User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-6032121-20190914173756/@comment-28349479-20190918185258

User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-6032121-20190914173756/@comment-28349479-20190918185258 Unfortunately authorial intent isn't relevant to even character identification. Authorial intent said that The War King was The Master, but the connection hasn't been made clear enough in-text, so the pages have stayed (mercifully) separate. The same goes for Ulysses and Daniel Joyce and the Doctor's father (at least until I open that Panopticon debate :P). I guess it's one thing if we conclude that two characters are the same based on in-text connections, and an author comes out and explicitly says they aren't, which indicates that we misread the evidence. But if a writer intends two characters to be the same, and there isn't enough evidence in-text to back it up, their intention is irrelevant.

Thankfully, we don't need an ounce of authorial intent to conclude that the Dalek Prime = Golden Emperor = Dalek Emperor (The Evil of the Daleks), because it's sufficiently specified in-text. Setting aside Doug86's suggestion that the timeline doesn't line up - which I think you successfully countered - you've proved pretty definitively in OP that there is enough in-text evidence to conclude that the characters are the same.

And I think Doug86 agrees. As I read it, his point of contention regards not what is stated in Peel's stories but what is stated in others. If there is conflicting information, it should definitely be treated analogously to Kaldor City's location in Legacy: the conflicting information will be included on the combined page via a "According to another account" clause. That's no worry.

And that's my preferred approach for the Creation of the Daleks page, with the Davros-centric account we saw on-screen being placed alongside the "According to the Dalek Emperor", Genesis of Evil version of events. As it stands, User:Scrooge MacDuck/Sandbox Alpha reads a little like "Here's the Davros story, but here's what really happened," when I think really both of the two competing narratives should each be allowed to stand on their own merits. But that's just me.