The Lost Dimension almost makes it here. It follows a similar story format, with different adventures for multiple Doctors and companions eventually culminating in the final issue. In fact, these were even crossover publications, released individually in each respective Doctor's Titan Comics line, adding to the general "vibe" that these should be taken separately. However, these parts were never given titles, and we're not about to create our own. So The Lost Dimension is one story.

To summarise, a multi-issue comic book arc should give individual titles to its parts, and let each issue stand on its own with one central plot outside the wider narrative, in order to be considered a mini-series with multiple "story units". However, if it is missing coherence at the single-issue level, without additional reference, or neglects to name the parts which might otherwise stand, the whole thing should be merged as one comic story.

Framing devices
In prose, it's often a source of debate whether we're looking at a novel or an anthology. An anthology would contain individual short stories... and sometimes a framing narrative which brings it all together.

Panels and paragraphs
To understand the prose situation, let's first look at one more example from comics: The Incomplete Death's Head. We decided that this was all one story, despite reprinting panels which had previously belonged to separate stories, since the framing narrative is printed throughout -- even midway through a section! What this means is in order to separate parts into their own stories, we must be able to meaningfully extract them. We can't say "this paragraph or this panel belongs to a different story from the rest of it".

Novel or anthology?
Some short story anthologies like The Story of Martha or various Short Trips anthologies have a unifying theme and narrative framework. Some might even contain linking material connecting one story to the next in the form of short interludes. It can be hard to distinguish such books from actual novels, and thus, to know if individual entries within them should get their own short story pages.

Ultimately, if they exist, we should defer to the publisher's own statements on the matter. Something advertised as an anthology should be covered as such, something advertised as a novel should be covered as such. The "linking material" of an anthology, if it exists, should be given its own page. In the absence of a title of its own, use the title of the book with the disambiguation term "(short story)".

What is an adaptation?
It can sometimes be difficult to determine the difference between a repackaging of an old story with some minor alterations, and an "adaptation" to a new medium or format which should be considered its own story. Clearly The Daleks is not Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, but what of audiobook adaptations of novelisations?

To begin with, different pages should be created when the new product is clearly advertised such, or constituted a fully new production. The webcast version of Mission to the Unknown was not merely a restoration of the original TV story, as animated reconstructions arguably are, but rather, a full remake keeping nothing but the script. The need for wholly different infobox fields and cast-and-crew information supported the creation of a new page.

Secondarily, different pages are preferable if there is cause to cite the new version separately from the old one; if the new version contains exclusive diegetic material which it would be disingenuous to attribute to the older version. For example:
 * The TV Movie is not very different from The Novel of the Film, but their openings are different enough that it is easier to discuss them as the "two conflicting accounts" of the Master's trial that they clearly are, if we give them two different pages which can be separately cited.
 * Many missing episode soundtrack releases are mere restorations, but The Power of the Daleks contains in-universe narration by the Fourth Doctor and thus qualifies for its own page: we want to be able to list it at Fourth Doctor - list of appearances, and it would be absurd to list the televised version there.