There is no official history of the Doctor Who universe. It is, cutting across multi-media, the sum of its parts.

There have been several attempts to capture such a history, and they have all been long in the making. The first published timeline was in The Doctor Who Programme Guides (updated in The Terrestrial Index) by Randy and Jean-Marc L'Officier. Lance Parkin, in his twice revised A History of the Universe, . More recently John Preddle's Timelink, a continuity guide 15 years in the making, has been published by Telos books.

As long as there is new Doctor Who being produced there will be gaps in published continuities, while online efforts such as Outpost Gallifrey's Canon Keeper's Guide and Will Swift's Gallifreyan timeline, often struggle to keep up to date with new information and are often forced to prioritize.

Cybermen	Daleks	Earth
Gallifrey	Mars	UNIT
Torchwood	The Universe

All chronologies suffer from issues of perspective. Often driven by a single interpretation of where and how events happen, or by the need to fit events into a single linear sequence.

Before deciding how a chronology should work, the user should first give some consideration to the nature of time and how it affects events in the past, present and future of the universe. For example, did the history of Torchwood exist before the tenth Doctor's interaction with Queen Victoria in Tooth and Claw caused it to happen?

Newapocrypha has taken a fragmented approach, gathering together different chronologies clustered around common themes and features. Common events and timelines are shared between these chronologies, and it is the interaction between these different spheres of activity that defines the overall history of the universe. Where relevant, it has also drawn upon histories from fanon and from spin-off media.

Being subject to change (most likely as a result of direct intervention by the Doctor himself), all of these histories become apocryphal as they pass from current affairs into the annals of recorded history.