User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-39450671-20200330222925/@comment-6032121-20200606131621

Lots of very wrong things to unpack in the post by the anonymous user, though I recognise that it was made in good faith and certainly didn't half-try. I'm going to give an ordered, structured reply to the various points raised.

The issue of timelines
The thing about this proposal to split the Master is that we do not try to unify the chronology. T:NPOV and T:NO FANFIC, taken together, prohibit us from speculation on how Legacy of the Daleks fits with Doorway to Hell, how the various early versions of the Master fit together, etc.

This is in fact one of the biggest reasons to have separate pages for the various versions of the Master. Our current unified The Master page has to jump through all kinds of weird hoops to do things like put later accounts of the Anthony Ainley Master after his regeneration into the Basil Rathbone incarnation in First Frontier. It's inviting speculation.

Thus, the good thing about splitting the Master page would be that we can just have a page about the Ainley Master, a page about the Delgad Master, a page about the Rathbone Master, and so on, without having to write a unified timeline of in which order they go, and how one turns into the other.

About "incarnations"
Similarly, there is no consensus on what is an "incarnation" of the Master. Etymologically, an "incarnation" is just a body in which the mind incarnates; by that logic, the Eric Roberts Master should count as an "incarnation", even if in this case, the Master's mind didn't gain control of this new body through conventional Time Lord regeneration. Big Finish themselves, for all that they push the idea that all the Wilderness Years Master eventually revert into Geoffrey Beevers, have used the term "incarnation" when speaking about the Roberts Master in promotional material, and created "multi-Master stories" where the Roberts Master is one of the incarnations present, in his own right.

Additionally, there are even a few sources which term Ainley a "regeneration", depicting what happened to him at the end of The Keeper of Traken as being a parasitical and abnormal regeneration, but a regeneration nonetheless.  The Master, for example. The Velvet Dark, meanwhile, ends with the Master, who had lost his Ainley body after The Five Doctors as punishment by the Time Lords, stealing regeneration energy from his own past selves to regenerate himself back into that very form.

Once again, we can't agree on just when the Master is in a borrowed body and when it's a regeneration. Even without going into The Eight Doctors where he's just Ainley, we don't know, for example, whether was a regeneration of the Basil Rathbone Master, or an unrelated attempt to extend his life — the Seventh Doctor's reminiscence that this version was born by "extending his life by adding alien biomass to himself" could be a reference to First Frontier, or it could not be. We. Don't. Know.

Therefore, the proposal is that every version of the Master gets a page, regardless of whether they were formed by regeneration or something else.

War Chiefs, Streams, ambiguities
You mention Stream (The Hollows of Time), the Man with the Rosette, Magnus, the War Chief, and "Constable Goody" (I assume you mean Constable Pavo). All of those characters are pages about individuals who were more or less strongly implied to be the Master, and whom we know from behind-the-scenes sources to have been intended to be the Master, but without any hard confirmation in valid sources.

They have separate pages because we do not, as far as in-universe pages are concerned, acknowledge that they are the Master. This will not change whether or not we go forwards with the splitting plan. There was talk on Thread:181963 that novelisations now being completely valid might warrant reopening the War Chief discussion in particular, but that would definitely be its own discussion.

That being said, the split would arguably help this Wiki conform with the full extent of T:NPOV in this matter; if there is one The Master page and all these potential-but-ambiguous incarnations remain separate, we're not preserving the ambiguities of the source, we're decisively telling the reader "this is not the Master as far as we're concerned". This would be greatly lessened, to the benefit of our coverage of these stories, if all Masters had individual pages. Provided we relitigate the War Chief case, it would also allow us to say "According to some accounts, the War Chief was an incarnation of the Master, while in other accounts, they were two distinct Time Lords who grew up together", which, if it is supported by the various sources, would be an exceedingly difficult situation to write about in the current setup.

As for the War King, we would not consider him the Master even if we did usually allow implication, because the stories in which he appears weren't licensed to use the Master. If a story licensed to use both "the War King" and "the Master" confirms them to be the same individual, we'll return to the subject; a solution akin to Great House/Time Lords could be worked out, I suppose. But not before. Again, it's not really relevant to this problem.

Alternate Masters
Finally, you mention the Magistrate, the Unbound Master, the Shalka Master and the Fatal Death Master as Masters who already have their own pages.

Now, the thing is, the Magistrate is only implied to be the Master, so that takes care of that one.

Furthermore, two of those currently have separate coverage because this Wiki doesn't recognise their stories to take place in the DWU. If Scream of the Shalka isn't set in the Doctor Who universe, then obviously, the biography of its "the Master" should not be covered on the page of his DWU counterpart save in BTS sections. The same reasoning holds for the Curse of Fatal Death Master, notwithstanding the ongoing inclusion debate for Curse of Fatal Death. You did not mention the Winning Designs Master but that's also why he gets a page.

In a similar yet distinct reasoning, that leaves Mark Gatiss's “Unbound” Master, who has a page of his own because he's a different individual from the prime timeline's Master, even if their biographies started out very similar. He's a counterpart of the Master, not a person whom the original Master is at one point his life. Big difference.