Forum:The Question

Given that the "Doctor Who?" question is now something with in-universe significance, shouldn't The "Doctor Who?" running joke be merged into The Question (and rewritten to be an in-universe account of occasions on which The Question was uttered)? 94.75.90.48talk to me 03:38, February 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * Not just no but hell no. The "Doctor Who?" running joke, which frankly is a silly article that I still think should be deleted, has an entirely different purpose to The Question.  It's trying to catalogue the metatextual references to the title of the programme, from a decidedly out-of-universe point of view.  That's why it's got a big ol' "real world" banner at the top of it.


 * The Question is about the in-universe question which fuels the religion known as the Silence. That's it.  That's the limit of that article.  Yes, the question is "Doctor who?", but the Question must clearly be asked in a particular context, at a particular time, for it to have resonance with the Silence.  Obviously, it's been asked a ton of times in the past without triggering the Silence.  At the beginning of The Christmas Invasion, Jackie Tyler is not asking "'the capital-bloody-Q Question".  She's just putting the words "doctor" and "who" into a sentence that ends with a question mark.  When Rose asks "Doctor who?" in The Empty Child, she's not triggering the Silence.  When the Brig's replacement in The Five Doctors asks the question, he's not calling forth the Silence.  The Question is specifically relative to some sort of interaction between the Silence and the Eleventh Doctor which has yet to be broadcast.  It does not mean every instance of someone asking the Doctor's true name/identity, which is what The "Doctor Who?" running joke is attempting to catalogue. 17:31: Sun 19 Feb 2012

Unlike Czechout, I like the "Running Gag" article and consider it as valid as any metatextual article like "Companions of the Doctor"  or "Pseudonyms of the Doctor." Moreover, the point of the running gag is entirely different from "The Question".... even if, as I believe, Moffatt got the idea of The Question from the Running Gag. However, just as I don't think that the IMDB article on Douglas Fairbanks Jr. should be subsumed in that of his father, I believe that these are two separate subjects. Were they given the same name, they would still require two articles and a disambiguation page. And two hardboiled eggs. Boblipton talk to me 19:14, February 19, 2012 (UTC)

Archivist's notes
Both respondents agreed that the two pages were sufficiently different as to remain separated. 19:27: Wed 02 May 2012