The BBC has released the most incredibly nerdy interactive infographic ever. They have mapped all of the time travel over twelve regenerations of Doctor Who (the War Doctor included). It's astonishing.
The first thing I did with this, as I do with all infographics I come across, was question the accuracy. I know the 9th Doctor the best and knew that 2040 was not far enough into the future to cover the episode where Rose and the Doctor first meet the last human being in the universe. The episode is actually called "The End of the World" and I found it on the chart immediately; I clicked the title and this popped up.
That's better. They travel to the year 5000000000, not 2040. And that, right there, is the genius of the chart.
Why limit the time travel range from 2040 to 1830? Because most time travel in Doctor Who falls into that range. The Doctor has gone further into the past and future, but most of the time it's Victorian Times to the near (then distant) future.
The graph's winding path is tongue in cheek and practical. It is canon that time is not a linear construct but "wibbly wobbly timey wimey." It's a joke, but it's how the series has always worked and will always work. So a curved time axis makes sense.
But look at that graphic up above. When I clicked on all of the Doctors, they circled the center of that graph. A linear scale would not read as well as this carefully planned series of curves. It also wouldn't stress the consistency in leaps of time for all of the Doctors.
Nothing, for me, has made the regeneration concept clearer than seeing this Spirograph-like image of the Doctors jumping from the past to the future to the past to the future over and over again. The pattern is refusing to have a set pattern. The smallest jump in the history of the series is one year (11th Doctor, "Day of the Moon"), while most jumps span decades, if not centuries. The TARDIS may determine where the Doctor needs to be at any given time, but the nature of the Doctor himself creates these repeated cycles of massive shifts into the past and future.
The Doctor Who Timelord Timelines is a very impressive time waster and resource. And that, right there, is the crux of any good infographic. This one just happens to be super nerdy.