Tardis:Merging policy

This is a draft for a future policy page. If you are an admin, feel free to contribute to the effort to compile precedent and common use into the final policy, which is planned to go to the Tardis:Merging policy namespace when it's completed. If you are a simple user, on the other hand, merely leave suggestions on my talk page. Merging articles is the process of collating the information on two different pages into one, after which an admin can merge the histories of two pages to truly make them one. This merging policy codifies the cases in which we do or do not merge pages with related topics, going through several cases.

One character, one page
Policies must be clearly applicable across the Wiki, and make sense within our in-universe perspective. For these reasons, groups of individuals must not be covered on a single page, even when this means the pages about the singular characters will contain largely identical information.

For example, Male art lover (City of Death) and Female art lover (City of Death) are different individuals in the DWU, even if they've never been seen apart and, in the real world, you'll never mention the one without the other.

Continuity of consciousness is key
Personhood is a tricky thing in the DWU. It is this Wiki's policy that identity between characters (leading to just the one page) is determined by continuity of consciousness rather than physical concerns — in either direction.

Consequently:
 * Rory Williams in TV: The Pandorica Opens, despite having been resurrected as an Auton, has all the memories of the dead "real" Rory up to that point. He loudly declares that "he is Rory", which the Eleventh Doctor confirms. Later, when Rory is resurrected again as a human after Big Bang Two, he has his memories of being an Auton. Therefore, we cover "both Rories" on the same page, as a single, linear biography.


 * Yana, John Smith or Ruth Clayton are what the bodies of (respectively), the Tenth Doctor and the "Fugitive" Doctor get up to while their Time Lord consciousnesses and memories are locked away in biodata modules. Despite being physically the same as their Time Lord counterparts, they have different memories and personalities, and consider turning back into Time Lords to be equivalent to dying. Therefore, they get their own pages.

Conflicting evidence
When some valid sources suggest that two individuals were one and the same, but others disagree, we do not merge the pages, but merely make note of their alleged identity on both pages — and duplicate biographical information as necessary. Christopher Marlowe may or may not have also been William Shakespeare in the DWU, and it would be in breach of T:NPOV to favour one version over the other by merging the pages completely. Both the Doctor and the Master have, at one point or another, been alleged as the true identity of Merlin: where would that leave us?

Valid sources
This may be obvious, but merges between two in-universe pages, about concepts from valid stories, can only be carried out based on narrative evidence from valid sources.

It's not enough that we're told that the Old man (Beige Planet Mars) is actually the Doctor for us to move the information to the "Undated events" section of that latter page. We'd have to have a story that makes the connection in so many words, or otherwise makes it glaringly, unambiguously obvious what is going on (e.g. the "old man" stepping into "his blue box" and reminiscing about "when he travelled with Jo", or some such).

Licenses and the "Homeworld principle"
Because the DWU isn't like other franchises, it's not all owned by one entity: various essential building blocks of the DWU are owned by players other than the BBC, who can then lease them out to authors and producers to create fully-official Doctor Who spin-offs works.

It is essential to understand that the boundaries of these legally-copyrighted elements are not the same as in-universe boundaries between concepts. The most obvious example of this is that the name "Dalek" and the iconic Raymond Cusick design are not owned by the same companies: the BBC own the former, while the Terry Nation estate own the latter.

But there are subtler things. If a story is licensed to use Bernice Summerfield but not the BBC-owned character of "the Doctor", but it has Benny mention some detail about "a time traveller" with whom she once visited Project Eden in 2157, then through the in-universe connection made in PROSE: Lucifer Rising, we can state that those details belong on our page about the Seventh Doctor, not on a page simply called Time traveller (Lucifer Rising) and acting as though this were a completely different person.

Sometimes, non-BBC-licensed spin-offs go one step further and make active use of a concept recognisable as a BBC-owned element from mainline Doctor Who. For example, the Faction Paradox series continues the story of the War in Heaven, a time war established in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures as being fought between the Time Lords of Gallifrey and the Enemy. In Lungbarrow, the Time Lords were established to have ruling clans known as the Great Houses. The Faction Paradox series licensed the concept of the "Great Houses" from Marc Platt, and of "the War in Heaven" from Lawrence Miles — and carried on writing about the War between the Enemy and "members of the Great Houses", whose homeworld was now only ever referred to as just that: "the Homeworld".

Because stories licensed to use both "the members of the Great Houses" and "the Time Lords" equated the former with the latter, only one page is required for "Homeworlders" and "Time Lords", and information about "the Homeworld of the members of the Great Houses" belongs on Gallifreyan history even if its sources were not all licensed to use the name of "Gallifrey".

However, the presence of this link that's licensed to use both legal "facets" of a single in-universe concept is essential. The Book of the War does everything in its power to convince you that the War King used to be the Master, but there never has been a story licensed to use both "the War King" and "the Master" that explicitly drew the connection in a narrative context. Therefore, whereas we might take the hint if the War King stories were licensed to use the Master, we keep them solidly distinct except in "Behind the scenes" notes.