Tardis:Merging policy

This is a draft for a future policy page. If you are an admin, feel free to contribute to the effort to compile precedent and common use into the final policy, which is planned to go to the Tardis:Merging policy namespace when it's completed. If you are a simple user, on the other hand, merely leave suggestions on my talk page. Merging articles is the process of collating the information on two different pages into one, after which an admin can merge the histories of two pages to truly make them one. This merging policy codifies the cases in which we do or do not merge pages with related topics, going through several cases.

One character, one page
Policies must be clearly applicable across the Wiki, and make sense within our in-universe perspective. For these reasons, groups of individuals must not be covered on a single page, even when this means the pages about the singular characters will contain largely identical information.

For example, Male art lover (City of Death) and Female art lover (City of Death) are different individuals in the DWU, even if they've never been seen apart and, in the real world, you'll never mention the one without the other.

Continuity of consciousness is key
Personhood is a tricky thing in the DWU. It is this Wiki's policy that identity between characters (leading to just the one page) is determined by continuity of consciousness rather than physical concerns — in either direction.

Consequently:
 * Rory Williams in TV: The Pandorica Opens, despite having been resurrected as an Auton, has all the memories of the dead "real" Rory up to that point. He loudly declares that "he is Rory", which the Eleventh Doctor confirms. Later, when Rory is resurrected again as a human after Big Bang Two, he has his memories of being an Auton. Therefore, we cover "both Rories" on the same page, as a single, linear biography.


 * Yana, John Smith or Ruth Clayton are what the bodies of (respectively), the Tenth Doctor and the "Fugitive" Doctor get up to while their Time Lord consciousnesses and memories are locked away in biodata modules. Despite being physically the same as their Time Lord counterparts, they have different memories and personalities, and consider turning back into Time Lords to be equivalent to dying. Therefore, they get their own pages.

Valid sources
This may be obvious, but merges between two in-universe pages, about concepts from valid stories, can only be carried out based on narrative evidence from valid sources.

It's not enough that we're told that the Old man (Beige Planet Mars) is actually the Doctor for us to move the information to the "Undated events" section of that latter page. We'd have to have a story that makes the connection in so many words, or otherwise makes it glaringly, unambiguously obvious what is going on (e.g. the "old man" stepping into "his blue box" and reminiscing about "when he travelled with Jo", or some such).