Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20171027202334/@comment-28349479-20171029165150

I agree that we should standardise this in some way. However, I don't agree with the way in which you propose that we do it.

First, I think we should always use established in-universe terms for things. If The Book of the War called the Yssgaroth's universe "Spiral Yssgaroth", why shouldn't we rename the page to reflect that? I know that you make a distinction between "immediately named" universes and universes that are only given a name in later releases, but I see no reason why that should matter at all? If after twenty years, a Classic Who author decided to write a book about a minor character from their episode, known only as "John" in the original story, and the new book introduced their last name as "Nguyen", would we be wrong in renaming the page from John (Storyname) to John Nguyen? I don't think so.

T:NPOV says nothing about prioritising older or newer stories, but don't you think that to do such a thing would certainly violate, if not the letter, the spirit of the law?

(I'll also note that Pete's World isn't given that name until its fifth appearance.)

And on that note, why on earth are we worried about disambiguating characters by universe? I just reread T:DAB and T:DAB TERM, and I don't see anything about mentioning the universe they come from. If Story A introduced a character named John Nguyen who's from Vietnam, and Story B introduced a character named John Nguyen who's from Russia, we wouldn't call them John Nguyen (Vietnam) and John Nguyen (Russia), would we? No, we'd call them John Nguyen (Story A) and John Nguyen (Story B), because we dab characters based on the story they're introduced, not where they're from.

Completely analogously, if Auld Mortality introduced a character named the Doctor, and he's from one unnamed parallel universe, and Sympathy for the Devil introduced a character named the Doctor, and he's from a different unnamed parallel universe, should we call them The Doctor (Auld Mortality universe) and The Doctor (Sympathy for the Devil universe), just because that's where they're from? Of course not! We call them The Doctor (Auld Mortality) and The Doctor (Sympathy for the Devil), because we dab characters based on the story they're introduced. (As an additional point of support, The Doctor (The Infinity Doctors universe) was renamed to The Doctor (The Infinity Doctors) just a few weeks ago.)

(In addition, I think that making Story Title universe the standard would make for a completely unnecessary inconvenience while writing an article. Compare the difference between The Infinity Doctors universe and Parallel universe (Sympathy for the Devil) -- hint, the pipe trick works for one! By now, you can probably tell the latter format is the one that I'd prefer, if we were to make an official tool for the ambiguous cases.)

As for Christine Summerfield ("real" universe), which I agree is quite awkward ... the whole point of Dead Romance is that the protagonist isn't certain if the universe she escaped into is the really real one. First, she thinks her universe is real; then she finds out it's a bottle universe, and escapes into another universe, which she thinks is real; and then at the end, she realizes this new universe might itself be a bottle. Christine Summerfield ("real" universe) is from the new universe, and the quotes around "real" are very well-placed.

... for what it's worth, the page only has that dab term to differentiate it from Christine Summerfield, who is only called that in Dead Romance and goes solely by "Eliza" in all later stories. I don't know if that gives us an easy way out -- renaming Christine Summerfield to Eliza (The Eleven Day Empire), and then just slapping a very hefty "you may" on Christine Summerfield ("real" universe)? (That'd be very convenient, for all the times I've had to pipe Christine Summerfield into Eliza ...) But I notice we still use Ashildr rather than Me, so I don't know what that means.