Forum:The Master - 1 article

This is a revisit of Forum:The Master, where the discussion had reached a conclusion but we hadn't quite gotten to an action point, so I thought I revisit was in order to get this settled and done.

But as we've recently had another instance of a user creating another Master article I felt we needed to revisit this again and get a decision.

As was surmised in 2008 and again during our Talk:The Master discussion concerning the image for the article there are fewer Master incarnations than we think.

I'm still in favour of rolling all the articles back into 1 main article. I think this would help with clarity and editing and stop people from trying to create extra Master articles. --Tangerineduel / talk 16:41, November 15, 2011 (UTC)
 * Swiftly seconded.


 * The Master is unlike other Time Lords in that we don't have narrative names for the various incarnations. And the names we've chosen are completely random.  There's not an easy way to make the character obey T:ONE NAME, the relevant policy, because it requires the use of the first story in which the character appeared.  This disambiguation would be highly ambiguous for the Master, since The Master (Utopia), The Master (Doctor Who), and The Master (Keeper of Traken) all refer to more than one incarnation.


 * Thus, as a purely disambiguational question, I think the single most sensible thing to do is to put it all on one page.


 * Your still left, however, with finding a way to talk about the character. There are times where you're going to want to specify a particular incarnation, so redirects will inevitably be created to particular parts of the article.  So you still need some name you can call these guys that makes sense.  I think we could "pull a T:ROMANA" and slightly fudge our in-universe-only name rule. To me, the easiest thing to do would be to:
 * Put all the info on The Master
 * Create redirects to sections of The Master


 * These redirects should use common-sense names, in the same way that we have Romana I and Romana II, despite the lack of narrative evidence for those names. Obviously we can't use numbers for the the various Masters, but we can just use the actor or company name.


 * So you'd end up with the following redirects:
 * The Master (Delgado)
 * The Master (Ainley)
 * The Master (BFA)
 * The Master (DWM)
 * The Master (Roberts)
 * The Master (Jacobi) (and since Shalka isn't in canon, this isn't, practically, ambiguous)
 * The Master (Simm)


 * That way, you have a naming system that makes some kind of sense, but you can easily hide the out-of-universe nomenclature. Being redirects, no pages will ever bear these actors' names, but editors and readers can use a system that's far more straightforward than what we have.  18:23: Tue 15 Nov 2011


 * Alrighty. I think the simplest way is do all this is to copy and integrate the information from the various articles into the one Master article.
 * I don't think it's practical to try and merge the histories of the various articles. It is possible to do (I think), it would involve merging two and two and so on. I think it's doable, but it would leave us with a long and fairly convoluted history for the Master article because all the the 7 Master articles' histories would end up merged. --Tangerineduel / talk 17:01, November 29, 2011 (UTC)