User:NateBumber

Hi! I'm Nate, a fellow wearing many hats: blogger; moderator of the Doctor Who and Gallifrey communities on Reddit; "Godfather" of the Faction Paradox forum; admin of the Doctor Who Discord and its flourishing wiki channel; janitor of the Faction Paradox and Obverse wikis; and occasional author! Nothing is canon, but the Eighth Doctor novels are canoner than NuWho, and I will challenge you to Rock Paper Scissors if you disagree.

Disclaimer: I do my best to stick to, and I absolutely never intend to attack anyone through what I say on this site. If any reader takes unintended offense at anything I say, I sincerely apologize; feel free to contact me about it and I'll retract the perceived insult at the earliest opportunity.

Come join our growing community of wiki editors at the Doctor Who Discord! (When you join, just ping me  to give you the Wiki role.)

Changes I'd currently like on the wiki
Big thanks to everyone who's helped with things on this list!

Renames

 * First Morbius to Morbius I, First Tecteun to Tecteun I, First Drax to Drax I, and so on, per Talk:First Morbius
 * Main Range to The Monthly Adventures (audio series) (contra the conclusion at Talk:Main Range)
 * The Short Trips and Decalog anthologies: for instance, Short Trips: Zodiac to Zodiac (anthology) (see Talk:Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury)

Mergers

 * Acid (drug) into LSD
 * Bacon sarnie into Bacon sandwich
 * Corvus into Chessman
 * Dot Branning into Dot Cotton
 * Dramos (planet) into Dramos (asteroid)
 * Elizabeth (Players) into Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
 * Obverse Paradise Towers series into Paradise Towers (series)
 * Paradise Towers (comic series) into Paradise Towers (series)
 * Quomippins into Quompipping
 * Wild boar into Boar

Policy
For 817 days, there was no way to change policy on this wiki. Thank you to the brave admins who helped rescue us and to all the users who weighed in at Forum talk:Index!

Proposals
Brief elaborations on some proposals at Tardis:Temporary forums which I support.
 * Subpages are direly underutilized on this wiki. At minimum, we should use Sabbath Dei/List of appearances instead of Sabbath Dei - list of appearances and Faction Paradox (series)/Covers instead of Faction Paradox covers.
 * Lists of appearances should use sortable tables so stories can be sorted both chronologically and by medium: see Sabbath Dei - list of appearances for an example. Some of this could probably be automated with SemanticWiki along the lines of Bongo50's excellent citation template tests.
 * T:SPOIL is designed to protect the hypothetical editor who doesn't want to learn about future content from Special:RecentChanges, but given the extreme reach of these announcements and the effort the BBC puts into promoting them, it's clear that such an editor isn't experiencing the franchise the way it's meant to be experienced. When the top trending search on this wiki for months is [REDACTED], an actor for whom we don't even have a page (!), we're failing the actual users of this wiki. It's long overdue that we allow -marked pages for new cast members based on official announcements, and -marked subpages for returning cast and crew. In the meantime, Tardis talk:Where spoilers are allowed has my light-touch proposal to make our current policy saner.
 * Our treatment of metafictional information is unnecessarily confusing to the not we, who sensibly expect pages like Doctor Who Series 9 to be about … you know … Doctor Who Series 9! We need a better and more explicit policy for disambiguation in this kind of scenario.
 * It would be helpful for disambiguation and less confusing for everyone if unproduced stories were dabbed as such: for instance, Creatures of Habit (comic story) should be moved to Creatures of Habit (unproduced comic story).
 * When you search for a redirect, the search bar now shows you not only the page name you're typing but also what it redirects to or from! This removes the obstacle to using names from novelisations in page titles. See Sandbox 3 for a list of pages which can be better disambiguated in this light.
 * Timewalkerauthor's summaries should not have been removed: in particular, I don't understand the comment that we shouldn't want people to "come here to get information they can get somewhere else". This entire wiki began as a fork of Wikipedia's Doctor Who pages!

Ideas
These are still cooking!
 * Our treatment of multi-part stories is a mess: either we flatten all 12 episodes and 3 months of The Daleks' Master Plan into a single page, or we plug our fingers in our ears and flat-out refuse to acknowledge that series 13 is a multi-part story called Flux. This has negative practical effects regarding
 * naming. "An Unearthly Child" is the name of the first episode of the serial 100,000 BC, but since we have no way to discuss the individual episode separately from its serial, we call all four episodes An Unearthly Child. This makes it impossible for us to discuss the many stories which have adapted "An Unearthly Child" without touching on the other episodes of the serial. This would be fixed by a precedent that allows for pages for individual installments, like "An Unearthly Child (episode)".
 * disambiguation. Contrast Andy Stone (The Dalek Book) with Tecteun (Once, Upon Time), or Nurse (Children of Earth) and Father (Children of Earth: Day One).
 * counting. See Talk:Season 23 for an argument over how to count the parts of The Trial of a Time Lord, where our unnuanced view of how stories relate almost led us to diverge from the consensus numbering used by every single other reference source.
 * our usefulness as a research tool. Try figuring out what exact date Sara Kingdom debuted on TV in The Daleks' Master Plan, or which of the story's two authors wrote that episode!
 * Contra T:MERGE, the key question regarding character page mergers should be "Is it useful to readers to cover these concepts on separate pages?", not "Is there continuity of consciousness between these characters?"
 * Characters and concepts with minor appearances or mentions in other realities simply do not need separate pages. It serves no one to separate our coverage of Moira (Shadow World) from Moira (The Pilot), Jevon (Ascension) from Jevon (Emancipation), or David Whitaker (The Thief of Sherwood) from David Whitaker (The Daleks). See T:SUBPAGE for one potential fix.
 * For a wiki run by fans for fans, we sure do care an awful lot about licensing! If 100% of the audience understands that a character is intended to be (for instance) the Doctor, the useful thing for us to do is to simply cover them as the Doctor. The Homeworld principle already hints at this, but a broader policy would also allow us to acknowledge the obvious intentions in cases like the Mistress (The Choice) and the Imperator. See Sandbox 3 for a longer potential list.
 * To dam the endless stream of disturbing pages like "12-years-old girl from Nice, France", we should follow Wikipedia's precedent and restrict page creation in the Main namespace to registered editors. This would not affect any good-faith IP editors, who could still create talk pages and edit existing articles, and who are already mostly uninterested in creating pages in the Main namespace. It just makes sense that by the time a user wants to create an article, we require them to provide a talk page where users can advise them on formatting and so on.