User:NateBumber

Hi! I'm Nate, a fellow who wears many hats: blogger; moderator of the Doctor Who and Gallifrey communities on Reddit; "Godfather" of the Faction Paradox forum; admin of the Doctor Who Discord and its flourishing wiki channel; janitor of the Faction Paradox and Obverse wikis; and occasional author! Nothing is canon, but the Eighth Doctor novels are canoner than NuWho, and I will challenge you to Rock Paper Scissors if you disagree.

Disclaimer: I do my best to stick to, and I absolutely never intend to attack anyone through what I say on this site. If any reader takes unintended offense at anything I say, I sincerely apologize; feel free to contact me about it and I'll retract the perceived insult at the earliest opportunity.

Changes I'd currently like on the wiki
Big thanks to everyone who's helped with things on this list!

Renames

 * First Morbius to Morbius I, First Tecteun to Tecteun I, First Drax to Drax I, and so on, per Talk:First Morbius
 * Interference - Book One (novel) and Interference - Book Two (novel) to Interference - Book One and Interference - Book Two
 * All the Short Trips and Decalog anthologies: for instance, Short Trips: Zodiac to Zodiac (anthology) (see Talk:Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)

Mergers

 * Acid (drug) into LSD
 * Bacon sarnie into Bacon sandwich
 * Corvus into Chessman
 * Dot Branning into Dot Cotton
 * Dramos (planet) into Dramos (asteroid)
 * Elizabeth (Players) into Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
 * Morok guard 2 into Morok technician
 * Obverse Paradise Towers series into Paradise Towers (series)
 * Paradise Towers (comic series) into Paradise Towers (series)
 * Quomippins into Quompipping
 * Wild boar into Boar

Policy
For  October 06 2020 , there has been no way to change policy on this wiki.

Tardis:Changing policy says policy change discussions must happen in Board:Panopticon, but Board:Panopticon does not exist, and it hasn't for a long time. The fact that this state has been allowed to persist for so long, leaving us totally unable to respond to new circumstances, is an embarrassment.

Our admins have not only failed to fix Tardis:Changing policy to provide an alternative recourse but also actively thwarted user attempts to solve the problem. This violates FANDOM guidelines and verges on dereliction of duty.

I understand there is a valiant grassroots plan in motion to recover archives of the Panopticon, but this has nothing to do with our inability to change policy right now. We must reopen Forum:Index before the lengthy to-do list grows any longer.

Purely technical
These concern naming, formatting, and so on.
 * When you search for a redirect, the search bar now shows you not only the page name you're typing but also what it redirects to or from! This removes the only obstacle to using names from novelisations in page titles. See Sandbox 3 for a list of pages which can be renamed in this light.
 * It would be helpful for disambiguation and less confusing for everyone if unproduced stories were dabbed as such: for instance, Creatures of Habit (comic story) should be moved to Creatures of Habit (unproduced comic story).
 * Subpages are direly underutilized on this wiki. At minimum, we should use Sabbath Dei/List of appearances instead of Sabbath Dei - list of appearances and Faction Paradox (series)/Covers instead of Faction Paradox covers.
 * Our treatment of metafictional information is unnecessarily confusing to the not we, who sensibly expect pages like Doctor Who Series 9 to be about … you know … Doctor Who Series 9. We need a better and more explicit policy for disambiguation in this kind of scenario.
 * We should use sortable tables so stories in bibliographies and lists of appearances can be sorted both chronologically and by medium: see Sabbath Dei - list of appearances for an example. Some of this could probably be automated with SemanticWiki along the lines of Bongolium500's excellent citation template proposal.
 * To dam the endless stream of disturbing pages like "12-years-old girl from Nice, France", we should follow Wikipedia's precedent and restrict page creation in the Main namespace to registered editors. This would not affect any good-faith IP editors, who could still create talk pages and edit anything, and who already aren't interested in creating pages in the Main namespace. It would only affect our persistent vandalist and our admins' time!

Slightly demanding

 * T:SPOIL is designed to protect the hypothetical editor who doesn't want to learn about the Fourteenth Doctor from Special:RecentChanges, but given the extreme reach of these announcements and the effort the BBC puts into promoting them, it's clear that such an editor isn't experiencing the franchise the way it's meant to be experienced. When the top trending search on this wiki is [REDACTED], an actor for whom we don't even have a page (!), we're failing the actual users of this wiki. It's long overdue that we allow -marked pages for future cast members based on official announcements. In the meantime, Tardis talk:Where spoilers are allowed has my light-touch proposal to make our current policy saner.
 * Per Thread:264489, The Master must be split into incarnation pages at earliest opportunity. To avoid the bickering over naming that has sidetracked previous attempts, we should disambiguate by first appearance as a suboptimal-yet-neutral temporary : The Master (Terror of the Autons), The Master (Dominion), Missy, The Master (Utopia), War Master, etc. Better names can then be debated on individual talk pages.
 * Characters and concepts with minor appearances or mere mentions in other realities don't need separate pages; Talk:Susan Foreman (Prologue: The First Doctor) is a step in the right direction and should be better articulated and enforced. It serves no one to separate our coverage of Moira (Shadow World) from Moira (The Pilot), Jevon (Ascension) from Jevon (Emancipation), or David Whitaker (The Thief of Sherwood) from David Whitaker (The Daleks).
 * The number of story pages with to be added tags in their Plot sections must be reduced. Timewalkerauthor's summaries should not have been removed, and subpages should be considered as a solution to this problem.

Wild
These requre more thought and nuance.
 * Peter Capaldi's difficulty in finding relevant information on our wiki has me rethinking how we write s. Realistically, TV information should be prioritised, such as at The Beatles and Musée d'Orsay; and on large character pages, most non-TV information in sections like Twelfth Doctor should be relegated to subpages.
 * Our treatment of multi-part stories is a mess: either we flatten all 12 episodes and 3 months of The Daleks' Master Plan into a single unit, or we plug our fingers in our ears and flat-out refuse to acknowledge that series 13 is a multi-part story called Flux. This has all kinds of confusing effects across our wiki. Some middle way must be possible, and (of course) I think it should involve subpages (somehow)!
 * For a wiki run by fans for fans, we sure do care an awful lot about licensing! If 100% of the audience understands that a character is obviously intended to be (for instance) the Doctor, we should just cover them as the Doctor, regardless of the exact legalities. The Homeworld principle already hints at this, but a broader policy would also allow us to dissolve our laughable distinctions between the Mistress (The Choice) and Romana II or the Imperator and Morbius I. See Sandbox 3 for a longer potential list.