…okay, I guess we’re doing this. sorry for the long post. get ready for:
the tardis wiki penis saga
so I’ve recently seen this screenshot being circulated a lot as an example of awful wikis:
but the thing is, I—along with jenna @jagoandlitefoot—am responsible for this page.
let me explain. TARDIS wiki is really bad. infamously bad. “has a list of nonhuman lighthouse keepers but deleted the list of gay characters for being not relevant” bad. “used to have a page that was just every instance of the n-word in dr who” bad.
you see, there are some really, really awful parts of the dr. who expanded universe. and of course, i’m intimately familiar with them—i’ve liveblogged some of the more awful ones on occasion.
so we hatched a plan: could we slide a page on penes into the fan wiki for 1960s BBC scifi show Dr. Who?
(incidentally—and because this is annoying to me when people make fun of it—the fact that it’s in past tense is to maintain stylistic consistency across the wiki. If a character dies you don’t want to have to edit every mention of them on the wiki to be in past tense. It’s just a way of futureproofing it, and the site should be stylistically consistent.)
anyway, there had actually previously been a few “Penis” articles on the wiki, but they were all made as vandalism. we wanted to do something worse. we wanted malicious compliance. so we made the page and populated it with every mention of dicks we could think of in Dr Who. and to our delight, other people got the joke(?) and started adding in other references!
but we wanted to go further. you see, as I’ve already eluded to, the Dr. Who EU is weird. there’s a fourth-wall-aware old lady who lives in a bus with a talking stuffed panda bear. there’s 7 different sherlock holmeses. there’s random spinoffs based on one-off characters from the 60s.
And there’s a fully licensed tentacle porno featuring shapeshifting squid aliens.
so we decided to take the penis page to the next level. we decided to illustrate it. with an image from canon.
click at your own peril. i cannot stress enough that there is mandick in this link so be warned.
but was this legal? surely there’d be something in the rules forbidding this. we pored over the TARDIS wiki editing rules.
there was nothing against it. in fact, the wiki’s rules specified that the wiki was not G-rated and was meant to cover all of Dr. Who. the dick was legal.
within two minutes the edit had been reverted. the stated reason for the reversion was very succinct:
but we knew our rights. we stood our ground, we fought the good fight, and we put the image back up. this time, the image stayed up for almost an hour! but then it was sadly removed. unfortunately, we had actually violated the TARDIS wiki rules.
we used the wrong image format. that was the only reason.
so we changed the image format. and reuploaded it.
mr. “AH JESUS” wasn’t having it, and deleted it again. so we took to the talk page. this sparked off an intense argument on the talk page over whether the dick pic was allowed. now this was SO much bigger than our humble discord server. people were getting HEATED:
eventually the admin of the entire tardis wiki stepped in. his judgement passed. the verdict?
sadly nothing can last forever, and it was not TARDIS wiki’s rules that prevented the dick pic, but rather fandom wiki’s overall terms of use. tragically the dick was removed—but it will live on in our hearts forever.
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