Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-86.174.105.135-20161211174119/@comment-20607870-20161215202806

SOTO wrote: I wouldn't say that the problem is we have "too many" Doctor pages. We're not exactly running out of space here. We don't need to cut down.

What I find to be the central issue in this thread is how we've been giving pages to Doctors that aren't actually distinct from the ones already defined, just not specified. Frankly, T:DAB OTHER already covers what we do with alternate reality versions of anyone: they get a separate page, and a dab term after a name given to the universe from whence they came.

I don't think we have any of these sorts of pages, but according to current convention with other characters, the only "alternate characters" that don't typically get their own page are those that were the main character, simply involved in an alternate timeline, which is usually reversed by the end.

(I'm sure there was a forum discussion that led to this, but it does seem a bit odd that we haven't got Donna Noble (Donna's World) anymore, seeing as it's made clear that wasn't just an alternative timeline but a "great big parallel universe", on the same level as Pete's World — except that it diverged more recently than Pete's World did. And it's made quite clear that Donna's World Donna is a distinct individual who would die when her whole world blinks out of existence, and does die to save her reality.)

So, for example, we don't need Eleventh Doctor (River Song's World), and we don't need Charles Dickens (River Song's World), either. This sort of information just goes in an alternate timeline section. We certainly don't need a separate page, for, say, the Eleventh Doctor in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, even though the events of that story were reversed.

But, as far as I'm aware, all the incarnations in category:Alternate versions of the Doctor do not fill that bill. If they were all played by an actor, they would be played by a different actor to any of the ones onscreen. Mostly, anyway—I did notice Lord of the Manor, and having listened to The Eternal Summer, I know he's an alternative future Fifth Doctor, still played by Peter Davison. But I do stand by that he deserves his own page, as he's pretty much that story's Valeyard, in the sense that he's the main villain of the piece, with Nyssa as the Lady of the Manor.

100% agree.