Forum:How to cover "fictional" versions of real individuals

As we all know, we cover the Doctor, as a fictional character, on its own page. What I want to decide with this thread is how to cover fictional versions of other individuals.

Should there be pages for the fictional versions of, say, Amy (COMIC: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who) or Donna (WC: U.N.I.T. On Call)? WaltK ☎  13:11, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Discussion
My intent when creating The Doctor (fictional character) was not to set a precedent for other pages. My general take on coverage was to cover all the details on Doctor Who (in-universe) and in the respective "real" character's  #Legacy  section; the only reason I created the Doctor (fictional character) is because there was so much unique information, it was getting too hard to cover just on either Doctor Who (in-universe), The Doctor in popular culture and mythology, and in the legacy section of pages like Twelfth Doctor. In a sense, this is quite comparable to the treatment of alternate reality individuals under T:MERGE. 13:27, 21 June 2023 (UTC)


 * I think we should treat these cases the same as we do alternate timelines/universes. If we have a single blurb to say, add it to Amy Pond or Amy Pond. If we have a lot more, then the topic justifies its own page, but in these cases that would be rare. OS25🤙☎️ 14:25, 21 June 2023 (UTC)


 * I would submit that this should only hold when we have more specific information. In some of these cases we have seemingly signfiicant information about the fictionalised version, but also that information is just restatements of stuff that is true of the real person. If all we had about The Doctor (fictional character) was "one account confirmed the existence of an in-universe Third Doctor… and an in-universe Fourth Doctor… and an in-universe Sixth Doctor… one account confirmed that they came from Gallifrey, and one claimed that they visited Skaro at least once…", I just don't feel like it's helpful to make that its own page divorced from coverage of the real versions of these elements. It's only when the fictionalised version has significant discrepancies (or significant fictional BTS info) that a different page starts to be warranted, in my view. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 09:47, 23 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Largely agree with the above responses. I can't see what additional context these pages add. Also The Doctor (fictional character) needs to be trimmed b/c Shy Cyberman was ruled invalid. I'd do it myself but I'm not sure how much of the Peter Davison/etc stuff has other sources. Najawin ☎  17:36, 23 June 2023 (UTC)


 * A big issue I have with these "meta" pages is that they often treat alternate universes as mutually exclusive which I find confusing. I get why it's done but it's awful to sort through when you're an editor. OS25🤙☎️ 20:05, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

My slow progress through coverage of The Shakespeare Notebooks is another relevant example of this phenomena. I've mostly been examining the need for separate pages for the "fictional" versions on a case-by-case basis, which is fairly easy considering each version of the Doctor and his companions are the main characters of each story with multiple paragraphs of information about them. See The Doctor (The True Tragedie of Macbeth) or The Doctor (The True and Most Excellent Comedie of Romeo and Juliet) for examples of Doctor pages, whereas I haven't created Rassilon (A Prologue) because that would amount to a one-sentence-long article.

In short, I'm not sure there can be a specific policy on this. Maybe a ruling on what constitutes "significant information" but I think it's largely dependant on the source. To address the specific examples in the OP, Amy or Donna wouldn't come anywhere close to these paramaters in my opinion. The information would be better served in a section of their main page. Borisashton ☎  23:47, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Conclusion
As largely outlined in discussion above, this is a hard thing to give a hard-and-fast policy ruling on. It's a bit know-it-when-you-see-it. But the spirit of it should be that pages about fictionalised-in-universe versions of real DWU characters should only be split off from the original if there is sufficient original information. A character appearing in fictional works while remaining substantially true-to-life is not worth creating a specific page about. The Doctor (fictional character) is exists because it's a split-off outgrowth of The Doctor in popular culture and mythology, itself a split-off outgrowth of The Doctor. The intermediate stage can be skipped for most characters, but the basic idea holds: a priori, a fictionalised version should just be documented in the "Legacy" section (or similar) of the real page. If there's really quite a lot of fictional information that's not just repeating things that are also true of the real version, it can be split off to its own page.

The standard is really quite similar to a character's counterparts in other realities. We don't need a First Doctor (Unbound Universe) page that restates "his history was identical to the N-Space version in basically all respects" in meticulous detail; it's more economical to make him a small note in the First Doctor's /Other_realities subpage, cutting to the quick of which sources implied or stated that such a counterpart existed, and specifying in what few respects they might differ.

To rule explicitly on the examples provided in the OP, the confirmations of lifelike portrayals of Amy or Donna do not pass this standard. That's #Legacy (or, in the cases of meta-fiction universes like The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who, "#Other_realities") material.

Thanks to everyone who participated! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:19, 19 August 2023 (UTC)