Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-88790-20140219051032/@comment-4028641-20171119194513

The meat of the debate, as I can recall, was a discrepancy over how much of something has to happen before it is a narrative. In most of the specials, there's some in-universe show or explanation of how this information is being presented.

I strongly recall a Harkness-narrated Cybermen file featuring a stand-in for Barrowman running around a set and tumbling his hands over a keyboard. At the end of the segment, we see a Cyberman head be re-activated, suggesting that the Cybermen are still alive. The question becomes, is this enough for it to be said that there is narrative? That being, could we create a page about that specific Cyberman information video and confidently detail those parts exclusively without Jack's information dump? Writing not about what Harkness says, but instead about what happens in the original video segments?

The issue is that some segments try much harder than others. For instance, the SJA episodes with Mr Smith discussing the various monsters with the main characters are difficult to illegitimise as a narrative. They are fully-acted out discussions amoung SJA-characters, which just happen to also be information dumps.

Take, for instance, the recent TARDIS Index Files segment (look at that, we give that name up, and the BBC grabs it!) Who Is The Master?. Arguably, the plot features Missy interacting and "hacking" the Index File, which is worth documenting on its own.

This topic gets even more rigid when you start looking at more of these "information resources" that happen to have their own "plots." A Brief History of Time Lords, for instance, both has a plot and is almost certainly written by someone checking our own website for details about the show's canon.

Here's what it really boils down to: as writers of a Doctor Who database, we want to be able to cover other "informative narratives" only in the context of the narratives within those publications, but not the information provided. So we want to be able to document the time that Luke Smith talked about the Mona Lisa with Mr Smith, or when Missy hacked the TARDIS Index File, but we don't want to say that Susan Foreman was the daughter of the President of Gallifrey just because Steve Tribe insists that she is in a random information dump (while also saying that she might not have been the Doctor's actual Granddaughter). We either need to find the line where these "stories" start being reasonable to write about, or we ban them all.