Talk:Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)

Merge
Arright then. So I'm against this merge for the time being. Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka) is, so long as Scream of the Shalka itself remains a valid source, a page marked with an tag. As such, we can't very well link to it from pages about valid characters, or put it in Category:Incarnations of the Doctor — except if we were to pull an Anthony Williams (P.S.) or Tannis, and make the page primarily about the character as he appears in valid sources, and put all the invalid stuff in BTS. But does anybody want that when, for this character, the invalid information is plentiful while the valid information amounts to little more than a vague physical description, and "he existed, maybe, at some point"?

If you want to reopen the Shalka inclusion debate on the basis that Cornell has reused his Shalka Doctor in a valid context, that'd be quite another thing. But if the Shalka and Shadow versions of this character are separatd by a wall of invalidity, it will do no good to merge the pages, in my humble opinion. As I said in my edit summary, compare The Brigadier (Death Comes to Time)/Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, even if in this case the road from validity to invalidity runs in the opposite direction. There's no person alive to doubt that those are the same individual, but we can't really document one on the page of the other because we don't consider the story with the DCtT Brigadier to take place within the same fictional multiverse as most other accounts of the life of ol'Lethbridge-Stewart. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  13:04, April 28, 2020 (UTC)
 * Its hardly just the "vague physical description". These characters are said to be the same number incarnation, with the same appearance and physical limitations (the inhaler) and both derive from Cornell works. Xx-connor-xX ☎  13:14, April 28, 2020 (UTC)
 * Not what I meant. What I meant is that if we tried to merge the two pages, we'd have to give primacy to the valid sources, and build the in-universe section with only that; and all the stuff from Scream of the Shalka and Feast of Stones would have to be relegated to the BTS section. This is just about viable for a character like Anthony Williams (P.S.) where we have about as much information in valid sources as in invalid ones. But if you look at Tersuron or Tannis, you'll see the sort of mess you'd get if you tried to merge the valid and invalid pages about the Shalka Doctor (and I do recognise that Ninth Doctor 4 is definitely the valid counterpart to the Shalka Doctor!): a tiny, tiny, tiny in-universe section and little proper coverage of the concept's primary role, namely in the invalid story. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  13:17, April 28, 2020 (UTC)
 * Would you be able to point me to the discussion regarding Shalka's invalidity? Thanks. Xx-connor-xX ☎  13:25, April 28, 2020 (UTC)
 * Thread:207499. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  13:31, April 28, 2020 (UTC)