User:NateBumber/Sandbox/2

Series relationships
Here I present some more detailed alternative to the designs at User:Bongolium500/Family tree test, since I worry that leaving everything in terms of series can obscure the concrete connections between stories, especially for series as huge and diverse as the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, where listing the individual story titles with links to spin-offs is much more helpful.

Proposal 1: Series and stories
As you can see, the effectiveness of this format is hindered by the shape limitations in : many needed intersections between solid and dashed lines aren't available.

The City of the Saved
Loosely based on User:Bongolium500/Family tree test.

Liberating Earth
This kind of relationship between individual stories would be obscured by the series-only approach. But this diagram, which should be very simple, highlights the shape limitations of Proposal 1.

Proposal 2: Series prefixes
What about bringing back the old-style prefixes? This might seem "retro", but it presents a very clean way of representing series connections for individual stories. As it leaves no need for distinctions between solid and dashed lines, it's the most versatile and simple-to-understand of the approaches.

The Faction Paradox Protocols
This format can accomodate extremely complex diagrams. It can also simplify things significantly, since (for instance) the VNA prefix makes the connection to TV Doctor Who fairly obvious.

Some notes about this: when two stories are connected side-by-side, it is because they share a connection that is harder to capture than "read one before the other" or "this idea was ": Interference and Dead Romance were written around the same time and intended to tie in with each other, without either really following the other; and Political Animals shares a complex relationship with Sabbath Dei, variably intended to be its sequel or prequel. In general, I tried to list the stories in release order. Of course, if this were for the actual article, I would dispense with some of the less relevant details about Lungbarrow, The Taking of Planet 5, and even Christmas on a Rational Planet.

Liberating Earth
This diagram, which made impossible to properly represent in Proposal 1, is trivially easy here.

Oswald family
Forked from User:Bongolium500/Family tree test.

The Doctor's family
This tree is a proof of concept of how contrary or parallel sources and multiple marriages can be represented in a single family tree. To achieve this, it draws from speculation and invalid sources.