Forum:Timeline pages

This is something of a continuation of the discussion on the Talk:Eleventh Doctor - Timeline which has been made more prominent by a user going through every story page and linking the "Timeline" sub-heading to the appropriate X-Doctor Timeline page.

I think we should be taking a close look at these timeline pages and re-writing (or heavily re-editing) them based on our own information, the Doctor Who Reference Guide and Doctor Who - The Complete Adventures are both good sources (both of which are mentioned on the Timeline pages, but I think we should also be finding information directly from the stories themselves possibly using other information from sources like AHistory.

Alternatively we could just abolish and re-direct all these articles to a main "Timeline" article which would discuss how on this wiki we make educated guesses to place individual stories but placing everything in one master timeline we leave to dedicated sites (such as those I've listed above) to work it out. This (theoretical) article would also discuss various issues of inter-story continuity and how the novels, short stories, audio dramas and other things have complicated things along the way. --Tangerineduel 12:56, June 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * We should abolish timeline pages outright. It's all speculation.  Most stories cannot be definitively linked in the way that the DWRG and other similar sites imply.  And, as I've said elsewhere, DWRG "cheats" by having one page that seems to unambiguously order stories, while giving the "fine print" about that ordering only at the invidual story page.  By suggesting this site is a valid resource, even just a secondary one, we are encouraging younger editors to simply copy the master story page listing of DWRG by rote.  So my thought is:
 * Eliminate all "timeline of X character" pages. These are highly conjectural.
 * Eliminate most timeline sections on story pages, but encourage the placement of a detailed note about the continuity of the story where appropriate. Some stories, like Flesh and Stone, heavily depend upon their placement relative to other stories.  That can be explained in the continuity section.  Most stories, however, don't really take place in a definite order.  Broadcast order is often substituted, rather lazily, for narrative order.  For instance, the stories of season 25 don't take place in broadcast order, even though they're often listed that way. And, just to pick totally random stories, The Curse of Peladon doesn't have to come before Frontier in Space; nor does Planet of Evil necessarily predate The Masque of Mandragora, or City of Death before The Creature from the Pit.  Czech Out   ☎ | ✍  04:54, July 18, 2010 (UTC)


 * Oh dear…I say in my best Second Doctor voice.
 * I do believe we're opening something of a can of worms if we're going to start saying the broadcast order, something generally considered to be the order in which the adventures take place isn't the order they happen in.
 * That will lead to people trying to explain discontinuity and errors with 'well they just came from a different time and this story is set before this one' etc. I'm very much against this as, well it'd be impossible in some stories, if we removed the broadcast order to prove where they occur.
 * We could make the Timeline section to be a sub-section of the Continuity section, just as I think the Timeline section is still necessary as a separate field from Continuity. --Tangerineduel 13:47, July 18, 2010 (UTC)