User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20131126205522/@comment-188432-20131128233641

T:OFF REL and T:VS both make it very plain that a Moffat interview does nothing to clear anything up. An interview about something which hasn't even been released has no merit on this wiki. We simply can't edit on the basis of it.

Why? Moffat lies. Always has, always will. That's his job. Also, I can give you other interviews in which he firmly says that the numbering stays exactly the same. He's also said that numbering is based on the face you see, meaning that Tennant can't be two different incarnations. Guys, Moffat is saying different things to different interviewers. He is in no way a trustworthy source for this wiki.

We at this wiki don't have the luxury of wishy-washy spin-doctorism. Every page must have a unique name. You can't just start using "eleventh incarnation" to mean the Tenth Doctor. You have to actually do some work finding the already-existing links and changing them. But then you have to do the much harder thing: find all the unlinked mentions of "tenth incarnation" and change those, too. By hand. After looking at every single page on the wiki.

That's just the fact of the MediaWiki software underpinning the wiki. This isn't a blog or a social media site. It's a relational database. And in any database, each record needs to be unique. We can't just say what we want, because it's all part of an organic whole. If on one page you say "eleventh incarnation" when you mean "Tenth Doctor", but on another I say "tenth incarnation" to mean "Tenth Doctor", it won't make any sense to our readers.

It's entirely possible that Moffat will make us think of David Tennant's Doctor in that bifurcated way: the Tenth Doctor, who's the eleventh and twelfth incarnation. And at that point we'll have to make another determination.

But for now we need to hold our collective nerve, and continue editing using precisely the same ordinal numbers as we did before Day was released. It's the only way we're even going to be able to think about making changes if they need to be made in the future.