User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Help!/@comment-43874324-20200612212458/@comment-6032121-20200612214741

Well, you did right to bring those concerns up here; while casual off-Wiki discussions between users, such as on Discord severs, can be a very good thing in terms of fostering goodwill between us fans who happen to also be members of the Wiki, it is enshrined somewhere in this Wiki's policy that they absolutely cannot be used to come to decisions in matters of policy.

As concerns the matters of real world pages vs. individuals, I believe the decision was originally taken regarding pages about real world individuals' counterparts in An Adventure in Space and Time. It was thus taken for the good reason that such pages, since Adventure is a docudrama, would essentially duplicate information that should already be present as historical information on the pages of the real-world individuals. Arguably, this reasoning doesn't apply for the heavily fictionalised versions of real-world individuals who appear in parodies.

John Nathan-Turner (Doctor Who?) is a major recurring character of the strip (as evidenced by the fact that he even has a list of appearances!), and the wealth of information about this in-universe version is such that it would bizarrely clutter the potential section of "John Nathan-Turner" we'd devote to him. Because the world of Doctor Who? is not at all the real world, Nathan-Turner in the Who?niverse, as it were, is a very different person from the Nathan-Turner of the real world. This is even more obvious with Roberta Tovey (Doctor Who?), who is named for the real-life Roberta Tovey but appears to have absolutely nothing in common with the actress.

…As for the pages like Tom Baker (TV Action!) and Tom Baker (The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who), I'm assuming this is because of how we treat parallel universes. Arguably, the current policy would point towards us covering of Tom Baker in N-Space at plain Tom Baker, but the Tom Baker of the meta-fiction universe is not the same person as that Tom Baker whom we'd cover at Tom Baker, and so should get his own page. I could be wrong but this seems to make sense and account both for current usage and for current policy.

…As concerns the matter of when valid characters used in an invalid context get their own pages… I think it's generally a matter of whether the character is a substantially different person in the world of the invalid work. Dimensions in Time is an invalid story featuring the valid Rani; you're meant to assume her history in the main TV show "applies" to what we see of her in DiT. Whereas the history of the Seventh Doctor in Death Comes to Time is ostensibly different from what we're used to, even if he looks like the Seventh Doctor and seems to have had most of the same adventures as the TV version.