Tardis:Forum:Temporary forums/Archive/Subpages 2.0/Non-valid sources

Until recently, our wiki hosted several types of strange pages related to our coverage of Death Comes to Time.
 * 1) Ace (Death Comes to Time). Despite this character clearly being Ace, sharing that character's background from Dragonfire to Survival, in the article there was no mention of any story besides Death Comes to Time itself! It's understandable that we didn't want to duplicate large portions of Ace, but the result was that if you read the page in a vacuum, you could come away thinking she was one of Dan Freeman's original characters.
 * 2) Canisian. Canisians were an original species from Death Comes to Time that were later referenced by name in a valid source. The main body of our article covered that one-off reference, while shoving all the information about their actual appearance into the behind-the-scenes section.
 * 3) Man with a bent nose (The Tomorrow Windows). This page, like Canisian, focused on valid references to a character who debuted in Death Comes to Time – in this case, the Minister of Chance. However, since the valid sources never explicitly used his name, in this case we just jammed our fingers in our ears and pretended we didn't understand the obvious connection!

While the recent validation of Death Comes to Time means these pages no longer exist, we've merely papered over the deeper problem: the rules which created these pages are still in force, and they're still distorting our coverage in many other cases – for instance, Agent (Is anyone receiving these transmissions?) and Ronnie (Doctor Who?). With subpages, we can attack the problem at its root and solve it once and for all.

Some pages for characters and concepts which appear briefly in non-valid stories, like Ronald Reagan, feature a "Behind the scenes" subsection called "Information from non-valid sources". We should use this design more widely; by establishing a clear link between the valid and non-valid information, it's much better than the Ace (Death Comes to Time) approach. But we understandably haven't taken this route when it comes to more significant appearances, since it would be cumbersome to cover that much material in a behind-the-scenes section. That's where subpages come in.

will provide the space to cover a character or concept's appearances in non-valid sources in maximum detail. This subpage will be decorated by a helpful new template, tentatively called. For example, here's how the template will appear on Auton/Non-valid sources:

In Auton, a subsection called "Information from non-valid sources" will briefly recap these non-valid appearances alongside a link to Auton/Non-valid sources.

unlocks the solution for Canisian and Man with a bent nose (The Tomorrow Windows), as well. In cases where a page topic's main licensed appearances are in non-valid stories – where, unlike on Auton, sequestering non-valid material on a subpage or behind-the-scenes subsection would be too harmful to the clarity of our coverage – we can put the template on the main page itself. This will enable much better coverage of not just Agent (Is anyone receiving these transmissions?) but also licensed crossover concepts like the Carnell and the Point of Stillness. The details of how we'll cite non-covered sources are specified at Template talk:NCmaterial; a happy side effect will be making our Charity publication page much more manageable. – n8 (☎) 20:35, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Corollary: Editing T:VS and T:NOT to reflect that licensed appearances of valid concepts in non-valid sources can be covered on those concepts' pages and subpages when marked with.