Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-38288735-20190125173637/@comment-38288735-20190409161849

Alright, if there's not a policy in place, here would be my proposal:

1)	Any individual character appearing in the story that appears in at least one other valid story should be listed in the Featuring column.

Example: Any story the Brigadier appears in should list him.

Rationale: Mostly, this seems to be the general point of the Featuring section so far. This would just be codifying it.

2)	If unnamed member(s) of a fictional species that appear in more than one valid story appear in and are relevant to the story, the species gets listed as well.

Example: Any time the Ice Warriors show up and they aren’t just random judges at a singing competition, they are listed.

Rationale: This one’s certainly debatable. It seems to me it’s the best way to include recurring species in the section without having to list “Time Lords” every time the Doctor and the Master are in the same story. If the rule were to instead require multiple members, then The Dalek Transaction would not then feature the Daleks. For those unfamiliar with that story, it’s similar to the TV episode Dalek; a single Dalek is discovered on Earth and must be handled.

Being “relevant to the story” is admittedly subjective, but I feel it is necessary to exclude non-plot relevant cameos. As cited in the example above, there is a story where Ice Warriors are some of the judges at a singing competition, are mentioned once, and have no other relevance to the plot.

Finally, the word “fictional” keeps us from having to include humans or other real-world species.

3)	The Doctor should not be included in any range where they already have their own column.

Example: For The Wormery, both the Sixth and Seventh Doctors would go in the Doctor column.

Rationale: This seems slightly cleaner than the alternative of making the subjective decision of whether a given story is a true multi-Doctor story where both should be listed in the Doctor column or whether one Doctor’s appearance is a cameo and belongs in the Featuring column.

4)	Any character who appears in every story within a range should not be included. It should instead be mentioned elsewhere in the article that this character is a main character.

Example: Jago and Litefoot do not need to be listed in Jago & Litefoot.

Rationale: Saves space. Also, this seems to be the norm already for most series where this applies.

A debatable aspect of this is whether it should also include characters who are in almost every story, but miss one or two. For example, Helen is certainly a main character in Doom Coalition, but her debut is the second story. If we want a solid rule, we could designate a percentage of stories they have to be in for this rule to apply, but I think it’s easier to just have the rule the way I put it.

5)	If a story ends with a lead-in to its following story that is disconnected from the narrative of the rest of the story, any characters that only appear in that lead-in will not appear in the Featuring section.

Example: Mother Superior does not need to be listed for Truant, as she is not featured in the events of the story proper. She only shows up at the end in the cliffhanger for the next story.

Rationale: This is the part of my proposal that may be the hardest to implement consistently, but would keep characters out of stories that they have no narrative significance in.

6)	Those characters that do appear in the Featuring column shall appear in alphabetical order.

Rationale: Consistency.

The previous poster expressed a concern over too many listings for some stories. I personally do not share this concern as most examples of this are noteworthy stories where even the cameos would be of interest (Many Happy Returns springs to mind), but it is certainly worth discussion. A limit could be made on how many listings a single story could have, but I am hard-pressed to think of a consistent way to decide who does not get listed if this limit is exceeded.

Thoughts?

EDIT: Fixed a confusing typo.