Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-188432-20190116004309

Everyone’s input into this thread has been appreciated and valuable.

But as Scrooge MacDuck has pointed out:
 * "By all means this thread should be closed, but because the new points have been addressed and we have found the current policy was correct after all even in the face of the new ideas — not because the discussion was just reopening the same old debate that had already been concluded."

Indeed, I'm not particularly convinced by any previous claim in this thread that T:POINT matters as much in this case as it might do to other issues.

Language is an evolutionary — not a revolutionary — thing. Previous decisions were made on the basis of what was then a rare occurrence in this fandom: multi-gendered, un-gendered, or just differently-gendered characters. And they were certainly taken before the genuine advent of the thirteenth Doctor.

I therefore think it was good, right, and proper that we revisited this issue during and after transmission of the eleventh series. We collectively did right by trying to draw some inspiration from the series that most directly challenged our assumptions about our fandom’s central character.

Still, we shouldn’t claim that in-universe concerns hold the only key to our editorial choices. After all, we rather unusually write our articles in the past tense, which has nothing to do with either “good grammar” or “what’s done on the show”.

What this discussion proves is that there is no single right answer on this issue. Critics of the current policy have argued cogently why that policy fails; supporters have brought to bear what to me is equally convincing logic. But both sides can point to academic, cultural and sometimes even in-universe evidence to support their case.

So let’s be clear: this is us making a choice not “being right” or “using better English” or any of that. Both the “singular they” and the “always-plural they” are, in a defensible way, “correct”.

So I don’t want people on either side to feel like they are either right or wrong.

But at a certain point, we as an administrative staff need to pick between global variations in the English language because the Doctor Who franchise plays all around the world.

This is something we’ve done on multiple occasions:


 * We’ve chosen to enforce British English, but we counsel the American use of double quotation marks
 * We’ve chosen to use italics for episode titles, even though that’s not widely done
 * We’ve chosen to use sentence case, even though other media outlets might use title case

Like any editorial staff on any publication in the world, we have a duty to establish and maintain a manual of style.

What this discussion proved is that, although the arguments on both sides are valid, there’s nothing from the most recent series, or coverage of it by the wider press, which throws up an obvious roadblock to our choice to include usage of the “singular they” on this wiki. If anything, usage of the “singular they” in the coverage of Doctor Who has accelerated in the last year or so — including amongst DWA, Titan and Fandom’s own staff writers.

So, we’ll be sticking with the “singular they”.

That said, this conversation must inform our usage.

Some of our readers are going to find the singular they massively unclear, especially when the subject of a sentence is singular and the object is plural. “The Doctor told their companions that they were special” is, for instance, ambiguous. Where possible, editors should try to speak about specific incarnations, using a gendered pronoun appropriate to that incarnation, or for the incarnation recalling their past lives.

If you’re an editor here, you may find it helpful to sometimes sidestep the pronoun issue entirely. Replace “they” with “the Time Lord” or “the Doctor”. Or, do what SOTO suggested upthread. Concentrate on the incarnation that’s recounting the past, rather than the regeneration that performed the remembered action. For instance, this is just fine: “The Doctor remembered that she had ordered a fez a long time ago. (TV: Kerblam! (TV story))

If series 11 has taught us anything, it’s that the concept of gender definitely exists in both the narrative and in the press coverage about the programme. So we’re obviously not getting rid of gendered pronouns when talking about an incarnation, or several incarnations of the same gender.

Therefore I don’t want this to be some signal that we need to go out and rewrite every line of every page on the wiki, or anything like that. Instead this is a narrower, but important, refinement to our manual of style. What we’re saying here is, when referring to gender-flexible characters in toto, the "singular they" is preferred. Equally, when talking about real life people who are gender-fluid or non-binary, we should use the pronouns for which that person has expressed a preference — but quite often, that will be the "singular they".

I also want to encourage people to actually review the situation in individual cases. I think it’s fine for people to have discussions on individual talk pages about particular sentences, in spite of all this conversation. This thread, and others before it, do not mean that individual sentences are beyond review. The object with editing is always to try to come up with the clearest sentence structure, while at the same time keeping our use of our evolving language current.