Forum:Roland Rat: The Series

Discussion of Rule 2, and the possible relaxation of it.

This OP is in it's early stages of development, so it's probably going to change a lot before it goes life. Please feel free to comment about this over at my talk page, I would very much appreciate criticism, suggestions etc.

OP

Introduction

Okay. So this a big one. Probably not the best idea to do this for my second OP, but there you are. Right. Hallo! Today we're going to be discussing Rule 2, namely how it doesn't allow stuff that was always intended to be in the DWU that features elements which will later become licenced. This is a big change, and I totally understand if people aren't up for it, but it's certainly an interesting topic. With that said, let's dive right in.

Introduction proper

So, basically Rule 2 came about between 2011 and 2013 in Forum:BBV and canon policy. There it was originally decided that a story needed a legal link to the DWU before it could be considered canon, the name of which was changed to a valid source. From what I can tell, it hasn't really changed since then. This isn't really a bad thing, as the rule is decent, but I think that this definition of the DWU isn't necessarily the best. What I basically intend to do in this thread is lay out some options as to how we can cover these things. I don't think I'm going to actually try and validate anything here, but will probably at some point run a series of threads validating stuff, if these proposals go through.

Our Options

1. Keep Rule 2 as it is, and carry on ignoring a lot of things. This is sub-optimal, I think, as, as a wiki, we should try to cover everything that we possibly can, and a lot of these sources are just not covered at all anywhere, and quite definitely Doctor Who by any standard that happens to include The Panda, the Cat and the Dreadful Teddy.
2. Add a clause into T:VS, (we could call it Rule 2 by Proxy, to compliment our nice new Rule 4 by Proxy, perhaps?) that states that if a work of fiction includes an element which has featured, or will feature, in a source considered valid by this wiki, does not contain any unlicensed DWU elements, and has been explicitly stated to be intended to be set in the Doctor Who Literary Universe, then it can be covered by this wiki if it passes rules 1 and 3. (the wording may need tweaking on these) I think this option is a lot better than the one above, and the one I think most people are likely to go for, but I still think it's suboptimal compared to the others below.
3. The same as the above, but instead of having "has been explicitly stated to be set in the Doctor Who Literary Universe" we have "is explicitly or implicitly intended to be set in the Doctor Who Literary Universe". I think this one is actually the most intuitive, so long as we keep a relatively high bar for "intended to be set in the DWU". Although the above one is reasonably sensible, it seems silly to discriminate stories due to the elements in them not having appeared in the DWU. But it's certainly a big step, and I'm okay if people don't want this one.
4. Actually changing the actual text of Rule 2 to let in sources which contain elements which did not contain any Doctor Who elements at the time of release. I don't think this one is a good idea, as, working with Rule 4 by Proxy, it ends up validating the entirety of Marvel! Just wanted to throw it in there as a possibility.

Conclusions

So that about wraps it up for now. Thanks for reading! ~~~~

Discussion

TBA