User:Epsilon/Non-narrative fiction

An incomplete archive of the lost non-narrative fiction thread from circa 2020.

This is a rule that has always bothered me for its seeming inanity. I'll be extremely happt to see the back of it.

On the reason why the wiki doesn't accept non-narrative but in-universe information, I think it was because there was an admin ruling that it would be too difficult a task for the admins to go through each non-narrative and decide which ones are valid sources. (Could be completely wrong though.) @Epsilon the Eternal

Taken from here

That is a good point, as there are hundreds of valid, narrative works contained next to real world info, so non-narrative works should still be valid regardless of if they're next to real world content.

It's only fair, and it would be unreasonable to say that the Doctor Who Magazine comics are invalid becuase they're presented next to out of universe information. @Epsilon the Eternal

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If there was such a ruling as User:Epsilon the Eternal recalls, it must have been post-hoc, and it's… well, it'd be in such strident conflict with T:NPOV. Acting as though we can simply decide non-narrative fiction is invalid because it's more convenient is treating said non-narrative fiction as disposable, as somehow less worthy than narrative fiction.

And indeed, I think such a flippant and obviously biased attitude lies at the source of Rule 1, from the very start. If you will permit me to engage in a history lesson…

It is always useful, when trying to change law or policy, to look back at the origins of it. So I did some archeology on how Rule 1 as we know it got started, digging all the way back to the Panopticon Archives.

A Tentative History of Rule 1

Are the Dalek Annulas "canon"?

It all begins around Christmas 2008, in a forum thread called Forum:Canonicity_of_Dalek_Annuals, which should tell you all it needs to know about how archaic this stuff is. It’s over a decade old, for God’s sake, and from a time when not only did we still use “canon”, but it seemed plausible that the Dalek Annuals as a whole might not be canonical!

Of course, the sentiment was widely in favour of the Annuals being made “canon”, and someone even mentioned that strictly speaking there isn’t a canon in Doctor Who, even if it took some time yet for the Wiki to listen to them. It is in the closing statement from (then-admin? if not, that thread never actually had a closing statement) User:Trak Nar — the closing statement of a thread that wasn’t actually about that — that we find the unilateral decision to make non-narrative fiction invalid. To their credit, Trak Nar doesn’t just mean to invalidate reference material and let non-narrative fiction slip past; they genuinely, actively want to invalidate the pieces of non-narrative fiction from the Dalek Annuals. Why?

Oh, while reading through The Dalek World annual, there were some things mentioned that could be added to the Dalek article, but I am hesitant to do so as the information is really stretching it in terms of believeability. For example, page 70, panel 1 says "Did you know, due to the lightness of the metal, a DALEK weighs only two an a half Earth pounds?" I can see the mutant itself weighing only a couple pounds, they are roughly the size of a house cat. But with the casing combined? In the same annual, it says that the casing contains over nine-thousand components and eleven miles of wiring. And then in Daleks in Manhattan, when the two workers are shown struggling to lift three panels from Dalek Thay's casing, that seems to contradict that. Though, one could also say that the light-weight materials was a property of older Dalek models. Either way, some of the information just seems silly.Trak Nar

Strange to Tell… According to the Daleks (which remains invalid to this day) does say these things, but it isn’t more or less “silly” or “contradictory” than a given story in the Dalek Annuals. This is after all the same series that gave us The Small Defender, where Earth is saved from a Dalek invasion by a mole. Yes, you read that right.

It is a dull idea of Doctor Who indeed to which one would arrive, if one excluded every story that seems “too silly to be true”. There is no evidence at all that Terry Nation and David Whitaker meant for the non-narrative sections to “count” less than the short stories and the comics.

The Technical Manual and circular reasoning

Three years later, in 2011, Forum:Canon_policy:_Items_on_which_policy_is_unclear informs us that in those days, the “canon policy” (what we now know as T:VS) is still unsure of what to do with original in-universe information from invalid sources.

The relevance of The Doctor Who Technical Manual, the in-universe history presented in part of The Terrestrial Index, The Doctor Who Monster Book and similar items and their suitability for use in creating and contributing to articles in the TARDIS Index File is unclear at this time, and up for discussion.the old “T:VS” as quoted by User:Tangerineduel

User:CzechOut answers — and closes the ‘debate’ with no further ado — by asserting that these publications “contain material which could potentially be used on in-universe articles, but probably shouldn't be”. Half of his argument makes sense, but falls under what we covered in Part 1 of this thread: it goes that some “reference books” like The Terrestrial Index are rather like this Wiki itself: summaries of information given in TV stories, plus theories from the author to glue them together. If the Wiki started reporting archivists’ theories from other encyclopedias, the whole Doctor Who universe would risk turning into Chinese whispers.

All these reference books are one step removed from the source material, the episodes themselves.CzechOut

But CzechOut admits that this is only true of some non-narrative sources (the “reference books”). There are in fact non-narrative works which aren’t meant to be “reference material” for TV Who, but rather new works of fiction in their own right. CzechOut, with all due respect, makes oddly short work of these:

They contain information about, for example, the technical specs of K9 or the operation of the TARDIS, or details about the sonic screwdriver — a substantial amount of which has never been confirmed in any narrative. (…) But I can't see the rationale for including the Technical Manual's ideas of what makes the sonic screwdriver tick in the main body of sonic screwdriver. Primacy must be given to narrative works on in-universe pages.CzechOut

Again CzechOut just flatly… asserts that primacy must be given to narrative works; that new in-universe information doesn’t “count” if it appears elsewhere than in the context of a story. He holds this to be self-evident, and so the whole thing turns into circular reasoning — in-universe info that doesn’t come from a story is invalidated because… it doesn’t come from a story.

Growing dogma

The saga continues in October 2011 with Forum:Brilliant Book 2011: a valid source?, where we see that the earlier, unilateral decision from CzechOut chafes with one of the highest-profile Doctor Who releases that year: the Brilliant Book 2011, which, on top of comic stories and prose stories, also contains snippets of non-narrative fictional information. On the basis of CzechOut’s earlier decision, now enshrined in policy, information not from a story is decided to not be valid, despite the common-sense sentiment from newbies that it ought to “be canon”. This isn’t justified or anything. And there’s even a question of whether stuff not from the increasingly-narrow category of “invalid sources” should even have pages, though thankfully the Wiki thought better of this eventually.

In December 2011, a grim epilogue: at Forum:The_original_inclusion_debates#REF, OS25 tries to initiate conversation on this still-controversial subject, but it never gets off the ground.

…And… that’s it. That’s, as near as I can tell, how “only stories are valid” became an established part of policy. One user complained that they don’t think Daleks should weigh half a pound because (Graham Chapman voice) that is much too silly; and three years later, another said that information that doesn’t come from stories is automatically suspect because it doesn’t come from stories, and that therefore, information that doesn’t come from stories is non-canon.

I don’t mean any insult towards any of the participants in those early conversations, but surely, in hindsight, we can all see that this isn’t exactly sensible policymaking behaviour. This isn’t a solid base on which to write the first of the four most important rules of this Wiki’s validity policies!

Reference material vs. non-fiction: clarifying the difference

As I mentioned above, the only argument presented in those debates that doesn't flagrantly conflict with T:NPOV — the only argument that doesn't rely on "I personally feel that non-narrative sources are less important" — is the fear of Chinese whispers. The idea that reference books are, essentially, doing the same thing we do, and as a result, if we try to cover them, we're covering their coverage of existing valid stories, and it turns into an echo chamber.

So let's refute that, shall we?

There is an ongoing problem on this Wiki, reflected in another active thread, of conflating "non-narrative", "non-fiction", and "reference works", which are all very different concepts. When you look at something like Strange to Tell... According to the Daleks, it has basically nothing in common with something like AHistory. Strange to Tell is almost entirely a vessel for the reveal of new information about the DWU — it's doing something entirely different from AHistory, which is indeed a Wiki-adjacent sort of project, collecting and curating data from existing works.

(And, for that matter, AHistory, which tries to present a repository of in-universe information, is doing a rather different thing from, say, The Nth Doctor or Queers Dig Time Lords. It is as bizarre that we call all three of those "non-fiction reference books" as that we act like Strange to Tell is in any way the same thing as AHistory.)

My point is, it is very easy for anyone with a pair of eyes to tell the difference between a "reference work" (which compiles information about existing stories) from "non-narrative fiction" (whose purpose is to present new facts about the DWU, just as a story might). Even though it currently tags the latter to be invalid, the Wiki is already doing a pretty good job of telling these apart.

Incidentally, here's what the Oxford Learners' Dictionary has to say about "fiction":

1. A type of literature that describes imaginary people and events, not real ones.
2. A thing that is invented or imagined and is not true.[1]

And here's how it defines "non-fiction":

Books, articles or texts about real facts, people and events.[2]

Things like Inside a Skaro Saucer are, by any reasonable definition, fiction. They are certainly not "non-fiction", and to call them "reference works" is equally inaccurate.

The conclusion is inescapable: Rule 1, as currently formulated, ends up excluding a significant body of Doctor Who fiction.

A proposal

So where do we go from here? "Three little rules" sounds wrong. And I'm not suggesting that. May I put forward the following wording as a possible rewriting of the Four Little Rules to correct the anti-non-narrative bias that has marred them from their inception?

1	Only in-universe fiction counts.

2	A story that isn't commercially licensed by all of the relevant copyright holders doesn't count.

3	A story must be officially released to be valid.

4	If a story was intended to be set outside the DWU, then it's probably not allowed. But a community discussion will likely be needed to make a final determination.

I am open as to tweaks to the wording of this revamped Rule 1, of course. But the basic idea is that it would exclude random out-of-universe things that happen to throw in an in-universe tidbit — like, say, an offhand comment by Russell T Davies about the Woman, or a reference book which constantly cites the TV stories it's reporting on, like The Gallifrey Chronicles. Whereas it does rule in things like The Dalek Dictionary, which are presented from a completely in-universe point of view but just don't have a plot.

The Dictionary is in fact a shining example of the harm it does to our Wiki not to cover non-narrative fiction: as its lengthy BTS section will demonstrate, The Dalek Dictionary is an essential piece of the history of Dalek fiction, responsible for introducing major elements of Dalek lore like Yarvelling.

And yet, because of the diktat against non-narrative works, and the decision (questionable in its own right) that invalid works can't have a "Continuity" section, we end up unable to even cite it in the continuity section of Genesis of Evil. It is ridiculous. @Scrooge MacDuck

Taken from here