Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20190324211646/@comment-1350697-20190327224845

More on-topic: One thing that comes up occasionally when talking to friends about our frustrations with this wiki is that time the in- and out-of-universe categories for fictional queer characters and real queer performers/writers/other staff and crew were deleted with very little debate.

Some of the arguments in that short thread -- from over seven years ago -- are somewhat... Let's just remember the past is a different country, because surely the fact that Russell T Davies is a gay man, or that characters like Jack Harkness, Bill Potts, or Bernice Summerfield are prominent queer heroic figures, is somewhat more significant to both Doctor Who and its fan community than whether or not a writer is a known smoker or was born in Kent.

Doctor Who as a cultural entity is massively informed by the British (and global) queer community (especially during the RTD years, but before and after, too) and has significantly informed it in return. That the man who brought a camp children's show to mainstream drama success is a gay man is a huge deal. That the spinoff of that mainstream drama was led by a gay man playing an enthusiastically queer man was a huge deal. Bill Potts was and is a huge deal.

The argument raised in the thread -- "We write articles in the past tense from an 'end of the universe' POV" -- holds up only if this wiki were imagined to be a perfect vaccuum, inhabited only by robots. The thoughts and feelings of real human beings should occasionally be allowed to trump the cold, hard logic of policies and points of view. (Which is why I was very happy with the decision to swiftly eliminate the remaining deadnaming still going on.)

Some kind of reinstatement of these categories, or, given that "LGBT individuals" is somewhat broad, a better thought-out set of categories than I can quickly come up with in the middle of the night, or even some other form of solution as an acknowledgement of this as an issue, would be much appreciated.