Tardis:Merging policy

This is a draft for a future policy page. If you are an admin, feel free to contribute to the effort to compile precedent and common use into the final policy, which is planned to go to the Tardis:Merging policy namespace when it's completed. If you are a simple user, on the other hand, merely leave suggestions on my talk page. Merging articles is the process of collating the information from two different pages onto one page, after which an admin can merge the histories of these two pages, to truly make them one. This merging policy clarifies the framework in which we decide which pages will be merged, and which should be covered separately.

Going through several cases, this page outlines the main concerns which come up when we need to make these decisions. First, the question of when to separate characters, then our rules on which stories "count" for their own articles, especially where serials and comic runs are concerned. Finally, standards for evidence are gone over, with more detail on what we're looking for.

One character, one page
Since policies, broadly, should aim to be universally applicable, we'll start with an easy one. To stay true to our aim always to employ an in-universe perspective, groups of individuals should never be covered on a single page, even when this means the pages about the singular characters will contain largely identical information.

For example, Male art lover (City of Death) and Female art lover (City of Death) are different people in the DWU, even if they've never been seen apart. (In the real world, you'll never mention the one without the other in the context of the Fourth Doctor serial, but in-universe, they presumably have their own unseen lives.)

Continuity of consciousness is key
Personhood is a tricky thing in the DWU. It is this wiki's stance that identity carried over between characters (leading to just the one page) is determined by continuity of consciousness rather than purely physical concerns — and this carries in both directions.

Consequently:
 * Rory Williams in TV: The Pandorica Opens, despite having been resurrected as an Auton, has all the memories of the dead "real" Rory up to that point. He loudly declares that "he is Rory", which the Eleventh Doctor confirms. Later, when Rory is resurrected again as a human after Big Bang Two, he has his memories of being an Auton. Therefore, we cover "both Rories" on the same page, as a single, linear biography.


 * As a counter-example, the Ganger Doctor in TV: The Rebel Flesh is a complete copy of the Eleventh Doctor. But while he has all of the Doctor's memories, they branch off at his conception. Where the original Doctor goes, when they're apart, has nothing to do with the Ganger Doctor. While they may have been two vessels for the same basic consciousness, by not sharing new experiences, the two Doctors have gained independence. And this means they get their own pages. They've earned it.


 * Professor Yana, John Smith and Ruth Clayton are what the bodies of (respectively), the Tenth Doctor and the Fugitive Doctor get up to while their Time Lord consciousnesses and memories are locked away in biodata modules. Despite being physically the same as their Time Lord counterparts, they have different memories and personalities, and consider turning back into Time Lords to be equivalent to dying. (Bodies can have lives of their own, too!) Therefore, they get their own pages.

Conflicting evidence
When some valid sources suggest that two characters are one and the same, but others disagree, we do not merge the pages, but merely make note of their alleged identity on both pages — with duplicate biographical information as necessary.

Christopher Marlowe may or may not have also been William Shakespeare in the DWU, and it would be in breach of T:NPOV to favour one version over the other by merging the pages completely. Both the Doctor and the Master have, at one point or another, been alleged as the true identity of Merlin: where would that leave us?

Valid sources
This may be obvious, but merges between two in-universe pages, about concepts from valid stories, can only be carried out based on narrative evidence from valid sources.

It's not enough that we're told that the Old man (Beige Planet Mars) is actually the Doctor for us to move the information to the "Undated events" section of that latter page. We'd have to have a story that makes the connection in so many words, or otherwise makes it glaringly, unambiguously obvious what is going on (e.g. the "old man" stepping into "his blue box" and reminiscing about "when he travelled with Jo", or some such).

A Rose, by any other name...
Because the DWU isn't like other franchises, it's not all owned by one entity: various essential building blocks of the DWU are owned by licensors other than the BBC, who can then lease them out to authors and producers to create fully official Doctor Who spin-offs works, under their segment of its expansive mythology.

It is thus essential to understand that the boundaries of these legally-copyrighted elements are not the same as in-universe boundaries between concepts. The most obvious example of this is that the name "Dalek" and the iconic Raymond Cusick design are not owned by the same companies: the BBC own the former, while the Terry Nation estate own the latter (counter-intuitive, right?).

But there are subtler cases. For example, if a story is licensed to use Bernice Summerfield but not the BBC-owned character of "the Doctor", and has Benny mention some detail regarding "a time traveller" with whom she once visited Project Eden in 2157, then, through the in-universe connection made in PROSE: Lucifer Rising, we can state that those details belong on our page about the Seventh Doctor.

Let's clarify what is meant here. One instinct, in these cases, would be to provide coverage at, say, Time traveller (Example Story), where we act as though this is a completely different person from the Seventh Doctor. However, because Lucifer Rising provides our missing link — in this case, names the setting, and links it to the year which would be referenced — there is no sense in covering them separately. By this method, another story with the correct license can "cover" for the ones without.

The anchoring of the thread
With this in mind: sometimes, non-BBC-licensed spin-offs can go one step further, and make active use of a concept recognisable as a BBC-owned element from mainline Doctor Who... under a different name.

For example, the Faction Paradox series continues the story of the War in Heaven, a time war established in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures as being fought between the Time Lords of Gallifrey and the Enemy. In PROSE: Lungbarrow, the Time Lords were established to have ruling clans known as the Great Houses. The Faction Paradox series licensed the concept of the "Great Houses" from Marc Platt, and of "the War in Heaven" from Lawrence Miles — and carried on writing about the War between the Enemy and "members of the Great Houses", whose homeworld is now only ever mentioned as just that... "the Homeworld".

Because stories licensed to use both terms, "the members of the Great Houses" and "the Time Lords", already equated the former with the latter, only one page is required for "Homeworlders" and "Time Lords", and information about "the Homeworld of the members of the Great Houses" belongs on Gallifreyan history, just as it would if all those sources had the license to use the name of Gallifrey.

What this means is that a bridge term can link two stories with the same concept. The requirement is that one story might have rights to both legal properties.

The presence of this link is essential. One novel, licensed to use both "facets", can establish that both angles are on the same fictional concept. Without this, we must separate our pages. The Book of the War does everything in its power to convince you that the War King used to be the Master, but there's never been a story licensed to use both "the War King" and "the Master" which explicitly drew this connection in a narrative context. Therefore, in the absence of our coveted bridge term, the War King he is, and the War King he shall stay. This is why he has his own page from the Master, where only "behind the scenes", we can reveal this connection.