Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20131126205522

Hi all :)

In the wake of The Day of the Doctor, numbering has gotten a little dicey. We've solved how we're going to use the terms "Ninth Doctor", "Tenth Doctor" and "Eleventh Doctor" in another thread.

But the really tricky bit is how we handle things like:
 * Ninth incarnation
 * Tenth self
 * Eleventh body

Since we've used these terms for years on the wiki, as a way to vary sentence structure, and since not all these instances are linked, it's going to be tedious in the extreme to try to fix them.

For the time being, please continue to use the same number for "incarnation", "self" and "body" that you do for "Doctor".

If you start using "twelfth incarnation" to refer to Matt Smith, that's going to fly in the face of tons of work that already exists on the site. We've been around for nine years. The number of references — many of them not linked and therefore harder to find with a bot – that would have to be changed is scary. Speaking in terms of what is technically possible on the wiki, it would involve roughly 3 days' solid work, as I'd have to run the bot on manual on 37,000+ pages, scanning for the context of "incarnation", "body", "self", "life", "reincarnation", and any other similar words I could put in the hopper.

Remember, even the War Doctor doesn't consider himself "the Doctor" at any point in his life that he can remember. Capaldi is the key to whether we need to undertake some laborious text changes around here. If he purports to be the Thirteenth Doctor, then, yah, we're going to need to change a lot around here. But until and unless that happens narratively, then he's the Twelfth Doctor, self, incarnation and body "of the Time Lord known as the Doctor".

To explain further, imagine you made this arguably correct edit: In his eleventh body, the Doctor enjoyed a long period of travel with Donna Noble. Fine, that can be established as being accurate ... from a certain point of view. But since we have tons and tons of articles where "eleventh body/incarnation/Doctor/face/whatever" refers to Matt Smith, you're creating a situation that cannot be corrected by bot.

We would have to manually check every single page on the wiki to understand the context of the phrase "eleventh body" to know how to correct it.

'Please, for the sake of your overworked administrative staff, keep all the numbers like they were prior to Day''. If "eleven" always means Matt Smith, and "ten" always means David Tennant, it'll be a lot easier to change things if Capaldi suddenly becomes definitively Thirteen.'''

"But, wait," I can hear you say. "Don't we go on what's established in narrative around here? Isn't it explicit in the script of The Day of the Doctor that Hurt is the Doctor? Aren't we shown Eight regenerating into Hurt and Hurt regenerating, however barely, into Eccleston?"

Well, yes, And no. The script has him also denying his role as "the Doctor". The script also has the other Doctors denying him, too. And the script quite clearly says that, even after he claims the mantle of Doctor, he doesn't remember it. And then there are tons of other narratives where Ten and Eleven are said to be, or proclaim themselves to be, their respective numbers.

So what we have here is one tiny little piece of dialogue versus the bulk of the rest of Day and every other story since 2005 that gives us a Doctor's number.

There is definite narrative ambiguity here, which, frankly, we need to exploit for administrative sanity. It would be quite unreasonable to change everything on the basis of one moment in Day, only to have Capaldi strongly assert that he was the Twelfth Doctor. The one thing we're definitely not doing is to change everything only to have to change it back.

So let's just shunt the War Doctor off in his numberless world and continue on as we were before Day happened.  