Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1827503-20151112135636/@comment-188432-20151112164124

It's a truism of rule-making that not every single case can be specified. Tardis:Disambiguation policy is long enough already without mentioning the conundrum that is largely presented by a single comic story!

Nevertheless it does address this situation, if not directly.

At the end of the day, we have to think of the end user here. It would be extremely confusing to our average readers if Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi and Peter Davison led to fictional characters, but Christopher Eccleston, Paul McGann and Jon Pertwee didn't.

Thus, the people who started these articles very wisely decided to stress point number 1 under the "finer details" section of our dab policy. They assigned a story name to the character. This is reasonable under the rules because of the "primary topic" exception. The actors who play the Doctor are obviously considered the "primary topic" for their own name. They therefore get the un-dabbed name.

It would be a completely unreasonable expenditure of time and effort to move all actor pages to Name (actor). Not only would this alone take forever, but it would set a potentially irresolvable precedent. We would then have to logically do the same for all behind the scenes personnel. What, then, would we do with people who moved from one position to another over their careers? Go with the first job they ever held? No, I think it would be disrespectful to move Graeme Harper to Graeme Harper (production assistant) or John Nathan-Turner to whatever menial job it was he did back in the 60s, or Steven Moffat to Steven Moffat (short story author). Heck, even if we tried something like "go for the job they mainly did", we'd be really stuck with someone like Moffat. Is he mainly a writer or an executive producer? This problem would have been extremely difficult to solve at the end of series 6, where his credits would have been about equal in both directions. So are we therefore going to commit ourselves to changing the dab term as soon as someone's credits tip one way or the other? And what if they remain evenly split between two job titles?

But even if you could figure out what to call a person, it would be technically laborious. We'd have to devise a template that would get rid of the parenthetical, and the easiest way of doing that would be to have a list of every single possible parenthetical that we would exclude from display.

Have you seen a list of modern credits? The number of titles is fairly staggering. So it's not necessarily impossible, but it's pretty unfeasible.

So while I understand that you can tilt your head one way at our disambiguation policy and think that we've "got something wrong" here, I'd ask you to stress other parts of the dab policy and see how we are in fact remaining consistent with it by declaring certain people the primary topics at a given name.

Finally, the Brian Blessed example is handled in what I would consider an odd way. Typically, we write articles differently about real people who are mentioned, but do not appear, in the DWU. A better example is Kylie Minogue or John Hurt, where we invert the usual form of an article, and create an "in-universe" section at the bottom of the page. This makes sense, as there is no appearance with which we could dab an article about the fictional version of the person.