Category:Floor 500

Floor 500 is the top-level category for the TARDIS Index File wiki. Like its namesake from DW: The Long Game, our Floor 500 is a central hub for information. All pages are ultimately linked to this one. The category is divided into four major kinds of information: stuff within the fictional Doctor Who universe, fictional stuff that's not in the Doctor Who universe, behind-the-scenes production information, and stuff that helps the wiki itself run.

'''No individual article pages should link to this one. Category:Floor 500 should remain comprised of only four subcategories.'''

Four on the floor
Category:Doctor Who Universe is by far the largest of the subcategories. It contains the vast majority of articles present on this wiki. All categories and pages within it contain information written from an in-universe perspective. That is, they are written on topics that have to do with the narrative "reality" of Doctor Who and its spin-offs. Such articles are easy to spot, because they're written in the past tense and tend to treat their subjects as "real" things that once existed. Note that this category includes information about Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, K-9 and Company and K-9 (2009) — and almost all licensed spin-off material arising therefrom.

Still, there are some works of fiction that are not within the Doctor Who universe for one reason or another. Maybe they weren't officially published by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Or maybe they were deliberate parodies. Articles about such fiction can be found in Category:Non-canonical material. A word of caution: please make sure you read Tardis:Canon policy before adding any of these categories to articles. There are actually very few works of fiction which can be classed, according to our rules, as truly "non-canonical".

Next comes Category:Real World. This category contains information about the production of Doctor Who universe stories. Its articles and subcategories are all written from the "real world perspective", usually in the present tense. It, too, includes production information from the above shows, along with information about the producers of both licensed and unlicensed material in other media. Note that even the producers of non-canonical material can be tagged with a real world category.

Finally, there's Category:TARDIS Index File Wiki, which is an administrative category for things that help the wiki function. Most of the things that get put in this category do so automatically, because a little piece of code makes it happen. Unless you really start editing the structure of this wiki, though, chances are you'll never peek inside this folder.

Keep 'em separate
No article should be tagged as being in more than one of these four main categories. An article can — theoretically — belong to an unlimited number of subcategories, but all these subcategories must be a part of only one of the four main categories. For instance, a thing cannot be both non-canonical and a part of the Doctor Who universe. Nor can it be both in the real world and in-universe.

This last assertion may be harder to grasp. If you have a category like category:Real people — which tags real-life people like Charles Dickens who have appeared in Doctor Who — you may believe that such a category belongs both within Category:Real World and Category:Doctor Who Universe. In fact, though, the article Charles Dickens is written from an in-universe perspective. That is, it's about Dickens' relevance to the history of that universe, not our own. Thus, the category only belongs in Category:Doctor Who Universe. Such cases, though, are rare. Most of the time, it's perfectly obvious which main category should house an article.

The only possible exception to this is that of a crossover between Category:Real World and Category:TARDIS Index File Wiki, because they're both real world categories. So far, the only category to cross over in this way is Category:Galleries, because galleries are created by a specific feature of wiki markup code, and because all the galleries in the category were displaying Doctor Who merchandise, organized under Category:Merchandise.

Nomenclature
As a general rule, we've tried to make the distinction between real world and in-universe categories easy. Take, for instance, broadcasters. There are brodcasters in the Whoniverse, like AMNN. And there are broadcastes in the real world, like BBC America. Clearly, they shouldn't be in the same category, but somehow the word "broadcaster" will probably appear in the two separate categories that these articles require. Generally, it works like this:
 * Unmodified nouns name subcategories within Category:Doctor Who Universe, and if it's in Category:Real World, it's prefaced with the words "Real world". Thus Category:Broadcasters is about broadcasters within the Doctor Who universe, whereas Category:Real world broadcasters is for braodcasters that actually exist.  The odd exception is for noting real life things that appear within the fictional world of Doctor Who — and thus become a part of the Whoniverse — as described above.