What actually is What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?

The What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? series began in 2016 as a YouTube series detailing the plans for Doctor Who beyond the 26 seasons that aired in its original run. Due to popular demand, the series evolved into speculative fiction continuing the timeline forward, using all different sorts of information to see what would happen next…

In 2021, the series caught up to the present, and since 2023 has been running with an appropriate distance behind the present day.

The series now shows an alternate version of Doctor Who where the show had an extra 15 years to develop and grow.

I used to follow What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? when it was a video series on YouTube, how best do I get back into it?

Since 2019, What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? has experimented with a number of alternative release formats. Currently, two magazines a month are released, containing new What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? content.

In the middle of the month, a magazine rewinding to the early years of the series, and taking a more in-depth look into them, is released, before at the end of the month, a full magazine taking a look at the present day (well about 6 months ago), is released. This magazine also contains many “out-of-universe” features.

Both magazines are available on the website, Issuu, which is accessible through this site’s main navigation. Additionally, for accessibility reasons, there is an audio version of both magazines released as What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? – The Magazine: The Podcast, which is available on Spotify, YouTube and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

This magazine format began in January 2023. For the first three issues, both present day and rewind features were incorporated into a single magazine.

Why is the What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? wiki no longer on FANDOM?

In June 2021, the decision was made to move our wiki from FANDOM to Miraheze. The new platform led to many advantages including the ability to use a domain name (wiki.widwwa.co.uk), increased customisation and the ability to turn off SEO tools.

Why did you choose to turn of SEO tools on the wiki?

The What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? series can already appear incredibly confusing when found by new viewers, however, what was often more confusing was when the wiki was discovered as people’s first entry into What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?. Not only did this create the false impression that the series was nothing more than just a wiki, with seemingly incredible detail about something fictional, but also it allowed people to view the series with absolutely zero context. This led, more often than not, to a negative impression of the series and its community.

Additionally, on the wiki, there are many pages for cast and crew members, some of which aren’t the most well-known names in our universe. This meant that sometimes when searching for a particular person, their WIDWWA Wiki page was visible in the first few results on Google. This just led to blatant misinformation about real people.

Turning off SEO has allowed for the WIDWWA Wiki to be a database of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? for people already familiar with the series and actively want to find out more information. It avoids a negative first impression of the series and misinformation around real-life people.

Why did you end the original YouTube series?

As What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? grew, the series became more detailed. This meant that a lot more time had to be spent in the writing process, considerably extending the time it took to make a single video. After already having written a video, it takes nearly as long to record, edit and publish the finished product. A devastating hard drive crash in September 2019 was the final straw and the decision was swiftly made to change the series to a blog format.

While the video series made a brief reprise during lockdown, due to the free time, this was only short and soon the series returned to a blog format again. Finally, in 2023, it moved into a Magazine format.

On YouTube, the series does live on, as What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? – The Magazine: The Podcast, an audio version of the Magazine, is published on the DDWF YouTube channel, as well as wherever you get your podcasts.

I would like to develop my own version of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? is this allowed?

Yes, that is more than okay!

The concept of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? is an old one, as many have speculated about it in the past. However, What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? was the first time the idea was dedicated into an actual series exploring an alternate timeline from 1990 to the present day. Therefore, we do recommend that anyone planning to make a series in the same style as What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? follow a few guidelines, which we issued in January 2020.

The major points include factors such as using a different name, as What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?, specifically, is the name of this series; making sure not to steal any original creative content from What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? and to avoid using actors in suspiciously similar parts to the ones they played in What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?. The main thing to remember is to just “be original” and you can’t go wrong.

The full set of guidelines can be read here.

These are only guidelines and cannot be enforced but we’d appreciate it if you didn’t repackage our work and pass it off as your own. Some things can just boil down to coincidence, but if you’re reading this, then you’re obviously a fan of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? and naturally very aware of our characters and stories. Therefore, we just ask, politely, then if you plan to make your own series, inspired by What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?, that you keep these guidelines in mind.

I thought Paul McGann played the Ninth Doctor in What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?… what happened?

The early years of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? featured many things that we were unhappy with, later on, due to them being more than likely very unrealistic. In January 2020, a post called “The Retcon-athon” was released detailing changes to the early years of the series. A year later, the decision was made to take this one step further and replace Paul McGann as the Ninth Doctor.

The reason Paul McGann was originally chosen was because he was the Doctor in 1996 in the real world, so it’d make sense for that also to be the case in What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?. This logic was misguided and deeply regretted. The decision was wrestled with for several years, and considered during the 2020 “Retcon-athon”, but in 2021, the decision was made to replace Paul McGann with the much more realistic choice, Michael French, as the Ninth Doctor.