User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20180428165444/@comment-6032121-20191214184502

Important semantics, though. "Alternate timeline" is a real concept within the DWU, not something where we can just assume one exists; it'd functionally be the same as assuming that if an interior set doesn't match the exterior shot to which it supposedly corresponds, then the building must in fact be dimensionally transcendental.

Again, the practical question isn't so much what we do on First Doctor as it is this: do we want to be creating Skaro (Dr. Who and the Daleks) or Earth (Dr. Who and the Daleks)? Or are The Daleks and Dr. Who and the Daleks competing accounts of people landing on the same Skaro?

If we separate our "differently valid" material completely, either as an "alternative timeline" or as "alternative validity", then because we are positing different universes for Dr. Who and the Shalka Doctor & Co., then we would have to create all those pages to give these universes full coverage. Whereas what I am saying is, no.

A lot of the baseline facts of the Whoniverse remain the same in all theses cases, even if there is conflict over other baseline facts; these are conflicting accounts of what the DWU looks like, not alternative DWUs altogether. I mean, I think it's completely ridiculous that we have The Brigadier (Death Comes to Time), a page which just treats the character's two-minute cameo as all we know about him and acts as though we have no inkling of his prior relationship with the Doctor. That's just wrong. But I do not see how going with "alternative timeline" or "separately valid" would fix that.

Wholly separating 'canons' is just about viable if we were just talking about the Cushingverse, even if I think it's probably miles away from the authorial intent at the time to act as though Dr. Who and the Daleks takes place on a different Skaro than Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. But if we want to extend this change in our validity rules to other Rule-4-breakers, it just doesn't work.