Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-5532276-20121230175132/@comment-188432-20130105185428

When you say:
 * ...we're still including information that doesn't have any connection to DW aside from the obvious location links.

you've rather missed my point. I think that the real world location is actually relevant. In School Reunion, you are supposed to know that Aberdeen and Croyden are in their approximate real world positions, or the joke doesn't make sense. In the Invasion of the Cat-People, you need to understand the distances between various Australian locations or the character's fatigue and claims of being on a "walkabout" doesn't make sense. Being able to see exactly how proximate Titusville is to Cape Canaveral informs our understanding of Father Time in a way that the book perhaps glosses over. Understanding what Fell's Point is prevents you from assuming a continuity error when Peri elsewhere says she's from Baltimore.

Many Doctor Who stories assume that you know where one place is in relation to another because, well, the Doctor is definitionally a traveller.

This template gives us a way to suggest what those distances might approximately be, while at the same time making clear that no author has exactly nailed the geography.

As for whether it could be hidden, yes, anything can be hidden. I'd be strongly opposed, though, because the point is to give at-a-glance information, and it's really the only shot most of these pages have at a graphical element.

Let me turn this around on you. If this thing were in a section that precisely said, "behind the scenes", would you really have a problem with it? If so, why? What would be the difference between geographical information (which is obviously best relayed graphically) and the sort of text-based behind the scenes info we allow on various pages in cultural references from the real world? If I were to suggest that what upsets you is just the map itself, but that you'd be okay with a text-based description of the geographic information, would I be right?