Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1272640-20170115234322/@comment-188432-20180529184433

Guys, we had quite an exhaustive talk about this back in 2012. As far as I can see, no new info has come to this debate that wasn't considered originally. Indeed, the hope that someone would provide new material is one of the reasons this thread has been allowed to remain open for as long as it has been. But, sure, a year-and-a-half is enough time to wait for what's not coming.

So I'm closing as no change to current policy.

It's fine that the article on the Doctor in this narrative is now at The Doctor (The Infinity Doctors). That extra word, "universe", wasn't really in compliance with our naming policy, anyway.

But to go further than that and say that this story is fully in the same universe as that in which most TV narratives occur — well, that's just not quite right. This thread has not mentioned the 2004 quote by Lance Parkin which brought that lengthy discussion to an equitable end, so I think it bears repeating here:
 * ... I realised this was a unique chance to do a story that could be outside the normal 'continuity' — about continuity. Which I found quite a fun idea. And I also realised that most of the readers would be expecting the bit where the universe goes all wobbly and turns back into the 'real' Doctor Who universe, and once I decided not to do that, it was very liberating. — Lance Parkin

That led all participants to agree — even though the AHistory stuff had already been discussed — that it did indeed take place in another universe. Josiah Rowe then suggested the following easy way to preface information drawn from TiD:

That was readily agreed to by all the people then still participating in the thread. And it points out the technical utility of the page The Infinity Doctors universe. It makes it easy to link to a brief explanation of what's up with this book — something casual readers of our site need. It shouldn't be deleted, even if the information also exists on the TID page itself.

(After all, plenty of information is duplicated on pages across this wiki. If you want to find out about K9's relationship to Sarah Jane, you can look on either page to learn details about A Girl's Best Friend and ''School Reunion.)

It is important that we be mindful, as editors, of the fact that most of our readers have never even heard of 1990s books in general — much less the specifics of a single book. This is even more vital when that book is, by the author's own admission, not a part of "the 'real' Doctor Who universe".

Finally, I'll reiterate something brought up in the 2012 discussion. A large part of the original poster's argument rests on the notion that because some things that happened in The Infinity Doctors are later referenced in other books which are unambiguously in the "mainstream DWU" that this means — through, I guess, the transitive property — that TID itself is in the mainstream DWU. This sort of thing happens all the time in comic books and other speculative fiction — but it doesn't make it any less an alternative universe. I think I gave examples from Earth-2's Batman/Catwoman relationship.

But a clearer example is likely the Kelvin universe created by Star Trek (2009). There's Khan in the "regular" STU, played by Ricardo Montalban. And there's Khan played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the Kelvin timeline. They're not the same, yet the two stories have points of intersection. Both involve one of the senior officers of the Enterprise sacrificing their lives for the good of the others. In one, it's Spock; in the other, Kirk. That's a big difference, yet the cause of their demise is pretty similar. Both are trying to restore power to the ship to escape Khan's wrath by exposing themselves to the radiation of the engine itself. But no reasonable observer would say that these events happen in the same universe.

That's how it is with details echoing from TID into other books. The whole concept of multiple realities depends on at least some things being similar across the realities. But that doesn't mean that they are the same.