User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20190102002350/@comment-6032121-20190102143637

Your way sounds to me like the right decision. Present day means year of release.

But if I may… that matter is really along the same lines as the questions of "when we're shown a picture of a historical character, who is otherwise known to exist in the DWU, and the episode obviously wants the reader to know who that is, are we allowed to count that as an appearance of that character?" (i.e. Martin Luther King & Winston Churchill in The Lie of the Land) or "if a historical character is unmistakably mentioned but not by name, and we otherwise know the historical character from a different DWU source, do we count that as the same character?" (i.e. the mention of ‘King James's mother’ in The Witchfinders).

In all cases, the problem is when instead of fans taking their knowledge of the real world for granted in a Doctor Who context (which is what T:NO RW is a floodgate against), the intent is to rely on the viewers' RW knowledge for something. Tardis allows the latter for certain things (we're allowed to call a car a car even if we're never explicitly told "this thing with four wheels, there, is in fact an Earth vehicle called a motorcar"), but in most cases it's a grey area.

The matter had a thread about it that was closed down due to the original post being mistaken about part of the existing policies, which sent some of the debate on the wrong track. But it's a debate worth having properly, and I think it shoud be revived in a new thread that would kind of englobe the "Present Day" question, rather than having "what does Present Day mean?" as its own bit of policy.