User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-26285319-20170104192003/@comment-24894325-20170126111149

In fact, upon thinking more about it, I think this change from DWU to DW supplants my earlier proposal. Because this directly concerns authorial intent. When a character is taken from something that has Doctor Who in large letters on its wrapper, it is hard to doubt that this was intended to be connected to Doctor Who (although there are still exceptions of course, like Chronotis from Dirk Gently). It is reasonable to presume connection to DWU unless there is evidence otherwise. And this, to me, is the essence of Rule 4.

On the other hand, if a character is taken from something that is not directly related to Doctor Who proper, we do not a priori know how the author wanted to play with this character. As OncomingStorm12th very succinctly put: "''any ... writer can pick characters of their DW related works, and use them outside of DWU. It may be confusing at first, but, if their intention is simply to use a character again, I'm pretty sure they won't be thinking "oh, let's make a new DWU novel/audio". They may just be thinking "oh, I liked that character. Let's use him/her/it again."''" I completely agree with this reasoning and think that in such cases we should not automatically presume that the author intended it to be part of DWU without any evidence. This is especially true in the cases where the debut story of the character was itself only decided to be inducted into DWU on this Wiki after a debate, meaning that at the time of writing the author might not even have been aware of the future connection to DWU that the inclusion is supposed to hinge on.

The change in the wording of the rule would simply insist on providing evidence for the connection to DWU rather than presuming an automatic connection based purely on a common character in cases when the said common character is not exclusively a DW character.