Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20160620203004/@comment-188432-20160702001425

As for your latest post, Amorkuz, you've characterised me incorrectly. I never said that "Dutch" should in any way be linked to "the Netherlands". In fact, that's sorta precisely the opposite of what I've said.

The reason "Dutch" will not get a page tied to the Netherlands is because the sense in which you're mainly trying to use it, it's not a noun. It's very much unlike German, because "German" is a noun for "a person from Germany". "Dutch" does not mean "someone from Holland/The Netherlands".

In any case, I'm not wild about the current redirects from English and German. They shouldn't be used as exemplars. I think those were done a long time ago and don't follow current best practices. Nowadays, you can manually link an adjective (i.e. porcine ) if you really feel it will help readers. But creating an actual redirect from an adjective is a way of getting around our guidelines. And this isn't an argument to follow a rule for the sake of following a rule. Rather, by insisting on nouns only, even for redirects, you're forced to create disambiguation pages. And dab pages are much more useful to readers than redirects to a primary topic page that may only approximately fit.

And the notion of a "primary topic" is important to this case of the robot. Within the DWU, it's reasonably arguable that the robot from Junk-Yard Demon is the primary topic with that name, because -- as I said earlier -- the story has been in print so long, and in so many different places. Indeed, there just aren't many things that have the word "Dutch" in them, and there aren't likely to be. Put "German" into the search bar. Put "English" into the search bar. Compare with the number of results for "Dutch". And then consider how many stories really have anything to do with Holland/The Netherlands. The likelihood is that the robot Dutch will remain the most prominent page with that name.

Remember, the rule is not "the real life concept gets the un-disambiguated term".

So until further notice, Dutch will remain reserved for the robot. That could change, but it seems unlikely.

As for the rest of your post, I'm a bit confused. None of our articles are written so as to suggest "from the real world perspective irrespective of time". Universal truths aren't really what we're interested in, because in a show about a time traveller, no truths are universal. The Doctor has been shown to do things which alter the flow of time, and therefore change history. Some things are fixed points in time -- and some things aren't.

So what we try to do is just write what we can source. Dutch being an adjectival demonym of "the Netherlands" is true to us only because the Fifth Doctor said it in a story which we can source. We don't know for how long this situation was true, for instance. But it doesn't matter, because the length of time something is true is irrelevant to whether it gets a page. It could be true forever, and it would get a page. It could have been true for a second, but then that second got written out of the web of time -- and it would still deserve a page here.