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I mean, I'm being a bit harsh here. But if I see something a bit sketchy placed into a continuity section, it's just not really worth it to fight over 9 times out of 10? Like. Look. I despise this from ''[[The Timeless Children (TV story)|The Timeless Children]]'' in Story Notes: | I mean, I'm being a bit harsh here. But if I see something a bit sketchy placed into a continuity section, it's just not really worth it to fight over 9 times out of 10? Like. Look. I despise this from ''[[The Timeless Children (TV story)|The Timeless Children]]'' in Story Notes: | ||
:The premise of this episode also fulfils several elements of [[the Hybrid]] [[prophecy]] from [[Season 9]]. | :The premise of this episode also fulfils several elements of [[the Hybrid]] [[prophecy]] from [[Season 9 (Doctor Who 1963)|Season 9]]. | ||
::A [[hybrid]] creature (the [[Spy Master]] had merged with the [[Cyberium]]), would stand over the ruins of [[Gallifrey]] and unravel the [[Web of Time]] (the Master had hacked into the Matrix), breaking a billion billion [[Heart|hearts]] to heal its own (the Master had also slaughtered the Time Lords after he became distraught at learning the truth of their origins). | ::A [[hybrid]] creature (the [[Spy Master]] had merged with the [[Cyberium]]), would stand over the ruins of [[Gallifrey]] and unravel the [[Web of Time]] (the Master had hacked into the Matrix), breaking a billion billion [[Heart|hearts]] to heal its own (the Master had also slaughtered the Time Lords after he became distraught at learning the truth of their origins). | ||
I want to force whoever started this nonsense to rewatch ''Hell Bent'' over and over ''Clockwork Orange'' style until they understand it. It's clearly not an intentional reference, and it fails to fulfill one of the parts of the prophecy, it's just silly to note. But I don't really see a reason to remove it on a page like this, it's well within the bounds of what's on other pages. | I want to force whoever started this nonsense to rewatch ''Hell Bent'' over and over ''Clockwork Orange'' style until they understand it. It's clearly not an intentional reference, and it fails to fulfill one of the parts of the prophecy, it's just silly to note. But I don't really see a reason to remove it on a page like this, it's well within the bounds of what's on other pages. | ||
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::…What now? I don't recall modifying R2 in any other sense than tidying away the ''Dimensions in Time''/likeness-rights… thing… and I don't see how ''that'' could have any wide-reaching consequences for validity prospects in the way you seem to imply? [[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 19:12, 22 September 2023 (UTC) | ::…What now? I don't recall modifying R2 in any other sense than tidying away the ''Dimensions in Time''/likeness-rights… thing… and I don't see how ''that'' could have any wide-reaching consequences for validity prospects in the way you seem to imply? [[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 19:12, 22 September 2023 (UTC) | ||
:::Well, R2 as part of the new T:CS. Focusing on "legal relationship[s], direct or otherwise". [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 19:32, 22 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
::Oh, that. Again, I think you’re reading too much in less-than-maximally-precise language of mine (sorry)… “Direct or otherwise” was simply meant to refer to second- or third-generation spin-offs and whatnot, not to imply that other kinds of relationship than filiation would be considered. "The EDAs, which begat FP" -> direct, "the EDAs, which begat ''Iris Wildthyme'', which begat Theo Possible" -> indirect. That's all. [[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 20:15, 22 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
:@Najawin I don't personally see how my definition is as recursive as yours, as long as we remember that only ''covered'' sources can even be checked for this meaning of "intent to contribute to the DWU". Non-covered sources would need a subtly different criterion (intent to be in continuity with past official-DWU sources, ''and'' lack of intent to not be referenced). So for covered sources, the only "recursion" is that, technically, this definition reaches all the way to the end of the universe. Also, I will admit that this definition only works particularly well for sections of the Web with multiple branches behind them, from a release- chronology. But even for the case of {{cs|The Daleks (TV story)}}, it simply has the lack intent to not be referenced by future [[List of Doctor Who television stories|''Doctor Who'' television stories]], in any form they may take. Not a ''particular'' story, just the general ''idea'' of a future story. This even applies to stories produced and released under the understanding that the show may well be cancelled, because I seriously doubt - I would support encoding into policy this presumption - that the writers of a "final episode" would be surprised (read: it subverts their intention) if a future DW publication (the existence of this may surprise them, but that's sort of irrelevant) referenced their work. [[User:Cousin Ettolrhc|Cousin Ettolrahc]] [[User talk:Cousin Ettolrhc|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 05:42, 23 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
::But parody stories can clearly be covered, no? Supposed we still considered the Daft Dimension as invalid, separate from the rest of our valid sources. How would we choose between DD being what we label as "valid" and the "mainstream DWU" as what we label as "valid"? DD will still allow for things, in this hypothetical, to refer to it. It's just things that we would traditionally consider invalid. [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 06:00, 23 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
::: I still object to WT in general, but surely most parodies would pass the "lack of intent to not be referenced" clause. I'm sure the creators of {{Cs|Untitled (The Lily Savage Show)}} wouldn't care tuppence if somebody were to reference them. They might be surprised, sure, but no more than the hypothetical "writer of the final episode of Doctor Who". They certainly wouldn't be actively hostile to the notion. The creators of something like Doctor Whoah ''might'' be? But then if you take a single issue of Doctor Whoah, then it is presumably intended to be referenced by the next issue, yes? (and additionally note that the next issue is in no way affected by the previous issue, as we removed the "must be in continuity with something else" clause) Now, I in no way object to this, due to the arguments I presented earlier, but I think there may be unexpected consequences of Web Theory that people haven't thought of. [[User:Aquanafrahudy|<span style="font-family: serif; color: pink" title="Hallo." > Aquanafrahudy</span>]] [[User talk: Aquanafrahudy|<span title="Talk to me">📢</span>]] 06:50, 23 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
::::The ''Doctor Whoah'' example is precisely illustrative though. When we say "intent to not be referenced by", there's an implied "by other stories in the Web!DWU" there. ''Doctor Whoah'' does intend to be referenced by things. It's just that the things he intends it to be referenced by ''are not in the same set'' as the set we've identified as Web!DWU. And to ''define'' the set "Web!DWU" we have to make a choice between all of these disjoint subsets in a way that's logically problematic. And, of course, this doesn't get into the problem of what happens when individual writerly intentions within Web!DWU disagree on what constitutes Web!DWU. (Thus, there's distinct intent to not be referenced by certain parts of what we consider mainline DWU, perhaps even a great deal of it, whereas other writers would be perfectly fine with their work being referred to in that particular part of the DWU that has become isolationist if it ever came up.) This latter issue isn't an ''inherent'' problem, and I don't want to suggest it is. But it's something we'd need to be pretty careful about. [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 07:23, 23 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
Come to think of it, Scrooge's rule 5 not-proposal might actually be quite a good idea. Maybe something like this: "If a series or corpus of works becomes so interconnected with the DWU that it becomes difficult to cover them on separate wikis, then we should cover the series/body of works in its entirety", or something of that nature. I'm not quite sure of the specifics, we would definitely need to freshen it up a lot, and as it's fairly late I may just be rambling and this may make no sense, but there you are. To my mind, it's an intuitive proposal that would make sense. Though that last sentence doesn't, really. Thoughts? [[User:Aquanafrahudy|<span style="font-family: serif; color: pink" title="Hallo." > Aquanafrahudy</span>]] [[User talk: Aquanafrahudy|<span title="Talk to me">📢</span>]] 20:56, 24 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
:Scrooge, just to clarify, should I expect another large object level response or should I take that as a baseline to respond to? I know you were working on other stuff that you scrapped due to, apparently, a misunderstanding of what I meant by wiki!DWU, and I'm not sure if any of that is transferable. You also say in your first response after, "More to come". If this is indeed the case, I'll hold off. [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 03:06, 27 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
:: Aye, aye. I'm getting my thoughts in order for another Big Reply. (Some small part of me hopes we shan't need further rounds after that.) [[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 12:40, 27 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
:::I highly doubt this to be the case. But we'll see! [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 16:53, 27 September 2023 (UTC) | |||
I've thought of how a hypothetical rule 1 by proxy could work! And it actually sort of makes sense. You see, the vast majority of rule 1-failing fiction that we cover as invalid is covered as invalid due to either being a mix of fiction and non-fiction (e.g., [[Winning Designs (feature)]]) or for having no clear end and seguing into non-fiction (such as several of ''The Fan Show'' webcasts). And I think that it is the latter to which we can apply Rule 1 by proxy. You see, if a future story were to reference its events, but leave out the non-fictional bits, then we ''would'' have a clear ending for it, and it would end. | |||
Also, [[:File:The Three Showrunners - Doctor Who @ 60 - Doctor Who|here's another black mark on Rule 4]]. If we were at all consistent in applying our rules, then we ought to invalidate all of NuWho. (Of course, there's the argument to be made that they were only joking when they said that; after all, they said it in a jovial sort of manner, but then we enter the realms of complete and utter speculation and just urgh.) <u>[[User:Aquanafrahudy|<span style="font-family: Georgia ; color: pink" title="Hallo." > Aquanafrahudy</span>]] [[User talk: Aquanafrahudy|<span title="Talk to me">📢</span>]] [[Special:Contributions/Aquanafrahudy|<span title="Stuff I've done">🖊️</span>]] </u> 09:54, 31 October 2023 (UTC) | |||
== The War Between Scrooge And Invalidity, or, The Crux on R4BP Road == | |||
<div class="tech"> | |||
Happy British-time New Year! We're back, and, as stock pictures of Paul McGann would say, it's about time. | |||
It might be considered irregular that I'm posting the next Big Reply ''again'' even though [[User:Najawin]] never got around to fully refuting the previous one, but it's alright, I can refute myself. The replies in the Break of the Shalka, and the subsequent hiatus, have given me a thought to read over this monster of a thread again, and think, and ponder the way forward. By agreement with [[User:Najawin]] and [[User:Bongolium500]], that way forward is mainly to wind this thing down and then get started on the "Part 2" we've discussed several times before; but first I wish to try one last time to outline my thoughts on this issue, since they have changed somewhat. [[The Time of the Doctor (TV story)|And that's good, that's okay. You gotta keep moving… so long as you remember all the things that you used to say.]] | |||
Let's try this one last time, and then Bongo will set the metre for the new debate. | |||
(Unless Najawin changes his mind and wants to reply to this here before Bongo arbitrates? I assume Bongo would permit it if Najawin asked.) | |||
=== Part 1: Why are we even talking about all this? === | |||
I think looking back at all these words (so… many… words), the question to be asked is: what the ''heck'' have we all been talking about for an entire academic semester? What is the crux of our disagreement? Why do things appear obvious to me that are not so to Najawin? (One assumes he asks himself the symmetrical question.) I think the Crux on R4BP Road is very simple: | |||
<span style="font-size:300%; vertical-align:sub;"><center>“What the hell is validity ''for''?”</center></span> | |||
My first Riposte started from this point, but we seem to have lost sight of it at some point. In the latest discussion areas, [[User:Aquanafrahudy]] asked multiple times for us to justify why there should even be such a ''thing'' as a valid/invalid distinction, arguing very reasonably that it's not clear why we should even entertain the notion of ''keeping'' any version of Rule 4 if we can't articulate a logical foundation for it. | |||
Part of the reason for the extended hiatus is that I was [[The Spiral Politic Database|very]] [[The Book of the Snowstorm (anthology)|busy]], but part of it is that my replies to Aqua's repeated question weren't entirely persuasive even to myself. After all, I've worked in Wikis that ''have'' no such thing as canon/validity policies as Tardis would recognise them; the Jenny Everywhere Wiki, for example. And the sky really doesn't fall, you know. So why not simply do that? We have a great system for dealing with "weird" or "contradictory" accounts. The sky wouldn't fall if we validated every single item in [[:Category:Non-DWU sources]]. "In one account" this, "<nowiki>[[The Doctor's reality (Insert Pardoy Title Here)]]</nowiki>" that; there is no piece of data in any one "invalid" source that isn't equalled in weirdness by one or another bit of trivia from an incontrovertibly valid story somewhere. | |||
I've sometimes mused that it would be very easy to cover a random piece of fiction with ''no connecton whatsoever to the DWU'' on the Wiki without it looking particularly "off" in execution. "In '''one universe''', which shared some basic elements of history with [[the Doctor's universe]], a Gaulish warrior called [[Asterix the Gaul|Asterix]] was documented by a number of accounts as defending his village against…" Who would blink first? It would take conscious investigation to notice that, in fact, there ''are'' no narrative tethers between that set of accounts and the expanded Whoniverse, aside from the "In other realities" section of real-world things. It would be a silly thing to do, certainly, but when "an arbitrary decision to cover the ''Asterix'' comics as valid" doesn't seem like it would fundamentally break the Wiki in any immediate sense, it's worth asking why we're so scared of covering, you know, [[Doctor Whoah!|actual comics about the Doctor published in ''Doctor Who Magazine'']]. Gasp! Choke! Whimper! | |||
In short I felt I couldn't return until I could fully articulate why I wasn't going to join Aqua on the "abolish Rule 4 completely" wagon; or at least until I had a better way to tackle that question than "I think people would vote against it for reasons I can't really formalise". | |||
It wasn't easy to achieve even that. But let me tell you, Old T:VS is even worse at it than I am. | |||
=== Part 2: The old justifications for T:VS are untenable === | |||
And I don't think it's a question that was really asked back in the day when old-T:VS and old-R4 were devised, not in so many words, and this is very worrisome. Letting "old-[[T:VS]]" speak for itself, its authorial voice does not sound like that of someone with a great concept of why there should be such a thing as a valid/invalid divide among licensed sources. In its [https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Tardis:Valid_sources?oldid=2888037 final state before I started redrafting it], the only passage that even gestures at the question is this: | |||
{{quote|The [[DWU|''Doctor Who'' universe]] is a tricky place when it comes to defining what should "count" and what shouldn't. You should make sure you understand [[Tardis:Canon policy|why the DWU isn't like other franchises]] before you go on. Suffice it to say here that ''any'' reference guide about the DWU must, of necessity, make certain choices about what to include – and what to kick off the farm.|Old T:VS}} | |||
Uhm, excuse you, no it ''doesn't'' "suffice to say"! But okay, this is referencing [https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Tardis:Canon_policy?oldid=2102192 the then-live revision] of [[Tardis:Canon policy]], and that ''does'' go into a ''little'' more detail… but it doesn't cover itself in glory in doing so. | |||
{{quote|'''In-universe''' articles are those written about the narrative elements of the DWU — articles like [[Amy Pond]], [[ambulance]] and [[Andromedan]]. The only valid sources for these articles are '''stories'''. Thus we need to know which stories "count" and which don't. If we didn't attempt a ''little'' bit of definition, our biography of [[the Doctor]] would have to include "the time he spent on Earth when he was a human called [[Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks)|Dr. Who]]" or "the incident in which he [[regenerated]] into his [[Thirteenth Doctor (The Curse of Fatal Death)|thirteenth body that looked an awful lot like Joanna Lumley]]", "the [[Exile (audio story)|one time he sounded an awful lot like Nick Briggs]], "the [[Audio Visuals|''other'' time he sounded an awful lot like Nick Briggs]]", and so forth.|Old T:CAN}} | |||
This extract fascinates me like a strange bug. It fascinates me like a record of a bygone, dictatorial age. It fascinates me like a glimpse into the mind of a medieval monk, or a three-headed Venusian philosopher. "If we didn't have Rule 4, our biography of the Doctor would have to include [proceeds to list things which our current biography of [[the Doctor]] is obviously much, much better off for including]". It floors me, it really does. | |||
I'm sorry, but this is canon thinking. I'm not proud of everything in [[User:Scrooge MacDuck/The Lost Closing Post|the Lost Closing Post]], but I could quote from its own Part 2, [[User:Scrooge MacDuck/The Lost Closing Post#Part 2: About Canon Thinking|''About Canon Thinking'']], ''verbatim'' in this particular conjuncture. (And that's all live policies from a forum thread that's already three years old…) Despite all the high-minded claims about "not invalidating things just because they're discontinuous", the T:VS-appealing-to-T:CAN dyad of yore betrays the very fallacious, toxic mentality it claimed to be moving away from: a base belief that "c'mon, we can't just act like [XYZ story] is ''real'' because then we'd have to say that Weird Things that Contradict Established Wisdom are real". One wonders why the rules were written in such a way as to permit ''[[The Dr Who Annual 1966]]'' — save carelessness — if it really is beyond the pale to allow in stories that force us to say that "according to one account the Doctor was a human called Dr Who". | |||
This. Is. Nonsense. It's not even the complicated mindset that led to people defending the exclusion of ''Faction Paradox'' — which was loosely "oh, that's a whole other mythology with its own vibes, it might have some elements in common with ''Who'' but ultimately they're best considered apart from one another, just as the Miles quote about different universes bears out and underlines". That happened to be wrong in that particular case, but it was wrong in a tricky, ponderous way bound up in a mixture of subtle fallacies, and factual errors in the alleged evidence. The hollow elbow-in-ribs snark of that old T:CAN passage is not even that. | |||
It is parochial and small-minded. It is an appeal to the ‘not-like-us,-not-like-us’ recoil at the unfamiliar and jarring; to the quintessentially fannish sentiment that has made people swear up and down that the [[Timeless Child]] or [[bi-generation]] have "broken the canon" of ''Doctor Who''. Even if there were a TV ''Who'' canon to be broken, these things wouldn't break it — they're each presented as newly-discovered ''secrets'', long buried or thought mythical; with the arguable exception of ''[[A Good Man Goes to War (TV story)|A Good Man Goes to War]]'' in the former case, neither "retcon" actually introduces any narrative or worldbuilding ''contradictions''. But what each does do is add a ''very weird'' footnote to the fan catechism of "here is what regeneration is, here are the Doctors in order, it's This Way And No Other". It's a purely aesthetic, knee-jerk dislike of in-universe data proving more complicated than "here are the names of all 15 Doctors" can encompass. | |||
Whatever the specifics of the authorial intent on ''[[The Curse of Fatal Death (TV story)|The Curse of Fatal Death]]'' or indeed ''[[Doctor Who Unbound]]'', there is nothing ''prima facie'' wrong with a source alleging that the Doctor at one point regenerated into Lumley or Briggs. Why would there be? If we're talking about parallel universes or rewritten time, it ''does not even rise to the level of contradiction''. It's just odd, that's all. But the mindset that wrote T:CAN couldn't stomach "odd", even if that's precisely what the DWU sources are serving up; so it reluctantly ''accepts'' the occasional oddity of "unintentional" narrative discontinuity, but exults when it's able to sever the more glaring "aberrations" by hook or crook. Whether or not this cripples proper coverage of other stories it leaves in its wake, in the way that a page like [[Dr. Who's reality (Dr. Who and the Daleks)]] would be pointlessly difficult to write if the actual Cushing-starring stories were the one thing we were not allowed to connect in-text to the various later sources trying to riff on or explicate them. | |||
[[User:Najawin]] has already been quoted several times for saying: | |||
{{quote|For me, as I said above, the reasoning comes first. I can live with [[Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)]]. It's irritating, but not ideal. I can live with a prominent, often referenced invalid story. I can live with weird implications of well thought out rules consistently applied. Poorly thought out rules, or well thought out rules inconsistently applied? That's when I have real frustrations.|[[User:Najawin]]}} | |||
But ''for heaven's sake, man, old-T:VS is'' '''''not''''' ''well-thought-out''. Not only have we been unable to agree on precisely what its Rule 4 is saying exactly, but it can barely articulate ''why'' such a rule ought to exist, and on the occasion that something like an implicit reasoning becomes apparent, it is patently obvious that it is a "reasoning" born of bias, parochialism and arbitrary dislike of the weird, ''not'' of a careful deliberation on what actually leads to the most informative, legible documentation of the body of work we have taken on the burden of Wikifying. Old-T:VS has at its heart a deeply incoherent and unjustified ''unwillingness'' to allow in "weird" sources ''even if'' in practice being able to cite them is beneficial to broader Wikification efforts. | |||
I don't want to keep driving old-T:VS into the dirt like this — the bits about not heeding narrative discontinuity were an indispensable first draft of the more principled way we look at these things nowadays. It has always been, as I said before, ''remarkably good by the standards of Wiki policies'', that just doesn't say much when a vast majority of big Wikis don't even ''begin'' to examine the concept of "canon". However trailblazing, we must recognise that in absolute terms ''it was not and has never been a wholly good, consistent policy''. Not even remotely. The simple reason we have been unable to agree on what galaxy-brain thing old-R4 might or might no thave been doing is that we were giving it far, far too much credit. There's no "there" there, just a convenient hammer with which to "kick off the farm" (oh, how I hate that phrase) those sources which our predecessors, for their own biased reasons, didn't ''want'' to ''bother'' to Wikify properly. | |||
==== Digression: a few words on consistency, counterproductive compromises, and the plight of the TV purists ==== | |||
I quoted the following, and touched on this point, before, but it bears repeating, given just how central "canon-brain" turns out to be to all of this. [[User:Najawin]] writes: | |||
{{quote|I know some people IRL who are massive Doctor Who fans, just massive. And they despise the wiki and consider it near unusable because it mixes together EU content and show content. I keep telling them that this will never change, that it's a foundational principle of our wiki that all sources are equal, but it really puts them off. And our decision validate all of these R4bp works, well... Some of them frustrated them more than others, but to them it just wasn't helpful, it obscured things more than made it clear.|[[User:Najawin]]}} | |||
Now, there is nothing wrong with being a fan of the ''Doctor Who'' TV series only, and not liking to think of the rest of the DWU as real in your head. People can do what they want. I want to be very clear about this. My steadfast belief that the Wiki must not give this mindset an inch is ''not'' to be misconstrued as a claim of moral superiority. It is unfortunate for TV-purists that they will not get what they want from our Wiki. I understand their plight, I sympathise, and I hope someday people who do not include myself put in the work to create a completely parallel TV-only Wiki to fulfil their deeply odd preference. | |||
''However'' — | |||
— there are two important things which, to my mind, void this as an argument against broadening the breadth of validity. | |||
* '''First''', there is no non-circular argument for TV meta-primacy. i.e. there is no reason an earnest preference for the continuity primacy of "all mainline BBC ''Who'' and nothing else" should be ''more'' catered to than an earnest preference for the continuity primacy of "Classic ''Who'' and its contemporary EU material, but none of that newfangled Cardiff stuff", or "Classic ''Who'' and NuWho S1-S11, but none of that Timeless Child stuff", or "''Faction Paradox'' and maybe some of the ''Doctor Who'' novels including the Target novelisationss, but nothing of that daft live-action stuff". Giving our readers ''everything'', clearly-labeled — everything to such an inclusive degree that only very few of us ''genuinely'' believe every single valid source to be real in their mental DWU — is the most neutral compromise between all these contradictory preferences that we have been able to reach. By scrupulously citing everything, and not claiming that any specific bit of non-TV content is more valid than any other bit, we are giving TV-purists ''as much as we can give them without unfairly giving them special treatment above and beyond other kinds of purists''. I'm sure some TV-purists will still find that insufficient, because they believe that TV has some innate claim of greater legitimacy, but, you know, accepting that argument ''makes'' you a TV-purist; as I said. Circular. (Well, that or the numbers game, but we are an encyclopaedia, dammit, not an entertainment channel. We cannot allow popular demand to affect the rigorousness and accuracy of ''how and whether we document information''; statistics on readers' aesthetic preferences can only guide, well, ''aesthetic'' decisions.) | |||
* '''Second,''' while I acknowledge that "everything(ish) is equally covered, sort through it yourselves using {{tlx|cite source}} if you care so much" is pretty far afield from what TV-purists want, ''they will not be getting what they want either way''. | |||
This second point is the one I wish to emphasise most, because it is also key to what makes the residual canon-brained thinking in old-T:VS/T:CAN detailed above so hopeless and counterproductive. One must have ''consistency''. We have already committed, very hard, to being the kind of Wiki that freely covers [[Yarvelling]] and [[loom]]s and the [[War in Heaven]] and the many subtleties of [[the Doctor's species]]. I don't want to say that there's ''no one'' who's okay with covering John & Gillian as valid, but not Rowan Atkinson. But it's a comically specific line-in-the-sand at best. The vast majority of people annoyed at our breadth of coverage are ''going to be annoyed either way''; inconsistently sacrificing ''[[The Curse of Fatal Death (TV story)|The Curse of Fatal Death]]'' and ''[[The Daft Dimension (series)|The Daft Dimension]]'', while happily covering ''[[The Equations of Dr Who (short story)|The Equations of Dr Who]]'' and ''[[Crimes Against History (short story)|Crimes Against History]]'', is not going to move their needle. It just makes us look weirdly finnicky on the margins for obscure, esoteric reasons that nobody off-Wiki actually cares about, even if they might ''individually'' approve of an invalid ''Curse'' and ''Daft Dimension'' for unrelated reasons. | |||
Yes, it will annoy some number of people to carry on covering ''Curse of Fatal Death'' and ''Daft Dimension'' and so on as valid, but (with all due sympathy) whether people who do not care about the osurces under discussion are annoyed or not should not be the determinant of good documentation — and by and large, those people are ''annoyed with us anyway and always will be''. ''Please'' let us not compromise good Wikification in futile gestures at "compromise" that leave us about as impenetrable to the purists, while inexplicably poking holes in the implacably logical universality of what our coverage aspires to me. There's a genuine population out there that wants "Hartnell but no TVComic, Cushing or Atkinson"; there is a neutral documentary case for "Hartnell + TVC + Cushing + Atkinson" and it's what our Wiki is best geared to provide; but "Hartnell + Cushing + TVC, but no Atkinson", or other such combinations, ''are not combinations that actually make anyone happy''. | |||
=== Part 3: So, why validity? (And validity by proxy?) === | |||
What, then, is validity ''for'', if it is not intended simply to fruitlessly pander to canon-brain or TV-purism? Having identified the fundamental unworkability of the old rationale, why ''not'' do as [[User:Aquanafrahudy]] suggest, and stick with [[Tardis:Covered sources]]? This is an important question, because it will determine the ethos with which we approach Part II's task, which, if [[User:Bongolium500]] agrees with the basics of my argument, will be tasked mainly with actually rewriting [[Tardis:Covered sources]] and [[Tardis:Valid sources]] wholesale based on principles which are ''actually'' clear and straightforward, and rooted in an archivists's unbiased neutrality, rather than the whim of people who happen to believe the idea of Joanna Lumley being a real Doctor is too outrageous to be true. | |||
And here I must return to part of my original riposte: not the specific three-step summary, whose specific implications proved more controversial than it was worth, but the basic kernel per which validity is ultimately a merging policy. It guides the degree to which we ought to cover similar elements of different works of fiction on the ''same'' pages vs. different pages. It allows us to say that when tackling the business of Wikifying ''[[The Daleks (TV story)|The Daleks]]'', one ought to link to the same [[Susan Foreman]] or [[TARDIS]] or [[human]] or indeed [[The Universe]] pages as when Wikifying ''[[An Unearthly Child (TV story)|An Unearthly Child]]'', rather than create a separate one. But the truth goes beyond that simple fact. | |||
The thing is that "what we do here" involves in large part '''discussing fictional connections between different stories'''. I implied in the earlier post that discussing connections was simply a byproduct of being parsimonious about not needlessly multiplying [[First Doctor (An Unearthly Child)]], [[First Doctor (The Daleks)]] etc. pages; but that was giving such editing-work too little credit. The truth is that connecting the dots is the ''heart and soul'' of in-universe Wikification. Everything comes back to this. Ultimately, if we did not ever merge in-universe pages for similar characters and elements in different sources, then we may as well not bother with the in-universe pages; [[First Doctor (An Unearthly Child)]] would tell you little that ''[[An Unearthly Child (TV story)|An Unearthly Child]]''" could not. The whole ''point'' of fiction Wikis lies in centralising data which even the most dedicated viewer could not hold in their mind all at the same time, and putting it all in a neutral, informative order that highlights points of connection from one work of fiction to the next. And ''this'' above all else is why "continuity trumps discontinuity" — why it ''must'' trump it. | |||
Pages like [[The Doctor's ninth incarnation]] that highlight the contradictory ways in which later sources might relate to a given original one are not merely fun novelties, they are ''the heart and soul of the concept of having an in-universe Wiki at all''. If our policies are not maximally conducive to smoothly, naturalistically writing pages like that then the policies are fundamentally ill-thought-out. Wikipedia can give you the normie-friendly list of all fifteen official Doctors, and a brief overview of the conventional asterisks e.g. John Hurt; ''our'' niche lies in teasing out all the subtle implications and connections and semi-contradictions that footnotes and off-handed lines here or there have introduced to complicate the simplistic view. It is our very essence. | |||
=== Part 4: So, why *in*validity? Featuring a Sampling of Theories and the Throwing of a Gauntlet === | |||
What place is there for "invalidity" under this view? | |||
Perhaps none. Perhaps Aquana is correct and we should just be done with the whole business — or at least with "Rule 4"-style invalidity. (On ''practicality'' grounds I think we would be well-served to retain invalidity under Rule 1 — that is, New Rule 1, the "''complete'' work of fiction" thing — either way. Aquana's suggestion of a R1-by-Proxy at the ned of the previous discussion breaks seems like a nonstarter to me: the question was never which fictional information was definitely in-universe, which is what a later story referencing the fictional bits of a R1-breaker might confirm, but rather confirming which bits of IRL bleed definitely ''weren't''.) | |||
I think, put simply, and this is what the talk of dead-ends was trying but failing to get at, it ought to be a practical measure to quarantine things that have ''nothing'' but discontinuity in all directions, in such a way that the only opportunity for discussion of "narrative connections" that they award is in the negative — in the "according to one account everything was completely different" sense. ''[[The Corridor Sketch]]'' and its ilk, even something like ''[[It's Showtime (TV story)|It's Showtime]]''. "According to another account none of ''Doctor Who'' was real and it was just something some goofs made up in an afternoon"; "According to another account none of these other things actually happened in any way and the universe worked according to wholly other principles, even if there was indicidentally still a man called the Doctor who looked like Matt Smith". Is this interesting? Is this fulfilling the purpose of an in-universe Wiki any more than trying to cover ''Asterix the Gaul'' on Tardis would? ''Is'' it? | |||
For aye, this is all becoming reminiscent of my ''Asterix'' thought experiment, notwithstanding that all those bits of ephemera do still purportedly old a license entitling them to coverage under [[T:CS]], so we'd be stuck covering them either way. But then, arguably my dream-self cheated by starting with "In <nowiki>[[Asterix's reality|one reality]]</nowiki>…", because ultimately what we don't have for these ephemera is any suggestion that they're even a "reality" or "universe" that exists in any way relative to [[the Doctor's universe]], in the [[Omniverse]] sense. We might choose to believe such if we choose to follow the view that the Omniverse contains all possibilities by definition, but that would be bringing in a controversial speculative-fiction idea from outside the story, and thus speculation/fanfic. So it really is down to ''accounts'' in those cases, and "According to another account, the universe had nothing in common with the usually-documented stuff except for that which also exists in real life" just isn't an interesting thing to say. Crucially ''this ceases to be the case'' if there is ever a story that even gestures at connecting back to the ''Corridor Sketch'', because then it becomes very meaningful to try to triangulate what the two sources are saying on the topics they share. | |||
All of this raises questions and possibilities galore. | |||
Perhaps a "strong" view of dead-end invalidity would hold that ''only'' something that has legal grounds for coverage, but no fictional concepts shared, like ''[[The Corridor Sketch]]'', might wind up invalid under a "Rule 4"-like principle. The "weak" view of dead-end invalidity, meanwhile, would extend to free-floating one-offs with their own "spins" on fictional DWU elements, thereby excluding the ''[[It's Showtime (TV story)|It's Showtime]]''s and ''[[Oh Mummy! (home video)|Oh Mummy!]]''s of the world. | |||
Perhaps my scruples about "reality" pages are ill-founded — perhaps we should do as the Jenny Everywhere Wiki does, and simply call things which seem to be intended to take place in realities of their own "valid realities" on principle, without taking a side on whether they relate to [[the Doctor's universe]] in any specific way, whether it be as "alternate universes" or "palimpsest" or "parallel". Perhaps that's enough to stave off the specter of fanfic-creep, at least as much as the uncontroversial widespread use of "According to one account…" language. (After all, to a churlish reader that might be taken to unwarrantedly imply the diegetic existence of such "accounts" as in-universe objects of some kind!) | |||
Perhaps, to stave off the plague of frivolous "Reality (Random tangentially-related comedy strip)" pages, we might retain invalidity for true one-offs, but award validity and "reality" coverage to any ''branch'' of covered works which connect to one another, even if they are discontinuous with the rest of the dreaded Web? So ''Daft Dimension'' would have been a valid "reality" all the time, even if its creator hadn't specifically confirmed it as a parallel universe in the diegetic sense, but we wouldn't have [[Sutekh's reality (Oh Mummy!)]]. Seems workable. Bit cobbled-together, but in line with the truth of the one thing (to my understanding) that validity can neutrally be argued to be ''for'', which is the main thing. Put a laser-gun to my head right now, that's what I'd go with, I think. | |||
But for pity's sake, "if it wasn't 'intended to be set in the DWU' [and note, bloody wars ''will'' be fought about what we mean by 'the DWU'] then it can never be valid ever whatever happens" cannot be the best we can do. Such absolutism runs completely contrary to the reason ''validity'' exists by foreclosing any tangible ability to discuss narrative connections between initially-"invalid" works and others in in-universe sections. Invalidity at that cost is ''not worth the benefit of having invalidity at all'' and we may as well abolish it and be done with it. | |||
Ultimately I'm not confident in any of my ways forward, though neither am I wholly confident in Aquana's abolitionism. But '''that is the gauntlet thrown. The old justification for "invalidity"'s existence was little more than at worst an artefact of canon-thinking on the part of the policy-crafters, or at best a half-hearted attempt to placate TV-purists who will never find our Wiki satisfactory anyway. Very probably there are good reasons to keep it around in some form, but the onus should really be on people who want it to be a thing to present a''' '''''well-thought-out rationale for having such a thing''''', not the other way around.''' And furthermore, '''a proposed invalidity policy that would designate as invalid any source in whose fictonal contents the Wiki would otherwise find interest in discussing connections to other, valid stories, is by definition to be considered a bad invalidity policy''', as running directly contrary to one of the main reasons why we have a "valid" in-universe area of the Wiki at all. | |||
=== Part 5: Final thoughts === | |||
Well, here we are at least, bloodied and bruised. Perhaps Najawin will reply to some of this, perhaps he won't. Other people should free to, of course. Sainte Eccleston prsides at last over the "definitive" Ninth break, which looks likely to be the last in this thread. I dunno if we've achieved anything constructive. Maybe. But by God, I hope if I've achieved one thing it's to show that ''the old policies cannot stand'', both because we can't agree on what precisely they were saying, and because what little we can divine of the intent behind them often fails to inspire confidence. They were invaluable first drafts, but we are older and wiser now; it's time for a change. The New Year's as good a time as any to finally get moving on that. | |||
My heartfelt certainty is that '''we need a Part II, and this Part II needs to be about rewriting our coverage/validity policies from scratch, using everything we learned here as a springboard — starting with the fact that things like the various R4BP targets absolutely ''must'' be included in the final valid output, or else we haven't found the right algorithm yet.''' Surely we can do it. | |||
And there are, of course, other things for it to hash out. Perhaps we might at last discuss the standards of inclusion on [[Talk:Guinevere One]]/[[Talk:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)]]-type issues; certainly it would be a good place to discuss the long-floated matter of non-fanfic non-licensed works whose fictional contents retroactively become inextricably intertwined with the DWU to the extent that it harms our coverage of various covere/valid sources not to be able to cover the originals, as discussed at [[Talk:Bibliophage (short story)]] and embodied by ''[[Phoenix Court (series)|Phoenix Court]]''. Certainly we shall discuss crossovers and Roland Rats. Oh, it'll be a big one. But '''if this thread was deconstructive, I must hope Part II will be fundamentally constructive''', and that I will, maybe, just maybe, get fewer headaches in the process this time. | |||
However, if by some twist of fate that hope for a reforming Thread II should be thwarted, let me at least say that '''keeping R4BP just-as-is (and dismissing invalidity-by-proxy, R1BP, R2BP and R3BP on principle) would be better than nothing, because ''contra'' Najawin's increasingly strained claims, the pre-R4BP policy regime was neither well-thought-out nor coherent'''. It was always a self-contradictory mess of casuistry, good and bad impulses, and half-articulated principles. That ungainly, shambling mass has historically pointed in ''more or less beneficial directions'' despite its inherent limitations; pasting "R4BP but none of its alleged logical extensions" on top of the shambling mass makes it marginally uglier but marginally better at pointing in beneficial directions, and comes out positive at the end of the day. If we're not going to go the whole hog and put the shambling mass out of its misery and start over based on actually objective principles, then the least we can do is avoid making the shambling mass's functionality ''worse'' via a meaningless "improvement" to its hopelessly-lost level of inner consistency and well-thought-out…ness. | |||
In short, '''either T:VS-as-we-know-it goes, or R4BP-as-we-know-it stays.''' Not my best slogan, but it's 1 a.m. on January 1st. You get the picture. | |||
Thank you to any staggering, exhausted traveller who's made it all the way down. Let's hope that long long road leads us somwhere in the end. [[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 01:12, 1 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
</div> | |||
== Ninth Break (Christopher Eccleston Edition) == | |||
First and foremost, I'll address the issue of not responding fully to the last object-level-response. As I gestured towards above, when you said "more to come" this was interpreted as you having a large comment pending, so I held off, which you indicated was the correct interpretation, it seems to me. | |||
:But ''for heaven's sake, man, old-T:VS is'' '''''not''''' ''well-thought-out''. Not only have we been unable to agree on precisely what its Rule 4 is saying exactly, but it can barely articulate ''why'' such a rule ought to exist, and on the occasion that something like an implicit reasoning becomes apparent, it is patently obvious that it is a "reasoning" born of bias, parochialism and arbitrary dislike of the weird, ''not'' of a careful deliberation on what actually leads to the most informative, legible documentation of the body of work we have taken on the burden of Wikifying | |||
Well, I note here that I also emphasize rules that are inconsistently applied, as I was referencing a rule that I believed would be inconsistently applied by its very nature. But disagreement does not entail that there's an active issue. And I strenuously object to your characterization of how R4 emerged. Might ultimately it not be the correct standard? Sure, of course. I think we can both agree old-T:VS is imperfect. But we know [[Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?|precisely]] what led to this view. Indeed, it's, I believe, the '''''only''''' case in [[T:VS]] that we don't fit into the strict valid/invalid dichotomy but instead say "it's complicated". It's pretty uncharitable to characterize it as you did. It requires us to psychologize the individuals involved and see deeper motives on that framing of R4 when they ''already'' allowed themselves to vote things off the island whenever they wished. (Now, if you wish to argue ''that'' bit in particular is what wasn't ever justified, I mean, fair enough, but I can think of quite a few reasons to do so. I'm sure anyone can if given five minutes.) | |||
:the basic kernel per which validity is ultimately a merging policy. It guides the degree to which we ought to cover similar elements of different works of fiction on the ''same'' pages vs. different pages. [...] The whole ''point'' of fiction Wikis lies in centralising data which even the most dedicated viewer could not hold in their mind all at the same time, and putting it all in a neutral, informative order that highlights points of connection from one work of fiction to the next. And ''this'' above all else is why "continuity trumps discontinuity" — why it ''must'' trump it. | |||
[[Stream (The Hollows of Time)]], [[Man with the rosette]], etc. You're suggesting not just a rewriting of T:VS, but a rewriting of how we merge pages far and away more extreme than the Homeworld principle. Maybe we should do this. But it's certainly, certainly not the case that this is how the wiki currently operates. We'd not just be rewriting T:VS, we'd be rewriting fundamental aspects of how we treat concepts, abandoning over a decade of precedent. | |||
:'''The old justification for "invalidity"'s existence was little more than at worst an artefact of canon-thinking on the part of the policy-crafters, or at best a half-hearted attempt to placate TV-purists who will never find our Wiki satisfactory anyway. Very probably there are good reasons to keep it around in some form, but the onus should really be on people who want it to be a thing to present a''' '''''well-thought-out rationale for having such a thing''''', not the other way around. | |||
The basic ideas for why, if invalidity does exist, R4 has a pretty solid case for being part of our considerations, are sketched out in [[Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?]]. | |||
* If the author doesn't believe it's the "real" continuity, why should we? [...] There must be ''some'' metric by which we define our borders, or we'll be pickin' Rose/Dodo lesbian fan fic off the walls | |||
* [[User:Tangerineduel|Tangerineduel]] has made the point that we can't believe a writer who says that their work '''''is''''' canonical. That's very true. But, in my opinion, he's incorrect on the reverse. I think we ''do'' have to believe a writer who declares, "Look, this isn't a part of the mainstream continuity." After all, we've believed it before. I don't see any rational argument for doing something '''different''' in this case. | |||
* it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity '''will''' have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you ''do'' take it seriously, because they're acting ''against''their self-interest. | |||
I don't quite agree with all of these, and I certainly wouldn't use the language in these as to how I would frame the discussion, it's very much of its time. But it's certainly the case that we have to cut off our wiki somewhere, and if an author tells us point blank "this is not supposed to count, this is just for fun, you can have your headcanons, but I don't think this happened in my view of the DWU, whatever that means, and I'd prefer if DWU stories, whatever those are, don't reference it", I'm pretty sold on us excising those from validity. I think it's about as good as we're ever gonna get. Other people then trying to force them back in with other stories referencing them is, honestly, not something I can bring myself to care about. The author's intent has been made clear. If we're ''ever'' going to invalidate licensed works, it's got to be these sorts of things, they have as clear a claim on this status as anything ever could. Ultimately should we invalidate licensed works at all? This is up to the wiki as a whole to decide. I note as well, the same forum argues fairly persuasively that if validity/invalidity exist ''we must never use solely narrative details to adjudicate this standard''. | |||
*Everything we've put outside the canonical wall has been placed there '''precisely because of''' out-of-universe arguments. [...] We '''must''' have an out-of-universe reason to throw it out. Otherwise, we're making a value judgement about the narrative. I'm not saying there can't be other, narrative reasons mentioned in the inclusion debate, but we '''have''' to have a valid out-of-universe rationale for exclusion. | |||
Once again, time moves on. It's been ten years. But if the next thread is to be constructive, and specifically constructive in the manner Scrooge wishes it to be, we need to realize that it will require a radical rethinking of wiki policy on multiple different levels as to how we approach in-universe articles, not just as it applies to validity vs invalidity. The decision to purge narrative and continuity from our decision making procedures (I, again, believe, rightly) in this manner has been so deeply engrained in our policies that it will be a monumental effort to reverse it. And if we think this thread is long, I can only imagine how long a thread dedicated to discussing all of those issues will be. [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 03:58, 1 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
:: Replying in brief to some of the points: | |||
:: • I did not mean to say you'd done anything odd in not putting up another Big Reply; the "it might seem unorthodox that it's me who…" was meant as a historical note for the benefit of readers scrolling through this page, who might miss this nuance and wonder why (at the macro scale) I'm replying to myself. | |||
:: • As I stressed multiple times, yes, there are good bits in Old-T:VS; when I say that "it's" unjustified I mean that the unjustified bits that are unjustified, not that there's naught in there that's worth saving or praising! Nor did I mean to "psychologise the individuals involved"; I specifically avoided any language putting the blame on the specific individuals who wrote it up. Apologies for sounding a little bit Hegelian just now but I really was blaming ''the then-prevalent mindset in itself'', beyond what any individual editor might have been expected to buck against. | |||
:: • [[Man with the rosette]] is a very odd and controversal situation, and I object to you acting like it's the be-all end-all of policy in this matter. Compare the way we do [[Weapon (The Eyeless)]] (which was worked out in a thread), or the acknowledgement that [[The Magistrate]]=[[The War King]] in some sense (even if there is a long-standing argument from [[User:NateBumber|n8]] that the pages shouldn't be ''merged'', he's certainly never argued that we should banish any links to BTS). On the whole, as per [[T:HOMEWORLD]] we've long moved away from the "unless it's explicitly the same thing by ''name'' then we can't ever acknowledge the implicit links" mentality which you depict as sacrosanct. [[Talk:DARDIS]] is also instructive in this matter. Might I also ask why OOU reasoning is the only thing you'll accept on matters of validity, but IU the only thing you'll accept on matters of other mergers, when, as I have demonstrated, ''validity is largely a matter of mergers''? It seems rather inconsistent to me. My standard for ''both'' is "is this more or less conducive to discussing the narrative connections between these accounts in a neutral way" (and as demonstrated by [[The Moment]]/[[Weapon (The Eyeless)]] such an approach permits other conclusions than the binary of "merge 100%" vs. "don't acknowledge the apparent connections anywhere except maybe ib BTS"). | |||
:: And perhaps most importantly… None of [[Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?]] strikes me as a pertinent justification for validity/invalidity. None of it is free from canon-brain. Everybody involved seems to be accepting the ''premise'' that there ought to be such a thing as a validity/invalidity divide for licensed stories; ''why'' should something as esoteric as "whether the author means for it to be in continuity" affect our coverage? It isn't an objective fact about the text, and it's not clear that it makes our Wiki better, since, again, it objectively greatly hinders the writing of a whole swathe of terrific pages e.g. [[The Doctor's reality (Death Comes to Time)]]. (And I stress once more, by the way, that I'm not sure what the hell you think "continuity" here ''means'' other than narrative connections, but oh well.) | |||
:: Looking at the specific arguments you quote, they're full of frankly baffling non-arguments. "There must be ''some'' metric by which we define our borders, or we'll be pickin' Rose/Dodo lesbian fan fic off the walls" if it means anything is an argument for Rule 2, not Rule 4; and furthermore R2 considered as a matter of whether-to-cover rather than cover-as-valid-or-invalid, as certainly the intention wasn't that we'd have pages on all these femslash fics, only with a little {{tlx|invalid}} tag in the corner. And again I feel like there's a toxic "appeal to absurdity" going on in the specific example chosen; we are no more equipped to cover all "canon-flavoured", unremarkable "the Doctor lands on a planet and foils some Daleks" fanfics than we are equipped to cover all romance fics with supposedly 'unlikely' pairings. As clarified in the conclusion of [[Forum:Relaxing our fan works policy (within reason)]], the problem with the hypothetical Rose/Dodo fic isn't that it's Rose/Dodo, it's that there's way too many things like it for us to hope to ever do the job without sacrificing all standards of quality. The pearl-clutching about "but ''imagine'', what if we had to say by one account Rose was ''gay''" really is an irrelevance; when a ''licensed'' source says that, for example, [[Liz Shaw]] was gay and in a relationship with [[Patricia Haggard|a modern-day Leela lookalike]] that's really ''quite'' alright. | |||
:: Moving on to the second bullet point, the whole "we have to believe a writer who says their work exists outside mainstream continuity" is just flatly asserted without any good justification for why there even ''is'' coherently such a thing as "mainstream continuity"; why it ought to be what the Wiki cares about; or why a writer's notion of it should be thought to correspond to the Wiki's hypothetical definition of the same. "After all we've done it before" and keeping it at that is a ''comically weak argument'' for such a thorny and prima-facie-unconvincing position. The urge is immense to hop in a time machine and go back and reply "Very probably we 'did it before' because editors at the time were overcome with the pervasive canon-brain thinking that infects our fandom, just as ''you'' are, not because they had a mysterious good reason you can't articulate right now! Come on!". | |||
:: The "sales" argument just depresses me. But if nothing else it bakes in a wholly unjustified idea that DWU stories are necessarily for-profit; how are we to judge a Rule 4 quote for a free online story then? Hmm? And in a broader sense it seems again intent on psychologising the writer involved for some reason, instead of looking at what's in the text, how the text connects to other texts, and what the optimal neutral way to document the fictional contents of that text might look like. | |||
:: As for your own gloss… Firstly, isn't "and I'd prefer if DWU stories, whatever those are, don't reference it" accepting that some version of Web Theory's 'dead-ends' would have to be part of a formalisation of what we mean by 'intent not to be set in the DWU'? Interesting, I find this. As for the rest, "other people then trying to force them back in with other stories referencing them is, honestly, not something I can bring myself to care about. The author's intent has been made clear" just remains open to the same issue. It's not clear how your personal feelings on such a matter relate to what's ''best for the Wiki''. The author's intent does not seem like it affects whether it's better Wiki-work to cover it as valid or not. Why would it be? | |||
:: And all this is before we get into all the well-trodden secondary issues about how it's monstrously difficult to find any uncontroversial instance of an author making a mythical Rule 4 statement, because actual DWU authors do not use the word "universe" the way we do and we ourselves don't all agree on what ''we'' mean by "the DWU". [[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 13:41, 1 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
::: As this thread draws wearily on, and we run about in circles in a manner not unakin to that of a headless chicken, the prospect of a new thread rethinking our validity policies from the ground up seems increasingly attractive (and is what I've been wanting for ages; I hadn't thought of the new thread bit, but the rethinking of our validity policies is something I've been wanting, and it follows that if we were to do this, we would want to have a larger input group than just us four (five?)). Our validity rules are dearly in need of a rethink, and, as I have said above, rule 4 seems no longer to stem from any coherent or logical principles. | |||
::: The arguments in the Infinity Doctor thread don't seem to me to be very persuasive; the former appears, as Scrooge has already pointed out, to be an argument for rule 2 more than rule 4, or very possibly rules 1 and 3. But certainly not 4! The latter does not follow remotely; for a start, if this is the logical underpinning of rule 4 as it currently stands, then rule 4 as it currently stands (as has already been pointed out) is not remotely coherent! For a start, if this were to be our guiding light, then why are parodies and fourth-wall breakers considered invalid? "After all, we've believed it before". People have believed all sorts of things before, this isn't a particularly compelling argument. | |||
:::: it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity '''will''' have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you ''do'' take it seriously, because they're acting ''against''their self-interest. | |||
::: Well, not really? We have, after all, established that it's common marketing practise to say that a series is "in its own universe", hence the validation of Vienna (iirc, may be using the wrong example). And what do we mean by continuity anyway? And Scrooge's argument for non-commercially released stuff holds. I do get that this was used as an example, rather than the argument, but still. (still what? heaven knows. Apologies for all these brackets, I'm rather tired, and fear I'm babbling. Oh, look at that, a babble!) | |||
::: As to Scrooge's proposed way of doing things, and rationale, well... suffice to say I'm not entirely convinced, but I certainly think it makes a good deal of sense, if not a complete amount of sense (was that a coherent sentence? I don't think that was a coherent sentence, sorry). Just getting rid of rule 4 entirely still seems to me to be the simplest and most stress-free option, but whatever. | |||
::: Yes, this is my opinion, and I have expressed it as best I can, which may not have been very well, considering the amount of sleep I got last night (and also note for posterity that I did not stay up late intentionally, but entirely by mistake, blasted insomnia). Was it coherent? Fuck knows. Was it elegant? Probably not? Was there a lot of random digressions and babbling? Yes, sorry. Can I be bothered to edit it? No. How long are these sort-of-rhetorical questions going on for? Not long, now. Did it reflect my overall views on this thread? Hopefully. | |||
::: Thanks for reading (and well done if you read through all that), {{User:Aquanafrahudy/Sig}} 19:55, 1 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
::::It seems to me... bizarre to characterize our progress in the discussion heretofore as | |||
:::::[Scrooge has] demonstrated, ''validity is largely a matter of mergers'' | |||
::::I mean, you've certainly ''claimed'' this. But there's no ''argument'' for it, it's just an assertion about what you view validity as being. Indeed, the pages we're discussing now are ''clear'' counter examples to this basic line of thought. If we cared solely about narrative connections, we'd have merged [[Weapon (The Eyeless)]] and [[The Moment]]. The fact that they're on separate pages with information present on each to talk about the varying accounts of the issue tells us that validity is not about ''merging pages.'' Everything present is in a valid work. If we were to merge works as you're suggesting we'd have one page discussing all of the competing ways in which the Doctor ended the time war pushed together. Now, of course, you realize that this approach is problematic to your argument, so you try to head it off at the pass. Are you successful? | |||
:::::My standard for ''both'' is "is this more or less conducive to discussing the narrative connections between these accounts in a neutral way" | |||
::::No. This is completely subjective. It's arbitrary in practice, it's precisely the worst type of rule we could implement on this wiki. (And as an aside, the reason why I use OOU reasons for validity and IU for merging is that I don't believe validity is related to merging, since we very distinctly do ''not'' always merge like you're suggesting. It's about cataloguing. Which appears similar.) | |||
::::It's also, I want to stress, not the only standard Scrooge has to hold. There's nothing preventing us from creating a page called "Time War Ending Device/Weapon/Whatever" and merging every account of the issue there and trying to cover things neutrally there. It would be ''horrible''. But it would be neutral! And it would probably cover the narrative connections better than we do currently. So why don't we do this? If validity is about merges, if we want to discuss narrative connections in a neutral way, and that's '''''all''''' we care about, why don't we? We can't do this trick with, say, [[Richard III of England]], [[Christopher Marlowe]], and [[William Shakespeare]], but we can do it here. | |||
:::::None of [[Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?]] strikes me as a pertinent justification for validity/invalidity. None of it is free from canon-brain. | |||
::::Oh come now. Under this standard you can argue that ''all'' of T:VS is irrelevant as it's not free from canon-brain. It's not six months before the writing of T:VS. They're explicitly using "canon" in that thread to refer to proto-T:VS, with perhaps 2 exceptions. | |||
:::::"There must be ''some'' metric by which we define our borders, or we'll be pickin' Rose/Dodo lesbian fan fic off the walls" if it means anything is an argument for Rule 2, not Rule 4 | |||
::::I'll focus on this, the rest is really '''quite''' irrelevant to the point being made. The statement made is just that some boundaries must exist, by the reference to a particularly ridiculous slashfic. Since some boundaries must exist, authorial intent is perhaps the most easily defensible metric, as they've explicitly insisted that they "don't think it counts". Whether or not you buy this, w/e. But it's not an argument for R2. It's an argument for some boundaries and then, '''''given that boundaries must exist''''', R4 following after. Two arguments. Not one. | |||
:::::the whole "we have to believe a writer who says their work exists outside mainstream continuity" is just flatly asserted without any good justification for why there even ''is'' coherently such a thing as "mainstream continuity"; why it ought to be what the Wiki cares about; or why a writer's notion of it should be thought to correspond to the Wiki's hypothetical definition of the same | |||
::::Again, this happens to be the one example where the conclusion of the thread ended in "it's kinda valid". And the statement made is ''specifically'' referring to that work. But you're making a mistake here. Perhaps there's no coherent thing as mainstream continuity. Sure, whatever. But it's still kosher for a writer to say "even if there ''were to be'' a mainstream continuity, my work is not like that. Whatever you think of as mainstream continuity, my work is not that." They can define themselves in negation to the term, even without the positive example exists. And Czech isn't even arguing there that the wiki ''should'' care about the positive example. Just that those people who define themselves in opposition to it are taken at their word. Obviously the wiki to writer conversion is nuanced though. | |||
:::::The "sales" argument just depresses me. But if nothing else it bakes in a wholly unjustified idea that DWU stories are necessarily for-profit; how are we to judge a Rule 4 quote for a free online story then? Hmm? And in a broader sense it seems again intent on psychologising the writer involved for some reason, instead of looking at what's in the text | |||
::::Publicity? But we can't look at the text to determine intent of DWU-ness, obviously. That would make us precisely as bad as our worst detractors accuse us of being, trying to decide what is and isn't DWU based on what we think from the text. Personally I don't think much of this argument though, I've read the ra.dw logs about ''Curse'', Moffat actively encouraged people to watch it and donate by saying it ''wasn't'' real, and to donate to charity to "keep Curse out of canon". | |||
:::::Firstly, isn't "and I'd prefer if DWU stories, whatever those are, don't reference it" accepting that some version of Web Theory's 'dead-ends' would have to be part of a formalisation of what we mean by 'intent not to be set in the DWU'? Interesting, I find this. | |||
::::Nah, on a first draft I didn't include that. I put it in specifically to better appeal to you, to make the hypothetical more extreme. | |||
:::::It's not clear how your personal feelings on such a matter relate to what's ''best for the Wiki''. The author's intent does not seem like it affects whether it's better Wiki-work to cover it as valid or not. | |||
::::I mean, sure. But it's just question begging, in the real sense of the term, to suggest that it's better wiki-work to cover it as valid. It was really the next sentence that mattered there, that if invalidity was ''ever'' going to exist, it was these works that would have to be invalidated. Do we want to invalidate things? We can discuss this. But I just don't see an argument here that gets around this issue, that if invalidity is to exist, these are the most natural objects to be invalid. | |||
:::::And all this is before we get into all the well-trodden secondary issues about how it's monstrously difficult to find any uncontroversial instance of an author making a mythical Rule 4 statement, because actual DWU authors do not use the word "universe" the way we do and we ourselves don't all agree on what ''we'' mean by "the DWU". | |||
::::You'll find no argument from me that this is difficult. But I don't believe that such a thing is impossible. Indeed, I'm fairly confident that at the time of release ''Curse'' met these criteria. Whether or not we can trust the statements Moffat made, given the motives I referenced above, and how he's changed his tune since then, you know, w/e. But his comments ''at time of release'' seem to be sufficient to me. So it ''can be done''. It's just rare. [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 20:19, 1 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
:: I never said it was the only merging standard which would direct merging policy! I said it was a ''subset'' of the merging policy. Though for what it's worth a "[[Weapon which ended the Time War]]" overview in the manner of [[The Doctor's ninth incarnation]] might well have merit, as an overview coexisting with, and distinct from, the pages about the specific versions. I'm not quite sure what fine-grained difference you see between a merging policy and a cataloguing policy. | |||
::: “Oh come on. (…) They're explicitly using "canon" in that thread to refer to proto-T:VS, with perhaps 2 exceptions.” | |||
:: Apologies if I was unclear, but I'm not talking about their usage of the ''word'' "canon" — I agree that's largely irrelevant. I'm talking about "canon-brain" as I defined it in the Lost Closing Post, i.e. a frame of mind where the Wiki in some sense tries to describe a "real DWU"; where the invalid/valid distinction would correspond to statements (however tentative; attempts to make descriptive statements about this do not quite come from the same place as would a proper "canon policy" where the Wiki attempted to ''dictate'' this based on its own judgements) about what "actually" "did" or "didn't happen" in some fantasmagorical "mainstream continuity" of the DWU — as opposed to being a matter of whether ''sources are fit to be cited as evidence of'' a given fact. The distinction now highlighted at the top of [[Tardis:Valid sources]], the paramount point "''Curse of Fatal Death'' isn't a valid source for writing about the DWU in the main namespace" ≠ "we actively hold that no such events as its plot happened in the DWU we talk about"… I don't think that was at all clear in the thread. | |||
:: I think it's hard to argue against the idea that people in the thread were labouring under that kind of mindset. The opening post from [[User:CzechOut]] alone is full of such tells as taking at face value the idea of a preexisting free-floating "normal DWU" that ''TID'' might or might not fit in with, and repeatedly fussing over whether we can "speak of [the book's] events with certainty". [[User:Tardis1963]] chimes in with a complaint that the book "doesn't make sense in the context of DWU canon", again emphasising the weirdness of the events described ''in'' the book — very much saying "come on, we can't say this stuff ''really happened'', can we? it doesn't make ''sense''" rather than "on its own this stuff could very well have happened, the weirdness is neither here nor there, it's only that Parkin seems not to mean for us to cover it that way". Further down the page we again find Czech talking about things like ''Curse'' being "clearly outside [''Who''{{'}}s] own continuity"; I think any reading of that paragraph as coming from a place of "obviously if we had no reason to think Moffat didn't for it to count, then it'd be all fine and dandy, it's only the BTS context that makes us conclude otherwise" would be ''extremely strained at best''. Czech really does seem to be assuming that there ''is'' a general "mainstream DWU", and that certain sources describe events which actively Do Not occur "there" . Just look at his bolded rationale for the invalidity of ''Scream of the Shalka'': "because RTD told us not to believe in it". ''Believe in it''. That's canon-brain if anything is. Or see later him alleging that Parkin "wrote the story in such a way that it was canonically impossible". (And it's not just Czech: look at [[User:Josiah Rowe]] talking about how "We exclude ''Scream of the Shalka'', ''The Curse of Fatal Death'' and ''Death Comes to Time'' because they're just not reconcilable with the rest of the Doctor's life".) | |||
:: And yes, at other points in the debate, some people, at times Czech himself, try to step back from this and assert that "we don't look at narrative contradictions to determine validity". (I am incidentally somewhat gratified to see Josiah Rowe inventing proto-Web Theory, complete with dead-ends, at one point: "''Curse'' is continuous in only one direction. It works as a (parodic) follow-on to the ''Doctor Who'' which preceded it, but not as a precedent for any of the ''Doctor Who'' which followed. ''TID'' is continuous in both directions: it builds on elements which came before, and elements from it are picked up in the narratives that follow".) But it's a noble aspiration that's entirely failing to save them from the weight of canon-brain. Again and again we come back to the fallacious, destructive notion that "is a source invalid or valid" has something to do with the question "did its events 'actually' happen in 'the' DWU", with nary any questioning of what this mythical 'the' DWU even means. One more Czech quote from the road: "If we're going to continue to allow the book to be cited, the only way I'd only be happy if we attached a note saying, 'Our community is of divided opinion as to whether the following statements accurately describe the DWU, because we disagree as to whether its source material is actually set the DWU.' Or words to that effect". He 100% participated in this debate (and steered, and ultimately closed it) within a view that validityhad something to do with "accurately describing the DWU", as though the DWU had a real external existence to which a source could be more or less "accurate". | |||
:: ''That'' is what I mean by canon-brain. That is the fallacy which I think must be scoured from T:VS at all costs, and which renders any decisions made under its influence deeply suspect, albeit not necessarily useless. And I'm afraid that however historically relevant it might be, that crippling problem is all over the ''TID'' thread. | |||
:: Moving on: | |||
::: “The statement made is just that some boundaries must exist, by the reference to a particularly ridiculous slashfic. Since some boundaries must exist, authorial intent is perhaps the most easily defensible metric, as they've explicitly insisted that they "don't think it counts". Whether or not you buy this, w/e. But it's not an argument for R2. It's an argument for some boundaries and then, given that boundaries must exist, R4 following after. Two arguments. Not one.” | |||
:: Okay, it's not specifically a R2 argument, I misspoke. But it is, as it were, an argument for [[Tardis:Covered sources]]. It goes "we do not have the manpower to cover ''everything'', therefore there must be boundaries to ''what'' we cover"; it does diddly-squat to justify that there should be different ''ways'' in which we cover the sources we do cover. Therefore nothing ''like'' Rule 4/invalidity, whatever the specific criterion determining validity/invalidity, can follow from that basic argument in any way. | |||
:: (I think it kind of did in Czech's head at the time, because as [[Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?]] also evidences, this is an artefact of that dark, dark period in the Wiki's history when {{tlx|invalid}} sources weren't consistently allowed to have pages made about their bespoke in-universe concepts, meaning they meaningfully ''were'' covered less. But, I mean, that was self-evidently awful and we moved on from it a very long time ago; before even my time.) | |||
:: And onwards: | |||
::: “''you're making a mistake here. Perhaps there's no coherent thing as mainstream continuity. Sure, whatever. But it's still kosher for a writer to say "even if there *were to be* a mainstream continuity, my work is not like that. Whatever you think of as mainstream continuity, my work is not that." They can define themselves in negation to the term, even without the positive example exists. And Czech isn't even arguing there that the wiki *should* care about the positive example. Just that those people who define themselves in opposition to it are taken at their word.''” | |||
:: But… Najawin. Why ''would'' "taking the writer at their word" on such an issue have any influence on Wiki coverage ''unless'' were granted the unjustified (and, you claim, non-actively-argued-for) premise that the Wiki normally cares about the positive thing? That is, why should the "taking the writer at their word" not consist of making an informative BTS note of "Fun fact, Lance Parkin apparently believes in a thing called 'mainstream continuity', and sort of placed ''TID'' outside of it", without that impacting the way in-universe pages are written in any way whatsoever? | |||
::: “(…) But I just don't see an argument here that gets around this issue, that if invalidity is to exist, these are the most natural objects to be invalid.” | |||
:: ''I'', for one, think the most natural objects to be invalid are Rule 1 breakers. It is for them, ultimately, that I would retain the {{tlx|invalid}} framework if otherwise going along with Aquana's Rule 4 abolitionism. If we think of validity as a matter of "these sources are not to be used to make positive claims on in-universe pages" rather than a matter of "do these sources 'accurately' describe 'the mainstream DWU' or not", then sources which are held to be ''structurally'' deficient — ones, for xample, whose fictional boundaries are muddy in a way that makes it difficult to determine what precisely warrants coverage as fiction — have a much clearer justification for second-class-citizen "invalid" status than sources whose contents would be quite simple, and indeed often ''easier'', to neutrally and accurately integrate with the in-universe namespace, but whose paratext happens to include authorial statements about being-set-in-'the'-DWU-or-not. [[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 22:18, 2 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
:::But again, it's just ''not'' a subset of the merging policy. And this is really easy to see, there are times when it's wholly improper to do things with the valid/invalid distinction where it might be proper to do it with ''any'' other merged pages that could communicate with each other. Suppose a parody comic, a clear, unambiguous, parody comic with authorial statements and everything, that we've ruled out through R4, has a strip where the 10th Doctor in a style distinctly reminiscent of Titan Comics shows up. This 10th Doctor interacts with people in the strip, does a gag, perhaps even referring to the different styles of art, and that's that. Future strips reference this event. The author of the comic (who is known to be well read about weird DWU shenanigans) is asked about if he thinks this is "canon" and he explicitly says that he doesn't, he's doing his own thing, and he doesn't think it in ''any way'' impacts anything anywhere, it was just a gag. It would '''''absolutely, positively''''' be improper to reference these events in the body of the normal 10th Doctor article. This is as R4 invalid as R4 invalid gets, it even explicitly fails R4bp under current policy. ''But'' you can reference them in the BTS section, and there's nothing preventing you from referencing them, including even linking to the proper, valid, 10th Doctor, on the pages for the relevant parody comic characters. This is a situation that doesn't occur anywhere else, and it only occurs because in-universe articles consider valid sources "real"/"reliable" (in terms of our wiki-writing kayfabe) and not invalid sources. | |||
::::I'm not quite sure what fine-grained difference you see between a merging policy and a cataloguing policy. | |||
:::It's worth going over this again since it was so far up thread. Instead of your three step model I suggested that a more accurate model would be: | |||
:::# We determine what things to cover on this wiki and in what way, in line with [[T:VS]]. | |||
:::# We write pages, both IU and OOU, '''''based on the decisions made in the previous step'''''. | |||
::::Apologies if I was unclear, but I'm not talking about their usage of the ''word'' "canon" — I agree that's largely irrelevant. I'm talking about "canon-brain" as I defined it in the Lost Closing Post | |||
:::Yes, but I think TLCP suffers from much this same flaw. It psychologizes people based on the usage of the word "canon" to take them to mean things they very clearly do not. For heaven's sake, in order to show that the wiki as a whole viewed things as you believe you're quoting someone who has under 100 forum posts ''total'' over the span of 3 years. Clearly it's unfair to compare the new forums to the old, but just look at OS25, who was in this thread. His first 100 forum posts were in ~6 months. Some users clearly did think what you're claiming they do, yes. But there's no real evidence that it was operating procedure at the wiki level, and we have multiple direct statements from the wiki's earliest days saying the exact opposite. | |||
::::Further down the page we again find Czech talking about things like ''Curse'' being "clearly outside [''Who''<nowiki/>'s] own continuity" | |||
:::Yes! This is why thinking that validity was continuity was bad and I'm glad we moved away from it! During proto-T:VS they were doing just this! We're regressing 10+ years and it's a very bad thing! :P (I'm not sure what the big insight here is, this is precisely how wiki-canon was defined, and it was explicitly demarcated in opposition to headcanon in the ''Curse'' thread, they're not taken to be the same thing. "[[Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon?|And remember, we're talking about whether it's canon in terms of our canon policy, not whether it's a part of your personal canon, or whether there is such a thing as a Doctor Who canon. In other words, can we take the events described in COFD or Scream of the Shalka and describe them as if they are part of the same universe of which the First, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors are a part?]]" Much of the rest of your concerns are about this same issue, but this is ''precisely'' the criticism that I brought up in the original R4bp thread - we're regressing to canon once again, just the loosest possible form.) | |||
:::If ''this'' is what you mean by canon brain, by all means, scour away. But R4bp will not survive it. It will be its first casualty. If instead it's, as you allude to, our kayfabe of writing articles as if we're reporting on things that actually happened, I'm not sure how the wiki as a whole wouldn't be radically transformed by this scouring, if you mean we should erase this on every level. If you mean that just certain people couldn't keep it in their heads properly that, well, it's a game, we're performing a game, we can change the rules when we wish, I just don't think this is an accurate historical representation of what occurred in these threads. I can quote Tangerine and Mantrid on this quite extensively. | |||
::::Why ''would'' "taking the writer at their word" on such an issue have any influence on Wiki coverage ''unless'' were granted the unjustified (and, you claim, non-actively-argued-for) premise that the Wiki normally cares about the positive thing? | |||
:::I certainly wouldn't invoke "mainstream continuity" as my loadstone of choice, even if this was the term used then. Insofar as I think we care about statements of "mainstream continuity" it's because I think people will use them, often, as synonyms for "DWU", or "N-Space" or similar, depending on context. But I do think there's a reasonable claim to make that we could define R4 invalid works solely by people expressing their intent not to be part of an in group even if it's poorly defined in the first place. (Think apophatic theology here, right? Or skepticism of abstract objects, when abstract objects are defined through the way of negation. You can gesture towards these things and work with them still, even if it's difficult.) But we're very much getting in the weeds here, and perhaps we're best served in wrapping up this thread. It's been a long time coming. Though [[User:Cousin Ettolrhc]] may wish to have a say first. [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 03:37, 3 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
:: “''It would absolutely, positively be improper to reference these events in the body of the normal 10th Doctor article. This is as R4 invalid as R4 invalid gets, it even explicitly fails R4bp under current policy. (…) This is a situation that doesn't occur anywhere else, and it only occurs because in-universe articles consider valid sources "real"/"reliable" (in terms of our wiki-writing kayfabe) and not invalid sources.''” | |||
: I mean, yes, it would fail current R4, but that's a bit of a tautological statement. What I am asking is ''why'' we have written R4 in such a way that such a thing fails it. There are two possible answers to that question — one is rooted in canon-brain, in "come on, it's not meant to have really happened, and we're here to write about what really happened", and is wholly and categorically improper; such that if that is the only reason R4 exists then R4-as-it-stands ''must go''. ''Alternatively'' there could be an answer rooted in "this approach of putting the info about the strip on a different page e.g. [[Tenth Doctor/Non-valid sources]] seems like the most effective, informative way to document the various sources at hand, including the parody strip taken on its own terms as no less important a source to document than ''The Christmas Invasion'' or ''The Eyeless''". Only this second argument would constitute a satisfactory justification for Rule-4-invalidity as a concept; I am more optimistic than Aquana that such an argument can exist; but I do not think this argument has been made in whole anywhere; and so we should try to ''find that argument'', then go from there to figure out how it implies that we ought to draw the boundaries. | |||
: It's an issue that the ''TID'' thread hovered on the edges of, but in largely insufficient way. Take the quote you highlight: "In other words, can we take the events described in COFD or Scream of the Shalka and describe them as if they are part of the same universe of which the First, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors are a part?". It's so close, but it's subtly wrong. The answer to the question is self-evidently "yes", after all; we ''can''. We can do anything. The question to ask is whether we ''should'', provided we define our general Wiki duty as "cover all these sources, ''Curse'' included, as well as we can, with a particular focus to documenting narrative connections and shared concepts between all of them". (And I don't know how ''else'' you'd define it; this isn't rhetorical, I am open to a rival pitch of "what is Tardis Wiki even for" if you have one!) And furthermore here, again, the phrasing says "the" same universe "of which the First, Tenth and Eleventh Doctor are a part" as though there's just one, genuine, independently-extant "main ''Doctor Who'' universe" that we're ''trying to describe''. There's no real awareness here that "''the'' DWU" is an optical illusion that emerges from our ''stylistic decision'' to write with an [[Tardis:In-universe perspective|in-universe perspective]] about all our valid sources — as opposed to a real external object which the I.U.P. facilitates the "accurate" description ''of''. | |||
: I am by no means arguing against the I.U.P., our "kayfabe of writing articles as if we're reporting on things that actually happened". What I am saying is that we should bear in mind that it's ''just'' an arbitrary kayfabe on our part; that we should not act as though we expect all our in-universe sources to cohere into "the" "real" DWU in a way that we have any reason to think should match a preexisting free-floating concept, let alone the ''same'' free-floating concept as what Lance Parkin might mean when he says things like "the mainstream DWU". To put it another way this is me arguing against the whole endeavour of trying to translate between "the DWU defined by T:VS" (i.e. the body of work which T:VS recommends us to talk about in the main namespace using the in-universe perspective) and authors' quotes and intentions about stuff "really happening" in their personal concept of the main setting of ''Doctor Who''. I think that's a completely misbegotten idea because it not only implies T:VS and T:IUP to be working to create a particular vision of what "the DWU" is — which I think it does only 'by accident'; it comes about from us writing neutrally in an in-universe way, side-by-side, about all things asserted by distinct writers and voices about their own DWUs, which is ''not'' the same nigh-fanfickish thing as asserting "imagine a universe where ''all'' these things happened, ''at once''" — but furthermore, it bakes in this ridiculous, recursive assumption that the result of that endeavour would have any claim to being "''the''" central concept of what "the" DWU is, in a way that makes it meaningful and relevant to try and translate between it and individual authors' quotes about what ''they'' might call "the DWU". | |||
: In practical terms we probably ''could'' "define R4 invalid works solely by people expressing their intent not to be part of an in group even if it's poorly defined in the first place", but ''why, positively, should we'' do any such thing? That is the question which I think requires active belief in the proposition "the Wiki is ''trying'' to talk about 'the' 'real' DWU, an externally-extant if blurrily-defined ''thing''" to be answered in the positive. And as that belief cannot be countenanced, I place the onus on you to find an alternative reason why we ''should'' define R4 in such a way; to tell me (and the rest of us) why you think it ''makes the Wiki better'' to write R4 that way.[[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 11:50, 3 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
::I think everyone is best served if we leave the larger T:CS/T:VS discussion for the next thread, where more users can be a part, to be perfectly honest. And we've tried everyone's patience too much with this one as it is. I'll leave you the last word on that front, as a result. But I do want to call attention to | |||
:::I mean, yes, it would fail current R4, but that's a bit of a tautological statement. What I am asking is ''why'' we have written R4 in such a way that such a thing fails it. | |||
::No you're not, these are just not the prior statements you have made. You're claiming that validity ''is'' about merging pages. Not that it ''should be'' about merging pages. That this is what the thing ''is''. This is '''strictly''' false. If you want to say that validity ''would make more sense'' as a merging policy, based on the philosophy you've outlined above, I think that's perfectly within the scope of whatever the next thread would be (as I'm quite confident it would erase the T:CS/T:VS distinction for anything but R1 breakers). But that's just not what you've argued until now. You've repeatedly asserted that this is what validity ''is''. From your original OL response to the latest. These distinctions '''''matter.''''' [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 20:59, 3 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
:Keeping this short for the same reason - I meant to argue that this is the ''heart'' of "the coherent thing that the current partially-incoherent mess is striving to become", for which I think "validity is ''fundamentally'' a merging policy" is a fair gloss. (Oh — this is just a mirror of our earlier argument about whether the currentl Rule 4's DWU "is" the Web or not.) | |||
:Also, for the avoidance of doubt — I'm not ''sure'' if you're misreading me on this point — "a merging policy" should not be construed as meaning "a policy saying to merge stuff", but rather "one of multiple policies about reasons we might ''or might not'' merge stuff"; I am saying it is a policy whose practical upshot is that it guides ''when and how we merge things'', not that it is a policy whose purpose is merging things, nor the only policy by which we judge whether to merge things. [[User:Scrooge MacDuck|'''Scrooge MacDuck''']] [[User_talk:Scrooge MacDuck|⊕]] 21:04, 3 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
::Part of this is incoherent to me, there's clearly a distinction between "a policy that, coincidentally, impacts what pages are to be merged" and "a merging policy". The latter clearly requires purpose. I can't imagine in any other area we'd use language where potentially marginal side effects that didn't seem to be the perspective which the authors framed the policy in serve to characterize the policy. (I guess you could argue about, like, structural discrimination, but usually we characterize these policies as such not just because of unintended side effects but because some of the principle authors ''did'' think this way, even if all did not.) But of course it's not the ''only'' policy guiding when to merge pages. There's [[T:HOMEWORLD]], for one. Perhaps a bit academic here. [[User:Najawin|Najawin]] [[User talk:Najawin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 00:46, 4 January 2024 (UTC) | |||
:I agree with what Scrooge said in the latest Big Reply. And I majorly struggle (although I am trying) to particularly care about the difference between "should be" and "is" with respects to the parts of R4 being discussed here. As for Part 2, I elect it should be created at [[Forum:Reworking our validity and coverage policies]], should link back to here at the top (but make it clear this thread isnt required reading), and should be opened by the admin who closes this thread. Said opening post should invite discussion on grounds of "should we split T:CS and T:VS?" and "how should rule 4 work?" as two sub-discussions, as the [[T:TF]] "Speedround" debates did (Perhaps specifics could be discussed at [[Forum talk:Rule 4 by Proxy and its ramifications: considered in the light of the forum archives]] before the new thread's opening? Wouldn't want it to run off the hinges, though...) Oh and yeah, no more Big Replies please, further major points should be held off until Part 2.[[User:Cousin Ettolrhc|Cousin Ettolrahc]] [[User talk:Cousin Ettolrhc|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 17:43, 5 January 2024 (UTC) |