Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-60605-20140919101627/@comment-188432-20140919175134

I would push back on the notion that dating BBC Wales productions is easy. General time periods, fine. Generally we're in the late 2000s, early 2010s — that is, the years of broadcast. But few things have been as contentious to DW fans as trying to give an actual year to the modern day segments of BBC Wales productions. Whole, long threads are devoted to it over at Gallifrey Base, and none of them have ever come to a definitive conclusion about every single story.

At this wiki, we've changed those dates over and over again. I wouldn't trust our dating more than a tinker's damn. The best thing we could do for the accuracy of the wiki is to stop trying to give a date to stories where the date is not absolutely stated. Note the number of times, above, that the words "appears" and "assume" occur. I'm not picking on Bwburke94 — merely pointing out that it's impossible to assemble a cross-series timeline that doesn't involve those words.

Unless the dates are actually relevant to the storytelling, as they arguably are from the start of series 1 of DW up to about Partners in Crime — because the dialogue does specify a year as it relates to Rose, Martha and Donna — it's probably safest to just characterise by decade, or to not even worry about dates beyond saying "modern day". I would also tend to believe there was no real attempt by BBC Wales to make sure that dates in SJA and Torchwood aligned with DW. Additionally, timelines within Torchwood itself are totally screwed by graphics within Miracle Day giving Gwen's dates of membership in Torchwood Three — ones that are impossible to rectify against TW series 1, much less DW series 1.

Roughly speaking, "modern day" in Torchwood and SJA is ±1 the year of broadcast. It doesn't matter one bit to the consumption of the narrative whether you hit the year exactly, because no SJA narratives care at all what year the current year is.

And that's why the most accurate thing for us to say in almost every instance is "modern day" rather than a specific year.