Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4139960-20130502195128/@comment-188432-20130502230342

I'm generally not a fan of history/biography sections. They encourage lazy writing. At the TARDIS, I think it would go against the structure that's already there, which makes much more sense to me. Yes, fine, she's "alive" in some sense, but how can you do a history when she's existing in multiple timelines simultaneously. Seems to me that was rather the narrative point of Journey to the Centre and '"The Doctor's Wife''.

I think writing the article primarily using the organisational principle of locations and features is the only sane way to write the article. If you tried to chronicle her like a person, I think you'd just get into all sorts of timeline — not to mention motivational — speculation. With something as narratively ubiquitous as the TARDIS, a "biography" would be tantamount to a timeline article, and if we can't even figure out the order of stories for individual Doctors, why would we think we could do it for the TARDIS? Another way of saying that is that there's not much difference between Theory:Timeline - The TARDIS and the sums of all the other Theory:Timeline pages.

I think it's better to layer in the history as it pertains to the locations within and features of the TARDIS. A true biography would make the article far less helpful.

Really, we should be continuing to edit down the TARDIS and putting more and more "history of individual components" off onto those component pages.