Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-20607870-20160106210048/@comment-5918438-20160106220221

The issue becomes one of diambiguation. For example, Matt Smith (The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who) is dabbed as an exception to regular T:DAB rules because it would simply be absurd to move Matt Smith—the real world actor—to Matt Smith (actor), simply because of an appearance in one comic which takes place in an alternate universe.

See the thing is, when something from the DWU and something from the real world have the same name or title, we always dab the real world topic, but never the DWU one (unless there's another DWU topic by the same name).

But if we break that for Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, etc, this then becomes a debate on—should John Cleese be the DWU character, or is real world Cleese's single Doctor Who contribution significant enough for him to get the same treatment? Or does the real world info just go in a behind the scenes section? That's what we do at Brian Blessed.

And so you see, at that point we're in a place of extreme ambiguity, where editors call precedent from different examples, and do very different things for different people that don't necessarily have any basis in policy.

Really, there can be only two ways to approach that:


 * 1) Define very clearly the limited scope of which real world articles are primary topics. Let's say, just for example, any actor who is in the primary cast of a season or series in either TV or audio—Peter Capaldi, Patrick Troughton Elisabeth Sladen, Lalla Ward, Lisa Bowerman, etc—is deemed to be the primary topic for that name, but only those cases.
 * 2) Make an exception for every topic which we cover somebody—the exact same person, the same singular entity—from both in-universe and real world perspectives. This would not apply to any situation where the DWU character is different from the real world person, despite the shared name. This only makes any sense if it's because we're covering the same person. However—this does not make for a very clear rule, because we want T:DAB to be as straight-forward as possible. I do not recommend this option. I'm also weary of this because John Cleese, for example, is mentioned in more than one story, and it would make much more sense to simply house him at John Cleese rather than whichever one happened to have been published first. And what would count? TV Action! is his only true appearance, so is that the first one? And what if the first mention doesn't give the full name, but the second one does? For cases like these, if split up, it would make muuuuch more sense to simply have John Cleese and John Cleese (actor).

In short, if we are to make more in-universe articles for real world Doctor Who actors and production crew, I think the only way to properly go about it if to give the undabbed name to the DWU individual, only making exceptions based on one clearly defined rule:
 * If an actor's name is featured pre-titles for a season (or is a primary character/companion for a great deal of audios), that real world actor is a primary topic. If a crew member is above the line—director, producer, writer, script editor in old Who—for a great deal of TV stories or for an entire season, they might be primary topics too. (Not sure on that last one right now. But by that rule, if Chris Chibnall for some reason were to appear in a DWU story, he'd get the main name and the DWU character would get dabbed.)

And you can see this is a messy issue, from a technical and from an administrative point of view. We always place priority on in-universe topics, and I think exceptions like Matt Smith should be few.

Keeping the two on one page—whether a DWU page with a "behind the scenes" section, or a real world page with an "in the DWU" section—is often a very simple and clean solution.

More questions arise than answers once you start to delve into the crossroads between the two worlds, which we treat very, very distinctly here. Should Bill Bailey be an in-universe topic with a behind the scenes section covering his one acting credit? Or Bill Bailey and Bill Bailey (actor) for the real world guy? Bill Bailey certainly shouldn't just be the RW actor, because he's in no way a primary topic, and T:DAB always, always applies, with very few exceptions. I'm not surprised at all that people just added DWU information to the bottom of real world pages, because this titling issue can be messy business.