Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20170618182814

"You should never assume that because you personally know, say, Albert Einstein's birthdate, or the year the film Breakfast at Tiffany's debuted, or the duration of the Second Afghan War, that these dates will be the same in the DWU."

- T:NO RW

T:NO RW is one of our most basic and integral rules used to write in-universe articles. The basic concept of the policy is that it can't be confirmed that the Doctor Who Universe and the real universe are exactly the same, and thus we have banned the use of real-world facts within these articles. For instance, at one point the page Elizabeth I featured the dates of which she was born, and those for which she died. However, it was soon pointed out that no in-universe story featured these elements, thus they were removed from the article. The issue comes about when people take this (rather integral rule) a little too far. This has been the case as of recent, when one of our admins has decided that this rule applies to things like photographs and archive recordings. His logic, as explained on my talk page, is that if we don't have someone in the story saying “This is a photograph of ____,” or “this is an audio recording of a speech made by ____,” then we can not assume that this is the person that it is supposed to be. The suggestion was that these certain appearances should only be mentioned in behind-the-scenes examples, which only really helps the situation on short pages like Martin Luther King, and not on gigantic ones like The Beatles. "I would like to remind you of T:NO RW. In short, you cannot identify a person by the image based on your real-world knowledge. In order to put those images on pages, you need either to use the context (like in the case of Neil Armstrong, where the event is identified by the narrator and there is enough prior DWU information to understand who is in the spacesuit) or you need to compare the image with images of the same person that were featured in the DWU before."

- Amorkuz

"You are not disagreeing with me. You are disagreeing with the policy. "Did a DWU source tell you that this is a photo of MLK?" is the question that the policy demands you to answer. ... You clearly do not pay attention to what I say, so there is no point continuing this discussion."

- Amorkuz

Amorkuz suggested that I move the discussion to a Pantopticon debate, and I have obliged. However, I am not, I might quickly add, arguing with policy. Policy is absolutely fine, and is written with fine intentions. I am disagreeing with this wholly unfounded interpretation of policy, and how little it accomplishes.

Who does this serve?
No one.

We create our rules to help our readers understand as much as possible about valid Doctor Who stories and the so-called Doctor Who Universe. It is thus very helpful to separate in-universe depictions of events and those same events in the real-world. There is no need, for instance, for the page about Martin Luther King Jr to mention any of his accomplishments in the Civil Rights Movement, because no known DWU text ever references such things. All we know about this character is that he was assassinated in 1968, he was heard in TV: Remembrance of the Daleks (set in 1963), and an image of him was shown inside the Monks' Cathedral in TV: The Lie of the Land. There is, however, no true use to deny instances of references towards MLK himself simply because characters don't suddenly stop acting like normal people and instead start talking like robots. Expecting MLK to be positively identified every time audio or video of him is used is quite the insane request. A reader searching for info about 1966 will not need to know about how the info presented there contradicts real-world events. However, on the same level, there is no need to deny information presented. No reader will care about if a picture of MLK is identified as a picture of MLK, because that's just blatantly obvious.

Do the rules really say this?
No. T:NO RW, in fact, in designed to stop people adding in references that are solely out-of-universe in nature. Adding in information which only exists in the real world. "Marco Polo's given DWU birthdate is different from the real world date. Modern day episodes of the show, like The War Machines, are based on qualities of British computer science that didn't exist in 1966. And episodes that were supposed to be set in the clear future, like The Tenth Planet, described events that obviously never came to pass."

- T:NO RW

Basically, T:NO RW is all about the fact that references to real world events can not be simply invented. Amorkuz's interpretation, meanwhile, is that we should use T:NO RW to disallow in-universe information from being used on the pages that they pertain to. The simple problem is that T:NO RW makes no single reference to this particular application. Our rules make quite the big deal to feature numerous examples of how certain policies should be used and applied. T:GTI features numerous examples of judgement on images, and even states some rules that otherwise aren't spelled out. And T:NO RW does not once, even in passing, mention this interpretation of policy.

Does this have precedent
No. There are, in fact, so many examples of this not being the case that I'm going to allow other users to point those out for me. Please note that if you think that any of the following uses are incorrect, you should not “fix” them, as per T:POINT. The page for The Beatles mentions their appearances in TV: The Evil of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks, and TV: Revelation of the Daleks. "Further in the future, the DJ on Necros had posters of several of the Beatles in his recording studio. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks)"

- Our page on The Beatles

""Paperback Writer" and "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" played in the background of cafés visited by the Doctor, (TV: The Evil of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks) as did The Beatles' recording of "A Taste of Honey". (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)"

- Our page on The Beatles

The page The Entertainer discusses in pretty heavy detail an instrumental track whistled in one story and played on piano in another. The page, of course, uses the name linked and takes no qualm in referencing it as the song despite no one saying “HAHA I'M WHISTLING A SONG CALLED THE ENTERTAINER!” Because our readers, in short, need to be able to find information that they want without dancing around if characters are written like people or robots.

In conclusion
I did some hunting, and I finally found an actual old-forums debate that cites clear precedent on this issue. It was, in all places, in a debate about how to cover the then-upcoming Star Trek crossover. "I hear ya, but IDW aren't going to spoonfeed aspects of the STU through dialogue. That would make for a very boring, very insulting read. After all, it's not like DW always names its objects. There are many, many episodes where the sonic screwdriver isn't named. We just know it is because we see it, we hear it, and, based on our prior knowledge, we can obviously put two and two together. After all, we have many articles that are based solely on visual inspection — like Volkswagen Beetle, HMS Teazer, London Borough of Barnet, real world people who appeared in archive footage, Doctor Who actors who played themselves — or aural examination, like practically the entire contents of category:Songs from the real world.  It seems to me that the better approach is to give things their proper name in the STU and then provide a "behind the scenes" note that it wasn't specifically named by the story, but that it is unmistakably that object/person/species."

- User:CzechOut

It's because of these reasons that I thoroughly dispute that T:NO RW, or indeed any of our policies, stop us from identifying a Volkswagen Beetle as a Volkswagen Beetle, or a Beatles song as a Beatles song, or a picture of Donald Trump as Donald Trump, or a recording of Martin Luther King Jr as a recording of Martin Luther King Jr. When writing about a primarily visual medium, and thus we should allow our pages to be written as such.

EDIT: There I changed two words. 