User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20180428165444/@comment-6032121-20190921192913

Whether the two Cushing movies from the real world should get "(theatrical film)" dab terms is currently under discussion at Talk:Dr. Who and the Daleks. The crux of the matter is A) that invalid stories don't have to get dab terms by policy, though sometimes they do — note that Search Out Space doesn't have a dab term either —, B) that since there aren't any valid theatrical films yet, we would be creating a new story dab term just for a couple of invalid stories. Mind you, I fall on the side of dabbing.

I'm certainly not advocating deleting the info about the Dalek Movies' universe from the Wiki altogether; only that instead of awkwardly trying to cover it as "pseudo-valid", in the full detail we give valid TV stories from the mainline DWU, we would give shorter accounts of the main characters and not to have page about every last secondary character or item; and the pages we would have about those characters would have a shiny interwiki banner at the top along the lines of "This is a summary of what is of interest about this guy from the perspective of a TV Who fan, but if you want coverage of his universe for its own sake, proceed to w:c:dalekmovies:Ian Chesterton" or what have you.

Also, the issue with making a separate page for the in-universe movies and Dr. Who character is that we can't just dab it to The Day of the Doctor: there are other previous references to Dr Who in valid stories, as shown in the relevant section of our current Dr. Who page, titled "Within the Doctor's universe".

I suppose a possible solution would be to have Dr. Who (A Visit to the Cinema) be about Dr. Who as a fictional character within the DWU (the short story A Visit to the Cinema appears to be the earliest story depicting him so), Dr. Who (The Five O'Clock Shadow) about the version brought into existence by the Doctor as part of a scheme in The Five O'Clock Shadow, and Parallel Doctors (Four Doctors) or something about the hypothetical parallel Doctors, Cushing lookalike included, from the Four Doctors comic. All three would then contain reference in their BTS section to the fact that they're all nods to the Dalek Movies Universe (DMU?) character. Said BTS entries would then link to Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks) and/or to the Dalek Movies Wiki page w:c:dalekmovies:Dr. Who.

But that's a bit convoluted, isn't it? And the John and Gillian and Sherlock Holmes precedents suggest not splitting character pages between "as a fictional character" and "as someone the Doctor can meet outside the Land of Fiction", if it's clearly the same character being referenced in the dueling accounts.