User:Scrooge MacDuck


 * “Hello there!”

Scrooge MacDuck (also found on other parts of the World Wide Web under the alias ‘Achille Talon’ or the pen name of Aristide Twain), is a Doctor Who enthusiast from France, with equal fondness for Classic and Revived series and an interest in relatively obscure material such as BBV Productions or Dalek Annual. This being quite enough of speaking of oneself in the third person, he shall carry out the rest of this userpage in the first person, instead.

A Brief History of a Whovian
I was aware of Doctor Who long before I became a fan of it; I think my first brush with Earth-5556 was a newspaper article of some sort that announced the return of the Daleks, though I've since lost it and couldn't tell you which return of the Daleks that was. (I do remember that the journalist derided them as “a bit kitschy-looking these days, with their ‘evil trash bin’ look…”, for which reason I retroactively bear a grudge against this journalist for failing to predict how much I would love the Daleks when I eventually found out quite what they were like on-screen; bless Nicholas Briggs). I had also, I believe, seen references to some character called River Song on TVtropes, and while I'd found the name quite intriguing, I knew no more about it than that.

It was in 2017 that I finally broke into Doctor Who properly. After reading up on this very Wiki, and watching scattered videos on the Doctor Who YouTube channel to get a feel of the various Doctors, I elected to watch The Day of the Doctor, which would give me a sample of two Doctors at once — not counting Hurt, the Curator and the various holograms. I loved it, and proceeded to watch Time of the Doctor and Deep Breath before learning of its existence just in time to catch Twice Upon a Time on release. (I liked it quite a bit, despite having no earthly clue who Bill or Clara were, which understandably made some bits of the plot a bit foggy for me at the time.) I then spent several months catching up on the Smith and Capaldi eras via Netflix, and then went back to watch the TV Movie, Scream of the Shalka, and series 1 through 4. I also started collecting the IDW/Titan comics, which I like quite a bit.

Currently, I am reading my way through the Eight Doctor Adventures novels (scattered thoughts: Vampire Science really is fantastic, innit? and you know, all told, War of the Daleks isn't the Twin Dilemma-sized trainwreck I was told it was) and watching scattered serials from the classic series in no particular order, as catches my fancy. In the process of this latter endeavor, I discovered one of my top-5 televised Who stories, the truly excellent The Evil of the Daleks. I have also sampled some Big Finish stories, including the truly quite excellent Davros, and various extras on the side.

Other Online Activities as a Doctor Who Fan
My online contributions to the Doctor Who fandom are not limited to this fine Wiki. Under the name of Aristide Twain, I maintain a review blog where I have on several occasions posted reviews of Doctor Who media, such as Series 11 of Doctor Who, fanfilms, and a few Eight Doctor Adventures. I have, similarly, taken to occasionally submitting differentDoctor Who reviews on Robert Smith's Doctor Who Ratings Guide, my first having been a joint critique of the three-partner formed by World Enough and Time, The Doctor Falls and Twice Upon a Time.

Activities on Tardis and Elsewhere
Though a mere user with no administrative rights, I'm often found debating policy on the Forums, which should not be surprising, as I am an administrator elsewhere — namely, on the $crooge McDuck Wiki, which, while yet younger and less developed than Tardis by far, has a subject matter of similar scope, and handles it in somewhat similar ways. This may or may not explain my username. Incidentally, due to a few crossovers that are invalid from Tardis's point of view, but not form the $MD Wiki's, you'll find a page about the Doctor and a page about the Whoniverse on that Wiki — guess who put'em there?

On Tardis, aside from the aforementioned Forum-roaming, I mostly edit in-universe and story pages; while I have immense respect and admirations for those who tirelessly investigate the behind-the-scenes circumstances, I have never had much interest in them. Which in-universe and story pages depends entirely on what I've been reading or watching at the moment; I'll readily jump from editing the summaries of Series 11 episodes to creating pages for obscure species mentioned once in an Eighth Doctor Adventures novel.

Tardis is not the only Doctor Who-related Wiki I frequent: I make occasional attempts to help with the Doctor Who Expanded wiki, and most importantly, I am the founder of the still-fledgling “Doctor Who Supplement Wiki”, a sort of Memory Beta to the Data Core's Alpha, where I aim to cover in the detail they deserve the odds-and-ends that Tardis has ruled invalid and thus, by necessity, covers in barer bones than it should in my opinion. If you want to help document things like the Peter Cushing Movies or Do You Have a Licence to Save this Planet? in more detail than is called-for on the mainstream Tardis, this is the place.

Opinions as a Wikian
The first opinion you may have inferred from the way I've been writing this is that I shall continue referring to the hub of Wikis we've been discussing as “Wikia” until such a time as I am physically prevented from doing so. I could not disapprove more heartily of the corporate appropriation of the common noun “Fandom” in replacement of the much sleeker and nicer-sounding “Wiki”, especially as the point of a ‘fandom’ in its normal usage is that it's not owned by someone, unlike the canon from which it sprouts.

While we're on the topic of Wikia updates, and even though I commend Staff for working to fix the greatest issues people find with it, I'm still not at all sold on Discussions; I'd be fine with it as a replacement for the old Wikia Chat, but am appalled by the suggestion that it could be a viable replacement for Forums. Much poorer organization of archives, much less freedom when formatting a post… the list of flaws goes on.

Opinions as a Tardis Contributor
Moving on to Tardis itself, I strive to follow its policies, and do not accuse their authors of any negative intent (such an accusation would be an insult, and what's more, a pointess one, since there is no single author of Tardis policy), but that does not mean I agree with all of them. Being a writer of policy oneself on other Wikis, and thus having one's own idea about how to do things, will do that.

First and foremost, the ban on images in PNG format and the demand that they be under 100kO both seem bizarrely restrictive to me; I am told that it has something to do with loading time for people on devices with less bandwith, a reasoning which is in itself sound but puzzles me inasmuch as no other Wiki, to my knowledge, has ever implemented such policies, which surely must mean they're not quite as crucial as all that. Oh well.

Another is, of course, T:NPA. Not that I approve of personal attacks per se, of course; but the thing of which I do disapprove is the philosophy that “personal attacks” are to be judged entirely “in the eye of the beholder”. It seems strikingly unfair to me that users should be obliged to anticipate a misreading of their words, especially considering the substantial numbers of non-native speakers on English Wikis. If a nasty double-meaning escapes one, perhaps there would be sense in warning the user in question of the possible misunderstanding, and let them edit their words; but innocence of intent should in my opinion be assumed until such a time as there is conclusive evidence that the intent was malicious. I mean, whatever happened to assuming good faith, a policy to which the T:NPA page itself links?

Connected to the above, I am also somewhat dismayed that the expected course of action in a ban appeal (as documented by precedent and by Help:I'm blocked) is necessarily an apology. A justice system which leaves no opening for an actual defence, where one is arguing that the blocking administrator was in error, seems necessarily more than a little biased. (An important note: I am not referring to a certain occasion where I was myself blocked, though it is in the course of that deplorable business that I discovered this quirk of Tardis's policies. The administrator who blocked me that time was correctly following the site's policy. They were, in point of fact, following one of the policies with which I now profess intellectual disagreement, but that's besides the point. They were not in error, and I am not saying that they were. I just think that had I judged them to be in error, I, or any other blocked user, should have had a way to argue my case.)

Right, that's this off my chest. There are other policies which I think might need alterations here and there, but in those cases, I think that I might in the long run actually be able to do something about it on the Forum, so there's no sense in writing them down here as grievances per se. The above gripes, on the other hand, are ones which I'm afraid I shan't be able to get the site to agree with me on, at least in the foreseeable future, hence my decision to write down this honest “here's how I feel” section in my userpage, which I think of as a sort of informal “let's agree to disagree and move on” between me and the Wiki.

Obligatory Opinions on the Various Doctor Who Controversies
Just to know where we stand, here are my opinions, positions and personal headcanons on the various matters which split the fandom in more-or-less dire schisms:
 * The Doctor's name as far as I am concerned, Doctor Who; Doctor Basil Who, to be exact. This is because “the Other” has, all along, been Dr. Who, having crashed on Gallifrey in a temporal paradox that erased his interference with Skarosian history — as hinted by Human Nature.
 * I prefer to think of Time Lords as a species rather than a class or subspecies — there are ‘Outsiders’ on my Gallifrey, but they're just Academy dropouts and assorted troublemakers who lost the use of their TARDIS, not a coherent social class; they can still regenerate, though some choose not to for moral reasons, as the First Doctor was tempted to; and they are a small minority. It's just much more interesting to me to think of Gallifrey as almost entirely populated with time-sensitive demigods, rather than as a mostly ordinary, barren desert-planet that happens to have one or two walled cities of hereditary emperor-scientists. This does not mean that non-Gallifreyans can't be made honorary Time Lords, however.
 * Hell Bent was not as good as Heaven Sent, but it was still a pretty good story. (My biggest issue with it is not actually any of the most usually-raised criticisms, but rather that I find its vision of Gallifrey almost painfully mundane. Outsiders should not be dressed like Amish farmers, the Time Lord military shouldn't be getting around in generic spaceships as opposed to TARDISes, and the Matrix should not just be a cobwebby dungeon, albeit an exquisitely-gothically-shot one.)
 * I don't much like Looms as a concept (well — I like the concept of Looms as Time Lord technology; just not the idea that they're al born this way), and have no beef with the notion of the Doctor being half-human, though I don't hold the latter to be sacrosanct either.
 * Chris Chibnall is a pretty poor writer (The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos being my least-liked series finale in the new series), though not a godawful one. Series 11 as a whole is a bit on the meh side, though it does have great moments (Kerblam! and Demons of the Punjab, for instance; and I think we can count Resolution too, even if it's, on paper, part of Series 12). It does if nothing else prove that a female Doctor works quite well, though, of course, Lumley, Ricci and Weir got there first. Jodie Whittaker's a pretty neat Doctor indeed, though not as dear to my heart as Capaldi was.

Contacting Me
I'm usually pretty quick to reply to messages, so feel free to ask me anything on my talk page; you can expect an answer within a week or so (probably less, but you never know when a horribly busy week might kick in). Just one thing: if the business you have with me isn't Tardis-related, I'd rather you contacted me on my user talk page on the $crooge McDuck Wiki, as I find the old-fashioned “reply on the other person's talk page” setup of Tardis talk pages something of a pain to keep track of. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  17:07, May 15, 2019 (UTC)