Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-5532276-20121230175132/@comment-188432-20130104203957

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say it's not in a behind the scenes section. Its biggest possible offence is that it's a behind the scenes section not precisely labelled "behind the scenes". To my mind, though, if you say "real world location" you're clearly saying, "this is information from the real world and not the DWU" so that's more than close enough to the precise words "behind the scenes".

Now, you might ask, why even invite this criticism? Why not just call it "behind the scenes" and be done with it. Well, we can't do that. Not because we don't want to, or that it would be hard. I mean, we do not have the ability to do that. There are two things stopping us from titling the section "behind the scenes":
 * 1) If we did that, we couldn't easily use on pages that already have a broader BTS section, such as London
 * 2) The MediaWiki code does not allow section heads to be fully transcluded. You'll note that none of these sections have an "edit" button next to them. Thus, we wouldn't want the title of the section to be "Behind the scenes", because it would mean that people wouldn't be able to edit just that section — which they can on the vast majority of pages that contain a BTS section.  Giving the section its own name means that every time we see that section head, we'll know it behaves similarly.

Moving on to your final paragraph, it appears you don't like the exact wording of the pre-formatted text. Can we talk about revisions to this text? Sure. But I'd point out that just because there is standard text does not mean that you are limited to using only that text. For example, Memphis and Miami contain pretty large caveats that flow logically from the pre-formatted text.

I would also say, in defence of the text as it now exists, that the statements are true. There aren't many known cases of the location of a real world city being significantly different from what would be shown by the Google map opened to the standard scale. In no way does the standard display actually give the precise real world geocoding, nor does it by default open to a satellite view — even if the maps obviously are based on that amount of real world precision. In most cases, we're talking about a very basic drawing of the location. The whole point of the module is just to give a sense-at-a-glance notion of location.

What's the utility of all this? Basically, the same utility as everything in category:cricket. Very often I find that place names get thrown out in DW fiction which are familiar to British audiences, but not at all to everyone else. I know I was mystified for years by Sarah Jane's last line in The Hand of Fear. Where the hell was Croyden? Since when has she ever been described as being from this Croyden place, I wondered. Just knowing "it is somewhere close to London" would have been helpful, because then it makes sense that she was going back to London, which is where I'd always assumed she was from. Also, unless you really understand where Croyden is, the Tenth Doctor's "that's near Aberdeen" joke in School Reunion doesn't make sense. But there's nothing in any narrative which gives you a wisp of a clue about this. Why? Because British writers often assume that you know where British locations are. In the same way that they assume you know what it means to be "hit for six" or to throw a leg spinner.

And this geographic shorthand I think is prevalent throughout a ton of DW fiction. It is assumed we know where Tadcaster is in Fogbound. We are absolutely meant to know that Salford is a Mancunian suburb, and that's why Patricia Menzies has a Mancunian accent in The Raincloud Man and other stories. Hell, the whole of Invasion of the Cat-People is a travelogue throughout Australia, but Gary Russell doesn't do a brilliant job of explaining where things are relative to other things, even though their relative distances is, in a few cases, actually plot-relevant.

So I'd push back firmly on the notion that this feature goes against our normal policies. It adds a relevant connection to the real world in exactly the same way that most BTS sections on "from the real world" pages normally do.

Is the map of Memphis giving us info that is as valuable as knowing who sung "Merry Xmas Everybody"? Is it as valuable as knowing a bit more about "Kookaburra" or "Voodoo Child" or "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"? Sure. At least that much. And in some cases, as with "the adventures of Nate Simms" section of Invasion of the Cat-People, having maps — even if potentially the shape of the DWU's Australia isn't exactly the same as the real world — help us non-Australians to contextualise that part of the narrative in precisely the way that Russell didn't.

Similarly, I think illustrating what Fell's Point is helps us to understand that Peri is talking about a section of the city of Baltimore. Thus, there isn't discontinuity with other stories where she takes a shortcut and just says she's from Baltimore.

So I think this template allows us to do precisely what you allege it doesn't.  It gives us the opportunity to help our readers understand the basic geography of a place mentioned in the DWU, while at the same time allowing a very careful statement that "this may not be the precise DWU location".

It does, I think, fit within the bounds of T:NO RW, because it explicitly says, "it's possible that a real world location doesn't exist in the same geographic space in the Doctor Who universe".

The kind of "RW creep" that we've been trying to eliminate from the site never gave this kind of warning. It featured people, for example, slipping in birth dates and death dates indiscriminately, and in some cases preferring Wikipedia info to actual narrative information. This is, to my mind, clearly different because we're putting it in its own section, and we are explicitly saying, "this might not be what is true of the DWU".