Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1317169-20121202170842/@comment-188432-20130119154014

Tangerineduel wrote: "References" are easier to quantify than "Continuity", they don't, as I've said require anyone to make a judgement or find a connection between stories and aren't affected by the growing pool of stories as they're restricted to that single story. This is really at the heart of the problem I'm having, and have always had. If one is making the distinction between "references" and "continuity" on the basis of number of appearances, one is on a very slippery slope. One can imagine that a particular thing appears in only one story, but that's a judgment based on one's own knowledge of the DWU. In fact, a lot of these "references" are simply part of a "continuity" of which one is unaware.

If the basis of distinction between "references" and "continuity" is number of appearances in the DWU, then we're clearly not future proofing ourselves. Can one really be prepared to swear that the only appearance of hairdryers or Seattle is in Dalek? One can't argue that the only reference to Slitheen is in Dalek? With more than 100 new stories every year, we cannot reasonably assert that any one reference appears only in one story.

That kinda goes against the whole spirit of the wiki — which, to my mind, is to make note of individual references and gradually assemble a more complete idea of that topic's overall place in the DWU. Having an entire section of an article declaring "these things only appear in this story" is just ... wrong. Not to mention arrogant.