Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-6032121-20200113121045/@comment-28349479-20200113131222

I broadly agree, but I also broadly agree with Shambala108’s policy.

I recently did a ~3.4k word rewrite of Ada Lovelace to add info from Spyfall and The Book of the War, thoroughly de-stub-ifying the page. As a result, there are 15 sentences citing The Book of the War, 9 citing Spyfall, and 21 citing The Enchantress of Numbers (which previously encompassed the entirety of the page). While Ada is certainly not an “oft-appearing character”, if the 2-3 sentence policy was strictly followed, her page would be gutted and imo re-stub-ified. Which would be very non-ideal.

(By the way, if anyone wants to pull a screen grab from Spyfall to put in Ada’s infobox, I would really appreciate it!)

On the other hand, I understand that it is absolutely imperative for our encyclopedia to summarize material. For instance, if we described every single action taken by Yasmin Khan in every episode ... well, bad example maybe, but on Clara Oswald you would much prefer to see


 * While investigating Rigsy’s mysterious tattoo, Clara and the Twelfth Doctor visited Trap Street, London, where Mayor Me explained it was a Chronolock linked to a Quantum Shade ...

rather than


 * After returning to the TARDIS after an adventure in the second most beautiful garden in all of time and space, Clara received a call from Rigsy, (TV: Face the Raven) whom she had previously met while facing the Boneless. (TV: Flatline) He explained to her that a mysterious tattoo had appeared on the back of his neck, and while Clara initially told him that she couldn’t help him fix a bad mistake, her curiousity was piqued when he mentioned that it was counting down to zero. They visited him and, after being surprised to meet his fiancée Jen and his newborn daughter Lucy, heard Rigsy’s description of his problem: he had no memory of the last 24 hours, and Clara noticed that his phone had also been wiped. The trio took to the TARDIS to scan the city for a trap street, leading them to discover ...

I believe this is the distinction which Shambala108 is pointing to, and in that case, I agree completely. I must admit that I have not combed through the entirety of any [Number]th Doctor pages, but if any examples exist of such exhaustive summary, they certainly must be expunged.

That said, it’s also undeniable that the hard “2-3 sentences” limit is not always advisable. Two to three sentences would not be appropriate to describe everything we learn about Ada Lovelace in The Book of the War. For this reason, while I do think the message of “leave the detailed summary for the story page” is necessary and important to emphasize, I think it should be left as a heuristic rather than a quantified hard limit.