User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-43908-20150311013943/@comment-28349479-20181105214514

Scrooge MacDuck wrote: It's sort of a fine point in editing philosophy, but some have argued (and I'm tempted to agree) that if we have conclusive evidence that two characters, who may or may not be identical in practice, were created separately by people who didn't know of each other's work, then they shouldn't be considered the same character. If there were a 1964 novelisation which namedropped a member of the same species as the Doctor as having a beard and being called "the Master", but the later creator of the actual Master went on record to say he'd never read the novelisation in question… then I would say that the two "Masters" should have separate pages. I definitely agree with you here, but that's not the case we're being presented with. Goss is pretty explicitly familiar with Cornell's Romana III, at least according to the quote in OP!

Scrooge MacDuck wrote: The problem with "alternate third Romana" vs. "Trey" is this: can we say for sure that it's not a name the Matrix-version chose for herself after she was copied from the prime Romana? If the Eleventh Doctor (Ganger) had chosen a name for himself, we wouldn't consider that an alias of the Doctor, would we? Here, I think the quote in OP is again illustrative. It comes from 2013, before Luna Romana or Intervention Earth, when Landau's Romana's only appearances were the "Matrix projection" examples in question. And there, it's incredibly obvious that, when Goss was writing the scenes with Trey, he believed he was writing an incarnation of Romana. It's no mistake that the non-projection version we hear in later stories has the exact same personality. And Trey is by no means some sort of "manifestation" of the Matrix in the sense that the TARDIS has used various companions' forms in Zagreus and Let's Kill Hitler: she's an independent agent with her own goals, and she is clearly a future version of the Romana that's running around during the stories.

Since the Matrix works by uploading the brain of a Time Lord at the moment of their death and allowing them to live on in non-physical form, I think a better example than the Ganger Doctor or the Shadow World Doctor is what happens to the Twelfth Doctor in Heaven Sent. In that story, the "original" Doctor dies, either when he was first teleported or at the end of the first loop, and a "copy" walked off in his shoes. Either way, the effect is the same: the Twelfth Doctor of series 10 is "just" a copy of the one in Face the Raven. However, since there's a continuity of consciousness between the original Doctor and all of his copies, and at no point are multiple Doctors walking around at the same time, it's more useful (for our wiki's sake) to think of the Twelfth Doctor as one person, rather than one who died + several thousand copies, one of which escaped. This explains our treatment of Rassilon, whose Matrix copy appears in multiple stories completely independently of any physical existence, all of which have been catalogued on the same page, since long before we knew that he was resurrected during the Time War.

I hope this helps to explain my position.