Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26469787-20150726050336/@comment-188432-20160723054516

BananaClownMan wrote: I say, we take a vote, like with the Titan Backup comics. The situations are considerably different, so the one fails to be predictive of the other.

Or to put it more simply, Shambala was right. There won't be a vote.

See, the Titan Backup comics were new. And their inclusion was an arbitrary decision. A simple up/down vote -- given that there had already been significant discussion -- was as good a method as any for determining an issue that was never going to have that much impact on the wiki as a whole.

That's not the case here.

In the past, we've had a number of discussions about this kind of thing. In fact, on this very thing. And we've maintained that you can only use in-universe proof, as Shambala has been pointing out.

It does not matter what the production team have said about the earring. It certainly doesn't matter what reference books written decades after transmission have said. What matters is what we can discern from the episodes as televised, and initially transmitted on BBC One.

That's it, really.

Writing an in-universe article is really simple at Tardis. You watch the episodes. You take notes. You work from those notes. And only those notes. You never let yourself fall into the trap of confusing behind-the-scenes information with in-universe matters. And you really never try to use narratives to prove an out-of-universe fact.

If you keep this in mind then you'll be able to properly identify the thing about the earring a production error not "proof that the proper timeline is something other than broadcast order."

See, I used to be on the side of people who wanted to restructure the McCoy era. But then Tangerineduel made me stop and reconsider the wisdom of that. There are any number of serials which have absolutely no connective tissue between them. That's even more true with stories in other media.

One of the easiest televised eras where this phenomenon occurs is once K9 Mark I has joined Leela and the Fourth Doctor. There's really nothing preventing the assertion that The Sun Makers occurred before Image of the Fendahl. In fact, the only stories of Season 15 that need to be where they were broadcast are the first and last ones. Leela's eye color changes at the top of the season, and she leaves at the bottom -- but otherwise there's nothing much that mandates the middle stories be in any particular order.

So if we were to allow this reordering of stories in the McCoy era as you suggest, we'd be opening ourselves up to different people having different ideas about proper narrative order -- throughout the history of Doctor Who. And we just can't have that kinda chaos. Since it is a general television convention that broadcast order does equal narrative order, that's what we have chosen after lengthy discussion.