Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1317169-20121202170842/@comment-188432-20121204061318

Just to expand a little bit on that last paragraph, the number of times that a thing is referenced is completely irrelevant, and essentially unprovable, given the thousands of Doctor Who stories we cover.

You might think, for instance, that the Gubbage Cones only appeared in The Chase, so therefore you put them in a section called "references". But that's only because you've not considered the writing of Craig Hinton, where they reappear. You might believe the Varga plant is exclusive to Mission to the Unknown, but that's only cause you're editing Mission to the Unknown in 2009 and City of the Daleks hasn't been published yet.

Trying to make a distinction between these two sections on the basis of number of appearances is a fool's errand. There are about a hundred new Doctor Who stories every year. One of them could easily prove you wrong. And no one can really say that they've experienced every single story that already exists.

We just don't know whether [insert thing here] has only appeared in [insert story name here]. And that's really why there's no semantic difference between "references" and "DWU continuity".