Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1317169-20121202170842/@comment-88790-20130121143733

CzechOut wrote: This is really at the heart of the problem I'm having, and have always had. If one is making the distinction between "references" and "continuity" on the basis of number of appearances, one is on a very slippery slope. One can imagine that a particular thing appears in only one story, but that's a judgment based on one's own knowledge of the DWU. In fact, a lot of these "references" are simply part of a "continuity" of which one is unaware.

I've continued to be somewhat confused by how you're confused by these concepts.

Are you saying that references are bad because they assume (or suggest to the reader) that with your example hairdryers appear in Dalek and that is their only appearance in DW?

That's not what Reference is about. It lists only what appears in the story. It doesn't, at all concern itself with other stories. No other stories are mentioned or presumed to exist within the References section. You link to the stuff that exists within the story. Sometimes you get a good link and sometimes you get a red link.

This process of noting these references doesn't go against the spirit of the wiki, it actually helps us create the wiki by providing red links (or adding to the what links here) of articles.

References don't need futureproofing because they're an observation of that story. You can write the References for any single story having not seen any other DW story. Writing the References is based purely on your observation of the "stuff" the elements, the universe of that story, but you don't actually need any other knowledge in order to write it.

Someone who's only seen Torchwood could watch The Keys of Marinus for the first time, having never seen any DW and write the References for it, because the References are isolated to that story and that page. They are like an extension of the Plot.

To return to Continuity, I will again propose removing it as that is something that is hard to futureproof as it is based on relationships to other stories. Continuity is something we can't futureproof.

Maybe it's something we shouldn't have, or make a rule that Continuity can only reflect on the past and not on the future (which I know as I write it would be hard to enforce).