User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-28349479-20180405163637/@comment-28349479-20180406182548

It's very true that the novelisations often contradict the episodes in ways that aren't just expanding the events seen on TV. I think that's true of all adaptations, whether TV-to-novel, novel-to-audio, or novel-to-TV! Most examples I've noticed are with name changes, like Tom Girton being renamed "Tom Wilkins". But we already have pretty good ways of dealing with this, as you can see on the Tom Girton page, Fendelman, or Auderly House: the page title is the way it's spelled in the captions of the episode, but the other names are listed as variant spellings.

In cases where the actual events are changed, like a line of dialogue from the episode being said by a different character ... well, little technicalities like that are rarely mentioned on pages, but when they are, as User:Mewiet pointed out, "According to another account"s can go a long way.

There are occasionally bigger changes: eg a few novelisations suggest that Ben and Polly come from the 1970s, not the 60s. But that can be very easily accounted for on their pages: "According to another account, he/she instead began traveling with the Doctor during the 1970s. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, Doctor Who and the Cybermen)"

There are already plenty of examples of this concerning deaths, eg at Ace, so it's clearly a flexible format; I see no reason why it wouldn't be able to extent to this circumstance. After all, by their very definition, adaptations are different accounts of the original stories.