Forum:Inclusion debate: The works of Douglas Adams

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Spoilers are strongly policed here.
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

Proposal

I was just going to create these pages myself but I realised it might cause dispute so I decided I would talk about it here first. I will be brief.

Dirk Gently

Firstly Dirk Gently. The first Dirk Gently book by Douglas Adams was released in 1987. In its first chapters we are introduced to Professor Chronotis. But this was not actually the first appearance of Chronotis. He famously originated in Shada by Douglas Adams.

Unfortunately that serial was cancelled so it does not count as the debut of Chronotis. But after its cancellation Chronotis was featured in The Legacy of Gallifrey in Doctor Who Magazine in 1985. That is two years before Dirk Gently. So Chronotis was an established Doctor Who Universe character at the time that the first Dirk Gently book was released.

For this reason the Dirk Gently series features licensed use of Doctor Who Universe elements. It belongs to the Doctor Who Universe and has belonged to the Doctor Who Universe from the very start. From its very first chapters.

Hitchhiker's

Secondly The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I recommend reading that Tardis Wiki page as helpful context for this discussion.

This is more complex because we have to pay careful attention to timing. There are two types of connection between Hitchhikers and Doctor Who in the writing of Douglas Adams. Note that the very existence of these crossovers indicates that Douglas Adam's authorial intent was that the series were set in different corners of the same universe.

1. The first type of connection is Doctor Who using concepts from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio show from 1978. The radio show predates Douglas Adams's first contribution to Doctor Who. However it introduced many concepts like Oolon Colluphid which were later used by Douglas Adams in Doctor Who. So the Hitchhikers radio show does not include licensed use of Doctor Who Universe elements.

1. The second type of connection is the Hitchhikers novels using concepts from Doctor Who. For instance Qualactin and Mandranite debuted in Doctor Who in the scripts of Douglas Adams. They were not mentioned in the Hitchhikers radio show. But they appeared in the first Hitchhikers novel by Douglas Adams.

For this reason it seems to me that the Hitchhikers radio show contains no use of Doctor Who Universe elements. But the novels do contain use of licensed Doctor Who Universe elements.

Conclusion

In conclusion I think some things are uncontestable.

• At minimum the first Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book is valid because it has licensed use of the Doctor Who concepts Qualactin and Mandranite.

• At minimum the first Dirk Gently book is valid because it has licensed use of the Doctor Who character Chronotis.

I think these two pages could be created today. What is still left undecided is where to draw the line. The whole Dirk Gently series or just the ones with Chronotis? All the Hitchhikers novels or just the ones which mention those elements specifically? Because there is a third thing which is uncontestable.

• The Hitchhikers Radio Show does not feature any licensed Doctor Who elements.

So where we draw the line in these series between covered and not covered is something we should be deliberate about. That is what I hope this thread will be good for. WarDocFan12 ☎ 14:57, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

Dirk Gently is one I've actually been planning to do a standalone thread about for some time, but ah well, it's been long enough without my getting a shift on that I might hand the reins to someone else… but it must be noted that under T:BOUND, as Dirk Gently was excluded from coverage in a past thread, the pages cannot be "created today" — even if that past thread's rationale didn't really make sense, either factually or in terms of policy.

Also, I must say that as both issues are complex and independent from one another I'm not sure a single thread for both is the best way to proceed (one might for example think that the minerals in the Hitchhiker's book are just "namedrops" and don't therefore demand coverage in the same way as stories prominently using a Time Lord character as an actual member of the cast), but eh, let's see where it goes. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 16:25, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

I need a little bit more time to think on this. My immediate concern is that it would open the door to the coverage of **tons** of material that is truly quite immaterial to the DWU. Chronotis's use in Douglas Adams works was more a matter of reusing an (as far as he's aware) unused character from a story that got shelved. The Legacy of Gallifrey ^[+]Loading...["The Legacy of Gallifrey (short story)"] isn't exactly the sort of thing that Adams would realistically have been aware of, so this feels like validity through techicality more than anything else. I don't know, I'll think more on this. Dewinter ☎ 21:19, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

More to come, but for now let me say that I think there are some interesting similarities between Chronotis and the situation at Talk:The Stranger (novel). Najawin ☎ 22:13, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

I'd say to include them due to their crossover, but to properly substantiate the claim to a page, I think there would have to be more crossing over, rather than just similar characters. Gingerfool ☎ 22:25, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Alright, so, doing my dig through the forum archives, I don't believe that Dirk Gently was ever explicitly ruled against in a forum thread. What I found was that in early 2017, during the height of the "post FP wave of inclusion debates", User:Pluto2 started a thread about the series based on Professor Chronotis. (Thread:209691 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1) The thread was criticized by User:AeD and User:OttselSpy25, as being "insane" and (potentially) "bad faith" and Pluto withdrew it the next day. But it was never explicitly ruled against, afaict. The closest we get is that in the resolution to another thread 6 days later, (Thread:208414 ibid) Czech refers to AeD's characterization of these inclusion debates as "bad faith". (It would be disingenuous for me not to note that there's also an edit by Czech on that same day in the original thread by Pluto, but I have no idea what was done. There's no clear closing post, certainly.) But this thread was about Blake's 7, and contains the fun quote:

The majority of our readers are here -- let's face it -- because of the 2005 series. Which can't even be called "the new series" anymore. They are simply not going to buy [the idea that Blake's 7 and Doctor Who are the same universe].

Look, look, Forum:Rule 4 by Proxy and its ramifications: considered in the light of the forum archives still has no closing post, and we still seem no closer to a full resolution on some of these issues. I think Blake's 7 is the sort of thing that is probably better served on its own wiki. (But am fully willing to be wrong! Unlike FP, I think it largely does make sense disconnected from DW.) But the idea that calling it part of the DWU is bad faith is mindboggling.

Seriously.

Maybe there's a forum thread somewhere I'm not aware of, but it seems that Dirk Gently was just "that's stupid, shut up", without an official admin statement, and Hitchhikers didn't even have a discussion outside of Josiah Rowe saying "u do u" in Forum:In doctor who did the doctor ever state something somewhat like "they discovered a beetle that couldn't have evolved which proved god existed and since god is based on faith he must not exist". (Though see also Talk:Oolon Colluphid. People have known about the issue since 2008 and it's been a very explicit "yeah, no, unless we get more than a name drop, there's no there there", just never a formal forum thread about it.) Najawin ☎ 07:49, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree with this, that the sources aren't "bad faith", its more that they don't necessarily have much to do with other things that I think it would be more pointless to include than anything else. Gingerfool ☎ 20:07, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

AeD here. On a new account -- the me from more than a few years ago liked to argue on the internet and was often an idiot, so the new site seemed like a good opportunity to put some more distance between that me and this me, but okay, here we are. Only took two months.

Reading back my words from (ugh) 2017, I don't think I'm calling the argument itself "bad faith," I think I was just frustrated by a spate of inclusion debates that, regardless of the actual motivation behind them, felt to me, at that time, in (ugh) 2017, as people just... throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. My sincerest apologies to Pluto 2 -- my frustration and the words "bad faith" were about the wave, not your drop of water.

Anyway, on the actual debate itself, clearly some of the slippery slopes I was concerned about back then have been thoroughly slid down by now -- to be more specific might be a T:NPA violation, and this isn't the place, anyway -- and my assessment that the existence of the Chronotis of Dirk Gently contradicts the one we see in Shada probably doesn't hold water in the age of "by another account," though I think you'd be hard pressed to make a case for Dirk Gently passing rule 4 -- Douglas Adams was clearly just reusing elements that he owned that never made it to the screen, having no way of knowing at the time they'd do so eventually, anyway. --Alex Daily ☎ 19:56, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Dirk Gently

@Alex Daily: Having read through the archives of old, I'm certainly sympathetic to the view that the glut of inclusion debates was counterproductive. A good Forum thread has a meaty opening post that explores all known evidence on the issue, and those threads were… not that, even when they were arguing for ultimately-desirable changes. With no offence to the OP of this thread, even this one is barely acceptable given all the complicated issues at stake.

As regards being "hard pressed to make a case for DG passing Rule 4" I actually don't think that's true — as documented at The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)#Shared Douglas Adams universe, Adams actually does seem to have liked sowing little connections between Dirk Gently, Hitchhiker's, and his Who scripts — one imagines, moreso for his own amusement than because he expected most readers to "get it", but even so. Chronotis in Dirk Gently doesn't actually need any "by another account": there is, pointedly, never any explanation in the novel for how he can be centuries old, and what he retired from. His inability to remember what he did before he joined St Cedd's is honestly a dead ringer for how more conventional spin-offs get around BBC-owned elements without retconning them, e.g. Chris Cwej's doctored memories in Dead Romance and Cwej: The Series which leave him unable to mention the Doctor. (Yes, Dirk believes that Chronotis invented the time machine himself, but this is never externally confirmed, and he's, well, Dirk.)

Compare Shada:

ROMANA: Three hundred years?
CHRONOTIS: Yes, my dear.
ROMANA: And in the same set of rooms?
CHRONOTIS: Ever since I retired from Gallifrey.
ROMANA: Didn't anybody notice?
CHRONOTIS: One of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges. Everyone is so discreet.Shada

And Dirk Gently's Holistic Detectve Agency:

"Ever since I retired."
"Retired from what?"
"Search me. Must have been something pretty good, though, what do you think?"
"You mean you've been in this same set of rooms here for… two hundred years?" murmured Richard. "You'd think someone would notice, or think it was odd."
"Oh, that's one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges," said Reg, "everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning what was odd about each other we'd be here till Christmas.Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Consider also the matter of the sofa. As Adams scripted it, over the course of the events of Shada, a sofa is dematerialised, sent hurtling out of time and space. As attested by the additional notes made by the shooting script, in the filmed version (and consequently the adaptation) this was tragically turned into a tea tray, but Adams wouldn't have known this; what he scripted was pointedly a sofa.

• 

  The relevant part of the shooting script of Shada, still retaining a mention of the "sofa" alongside addenda discussing the "tea tray".

What seems to very much be that very sofa turns up in 1982 in Life, the Universe, and Everything:

Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisleycovered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.
"Why," he said, "is there a sofa in that field?"
"I told you!" shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. "Eddies in the space-time continuum!"
"And this is his sofa, is it?" asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.
"Arthur!" shouted Ford at him, "that sofa is there because of the space time instability I've been trying to get your terminally softened brain to get to grips with. It's been washed out of the continuum, it's space-time jetsam, it doesn't matter what it is, we've got to catch it, it's our only way out of here!"'Life, the Universe, and Everything

After spending some time in Arthur and Ford's company, this sofa eventually vanishes again…

…and what should turn up in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987), the original novel, having materialised at a very inconvenient angle in a place where no deliveryman could possibly have physically put it… but a sofa. (This is not mentioned in the quote below, but there is another scene in the novel which specifically describes it as a Chesterfield sofa: a dead ringer for the one in Life, the Universe… whose origins were pointedly elided.)

"Has it been stuck there for long?"
"Oh, only about three weeks," said Richard, sitting down. "I could just saw it up and throw it away, but I can't believe that there isn't a logical answer. And it also made me think - it would be really useful to know before you buy a piece of furniture whether it's actually going to ht up the stairs or around the corner. So I've modelled the problem in three dimensions on my computer - and so far it just says no way."
"It says what?" called Reg, over the noise of filling the kettle.
"That it can't be done. I told it to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa out, and it said there aren't any. I said `What?' and it said there aren't any. I then asked it, and this is the really mysterious thing, to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa into its present position in the first place, and it said that it couldn't have got there. Not without fundamental restructuring of the walls. So, either there's something wrong with the fundamental structure of the matter in my walls or," he added with a sigh, "there's something wrong with the program. Which would you guess?"'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Of course, the characters' assumption that the sofa is one which Richard had delivered to him in his absence goes unchallenged within the book — but the 'how' of its mathematically-baffling position remain just as inscrutable. (EDIT: See below.) Again I think what we're dealing with is Adams weaving a subtle puzzle, almost a private joke, between all three series, and thus very tangibly hinting at a shared universe. Maybe I'm seeing things; I don't know. Perhaps it seems odd to harp on about mysterious sofas when you've got Professor Chronotis himself right there. But it certainly moves my needle, alongside the famous Oolon Colluphid bit in Destiny of the Daleks and the Pirate Planet minerals.

I think this all is very different from the way that, for example, the Krikkitmen were reused by Adams in Hitchhiker's (or indeed from the way he riffs on the basic idea of Scaroth with The Ghost in Dirk Gently's Holistic Agency itself). As well it should. We must remember that throughout the 1980s, John Nathan-Turner kept trying to make a release of Shada "happen". It was well-known in fandom even before the seminal VHS release, hence why The Legacy of Gallifrey casually integrated Salyavin/Chronotis into its Unified History of Gallifrey (but not other unmade stories such as the Cats of Gin-Seng). I don't think Adams anticipated a prestigious half-animated steelbook "completion" in 2017, certainly, but I think he would have been well-aware by the time Dirk Gently was released that Shada was known to fans, and that something like the VHS release version might happen sooner than later. Aware enough to deliberately drop these little hints of connections, for that small percentage of readers to pick up on and giggle at.

Where it gets tricky is that I think the argument that he would have known about Legacy of Gallifrey specifically is more strained — that is, I don't think he's likely to have published the novel in the specific frame of mind of "I am spinning off the character introduced a few years ago in that one obscure short story published in a niche fan magazine by a nice young man called Gary Russell". But I do strongly believe that he wrote it with the intent that Chronotis was indeed "secretly" a Time Lord. I think this justifies giving it a lot more thought than we would treat the likes of Life, the Universe and Everything's usage of the Krikkitmen. I absolutely get queasiness about equating "reusing elements from a scrapped script" with "spin-off" — I just think that what's going on with Chronotis is distinctly different.

Setting all this aside, we also have to face the interesting puzzle that the two IDW Publishing Dirk Gently comics featuring the Professor give every impression of passing Rule 4, even more than Adams's own stuff does. In the first run, as illustrated at Chronotis, the character was specifically drawn with Denis Carey's likeness; in the second, although the Prof's design was altered (as, indeed, was Dirk's), there all sorts of other nods to the DWU of it all; talk of "fixed points in time", "adventures in time and space", the Professor "reversing the polarity", even a partially-obscured cameo by a Dalek in a dream sequence. Chronotis's time machine does not quite go "Vworp Vworp", but it sure does go "Va Voom Va Voom" and "Vwoop" and other such sound effects that one might use if one wanted to hint at the iconic "wheezing, groaning sound" without treading on any toes, as an instant bit of written sound-design which is not mentioned anywhere in the original novel.

In short I don't think there's any doubt that we're dealing with stories written by people who know about the Shada connection and are knowingly written Chronotis as a Time Lord. This would be true regardless of Adams's intent in the 1980s, and would potentially mean that they could pull the original novel into validity via Rule 4 By Proxy, even if we deemed Adams's own intent to be in question.

But again I don't think this is necessary. There is (to my mind, quite strong) circumstantial evidence for Adams fulfilling Rule 4 on the original Dirk Gently novel. And ever since its inception, Rule 4 has been defined negatively. That is: by default, things that pass the other three rules are assumed to pass Rule 4 unless there is an explicit quote showing otherwise. (There are wrinkles and asterisks — fourth-wall-breaks, parodies, etc. — but none of those are in play with the novel.) No such "Dirk Gently is not in continuity with Shada" quotes exist, to my knowledge, and so the presumption really should be that the book passes regular Rule 4, no questions asked.

Ultimately, I think there's no strong argument against covering the two Dirk Gently novels and the IDW comics. Where it all falls down is in the matter of the two TV series. Covering two entire TV series that don't feature Chronotis feels like a tall order (although the BBC miniseries with Stephen Mangan did have an episode set at St Cedd's College…). And although intent seems to have shifted back and forth over time in a couple of ways — I could expand on this if people are interested, but this post is long enough as it is — one of the Chronotis-featuring comic stories, The Salmon of Doubt, nails down the "classic" Dirk Gently universe of the books and comics (the one who seems to be continuous with Shada) as living in an actual, textual parallel universe relative to the two TV series — most explicitly the later, longer one, but the BBC miniseries gets a blink-and-you'll-miss-it acknowledgement. So covering the second TV series as a valid spin-off would mean a glut of "In another universe…" pages, at that. We could — but do we want to? Eh.

And yet I don't think there's a way out of covering, at the absolute least, the three stories featuring Prof Chronotis himself: Dirk Gently's Holistic Agency (1987), the BBC Radio adaptation thereof (2007), The Interconnectedness of All Kings (2015) and The Salmon of Doubt (2016). I think basically our options are:

Option 1: We cover the three stories featuring Professor Chronotis. They are treated more as "crossovers with the Extended Douglas Adams Universe" than as "spin-offs", which is to say that we do not hold concepts and characters which debut within them to be 'inherently' DWU in a way that makes their validity 'catching'. Thus we do not consider Dirk himself a DWU character at all.

Option 2: Same as above, but we also cover Episode 2 of the 2012 TV miniseries. This is annoying, doubly so because these episodes don't have individual titles, but that's the story set at St Cedd's College. We can only dodge out of this one if we continue to hold that Chronotis is "only" a DWU character in 1987 thanks to The Legacy of Gallifrey. Which is an annoyingly pedantic position — I would be happier treating Shada as a kind of "time-delayed DWU debut", which is how anyone not on the Wiki would think about the sense in which Chronotis was DWU "first" — but unless we want this, we may have to retain it.

Option 3: We cover everything set in the books' continuity. This would mean covering The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) and A Spoon Too Short (2016) in addition to the 'Option 1' bunch. This option is attractive to me on a gut level, but would constitute a kind of "special case" we would be grandfathering into policy, where we would consider the "prime" Dirk a DWU element, but still exclude ourselves from covering the TV shows — not because they fail Rule 4 exactly, but because they're "less relevant" in an inchoate sense. It would also mean us making a judgement call of taking Salmon of Doubt as authoritative regarding the second TV series being its own universe; earlier marketing actually advertised that series as being in direct continuity with the books, and there are continuity references thereto in the TV series even though its Dirk is physically wildly different from the books' physical description, so that at the very least he seems to have gone through 'broad strokes' versions of them. It very much feels like an "according to one account" issue. So I dunno. Much as I would find it annoying not to be able to cover Tea-Time and Spoon, they may be more trouble than they're worth to justify.

Option 4: We cover all Dirk Gently media, biting the bullet that Dirk's introduction in a book featuring Chronotis makes him an innately-DWU character. This is the simplest, most straightforward option suggested by policy. It's also a logistical nightmare (two entire TV series?? All those cast pages!…) and probably not in line with the community's wishes. Lest I make it seem too much like the runt of the litter, Option 4 does have a few arguments in its favour besides Occam's Razor; chiefly, The Salmon of Doubt (one of the stories we would be covering in all cases) heavily intertwines with the continuity of the two seasons of the second series. Those "Barnett-verse" variations are going to get coverage either way. So there's a degree to which covering the TV series would indeed be giving further context on characters we'd already be covering, not just cluttering our systems with reams and reams of stuff about irrelevant alternative versions from a universe that's shed all the DWU trappings of its book/comic counterpart. Still, I don't love this, and I don't expect it to pass.

(There is also a kind of "Option 0" which functions like "Option 1" in terms of coverage, but where people aren't convinced by the Rule 4 argument for some reason, and thus we cover the three Chronotis stories as invalid — i.e. they feature a DWU-licensed character but aren't intended to be DWU. I would find this very annoying, and again I think it would be incorrect. But it would still be preferable to continuing to not cover these stories.)

Sorry for the extremely long post, hope this has been helpful. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 22:33, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

If we covered all Dirk Gently media, would we merge with the existing wiki for it, or would we just also cover everything they do? (I guess it depends what that community thinks is best?) Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 23:02, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Given that Wiki being stuck on Fandom, the difference would be fairly academic. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:26, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, my schtick would be that if there's already a robust wiki for Dirk Gently, it might make sense to just do inter-wiki links to it, since DG does largely make sense without Doctor Who. Buuuuuuttttttt, it's on Fandom, so that's a heavy point against that mindset. Not immediately disqualifying, but, uh, not a fan. Najawin ☎ 01:16, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

I also wouldn't call "under 300 pages" robust, anyway, even for a relatively small franchise. And as for interwiki linking in general… boy, I have a thread cooking about that. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 01:33, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

I think we are somewhat in danger of coverage/scope creep as we try to cover more and more on the periphery of the DWU.

Option 1 most aligns the best for me I think. Chronotis' presence in the stories is enough for us to coverage those. But I don't think it's a good enough reason to pull in everything else around it into our coverage sphere. —Tangerineduel / talk 14:50, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. I presented the four options for clarity, but I think Option 1 is the wisest course of action. (Really, I didn't deliberately write them by order of preference, but I think Option 1>Option 2>Option 3>Option 4, if I had to rank them.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 15:41, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

To me, Option 2 is the best option. If St Cedd's College appears in the TV series, then that episode should at least be covered, probably valid too. Even if we go by the pedantic view that Shada wasn't actually released before Dirk Gently, then the college still appears (albeit unnamed) in TV: The Five Doctors and its novelisation before the publication of the first Dirk Gently novel. But anyway, regardless of whether we go with option 1 or 2, I think it's best to treat it as a series which crosses over with Doctor Who, rather than as a spinoff. Danochy ☎ 04:30, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much for elaborating so well Scrooge MacDuck. I should have left the OP to you! I agree with Najawin that interwiki linking to Fandom is a nonstarter. And I agree with Danochy that Option 2 is the minimum viable option. For this reason I strongly prefer Option 3. Especially since The Salmon of Doubt is one of the stories we would be covering even in Option 1: we will be taking it as authoritative one way or another. There is no reason for us not to follow that to its logical conclusion. What would we be left with otherwise: deliberately half-incomplete pages which only confuse casual readers who will not follow our logic about semi-arbitrary lines in the sand. As for scope creep. Well. I am sympathetic. But to be maximally blunt the series in question are infinitely more relevant to a Doctor Who Wiki than all the effort that is put into content like PROBE and Jenny Everywhere which for better or worse are read by hardly anyone and are of interest to only the wiki's own editor-authors. WarDocFan12 ☎ 15:07, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

@Danochy: Oh yes! Of course! St Cedd's is in Five Doctors! Of course it is. I hadn't thought of that. Yes, I suppose that strengthens the case for Option 2 considerably. (Of course, it's not as though the Dirk Gently TV story uses the specific visuals seen in Five Doctors, so if we wanted to "technically" our way out of this one, we could argue that with the name going unsaid in Five Doctors, the Dirk Gently episode doesn't actually use any specific details which originated in the DWU… But that's a big stretch.)

@WarDocFan12: Thank you for the kind words! To clarify my thinking on "taking Salmon of Doubt as authoritative", though, what I meant is that common practice would be to treat any post hoc claim of "this earlier story loosely intended as prime-universe was actually an alternate reality" as a "by another account" deal. See the class of pages like Virgin reality or The Doctor's reality (Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks). The VNA novels or Target novelisations were not intended to be parallel universes originally, and we continue to cover them as "main-universe" material by default, presenting any attempted later retcons as just that — controversial retcons. Insofar as the Barnett-verse was originally written and advertised as a continuation of the novels and Interconnectedness of All Kings, the normal way to cover Salmon of Doubt's multiversal lore would be in the same cautious, by-another-accounty way. "These sources documented Dirk Gently's further adventures, seemingly in continuity with his earlier encounter with Chronotis, but a later account claimed that he was actually a parallel version". This is why I think there would be something slightly disingenuous about taking it as gospel just so we can get away with covering Tea-Time and Spoon but not Barnett.

As far as discussion of scope-creep and "relevance", I also feel like there's a degree of confusion going on. Something might be very obscure and yet very relevant. "How many people have even watched the P.R.O.B.E. films" is not the same question as "granted that these people know they exist at all, how many people would expect the P.R.O.B.E. films to be covered on a Doctor Who Wiki". Case in point, millions more people have read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy than, say, The Dalek Chronicles, but that's not particularly relevant to whether Hitchhiker's is of greater relevance to us than The Dalek Chronicles. P.R.O.B.E. is relevant because it's about Liz Shaw/a group founded by Liz Shaw, frequently encountering other elements of the wider Whoniverse e.g. the Yssgaroth, and thus a Doctor Who Wiki is a natural place to cover it.

That is: if Dirk Gently is relevant — and as I said, I agree that at least parts of it are — it's because of how closely Chronotis and St. Cedd's intertwine it with DWU lore and Who's production history. Concerns about "scope creep" go back to Forum:Iris Wildthyme: should she stay or should she go?, and a flagship example there was something no less iconic than Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short stories! (Jenny Everywhere is a better example, because her relevance to the DWU is a creature of crossovers through and through. We should not find ourselves covering Jenny stories unless they directly involve DWU concepts; she's her own thing first and foremost, best-served by her own Wiki. And, indeed, she has one, which is in the process of being moved off Fandom too.)

Incidentally, my big effortpost above didn't go into the Hitchhiker's of it all — as per the concerns in my earliest message, I sort of feel like we should resolve Dirk Gently first, and only then discuss the more anecdotal matter of the Hitchhiker's minerals. But I don't want to block discussion in that area if people disagree, or anything. Thoughts?--Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 16:24, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

After more thought, I'm still divided on this, as it could be useful to include the crossover characters, but I don't know whether it properly makes sense to include everything HHGTTG and Dirk Gently related (as would happen through natural page evolution) on a wiki intended for Doctor Who - it'd expand the information available but it would probably clash with Rule 4. SID'gingerfool'RAT 16:39, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, I can't really see us doing stage 3 without doing stage 4. I feel like at least a fair bit of Dirk Gently is fairly relevant, but it's worth noting I haven't actually read/watched/listened to/attended any Dirk Gently media, so this is mostly from what I've heard from others (such as in this thread). Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 16:42, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

I would be strongly opposed to covering all Hitchhiker's, certainly. But as I said I think we should discuss Dirk first. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 16:54, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

I split the proposal into a Dirk section and a Hitchhiker. Maybe it would make sense to do the same for the discussion section. I should have thought of that earlier. Will leave the decision to an admin but I put a comment where I think the section header should go. Right before User:Scrooge MacDuck's big explanation. WarDocFan12 ☎ 18:59, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Seems entirely sensible. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:15, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

I must say, out of the options, number three is the most realistic. If we're going to cover Dirk Gently (we should, 1000% cover the relevant bits), we may as well do it properly. My heart feels option four would be best, but that's idealistic and I doubt we'd ever really complete the coverage, considering a lot of other spin-off coverage is also stubby. Perhaps in the future, once the books and the comics are covered to a good level, it may be worth reopening this discussion to allow in the two television series too.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

23:26, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

I'd just like to point out that misgivings about incomplete coverage can be set aside, as we can just use NOTCOVERED to fill in the gaps on pages like Dirk Gently. The discussion at hand, therefore, has to be centred on whether we consider Dirk Gently to genuinely be a Doctor Who spinoff, and not on how incomplete coverage would feel subjectively. So, is there anything to suggest that the use of Chronotis and St Cedds was was intended to tie the series (not Chronotis, but the series itself) and its lead Dirk to Doctor Who? If not, and its simple reuse of ideas, we should just cover the relevant concepts. Danochy ☎ 03:56, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

NOTCOVERED, as the name implies, is not complete coverage. It can help give broader context on shared concepts e.g. Dirk himself, but would still mean that some of the sources aren't covered in full — for example, Thor wouldn't say anything about Tea-Time, and we wouldn't host a full plot summary of that book or A Spoon Too Short anywhere. This isn't the end of the world, I still think Option 1 or Option 2 are better, but there is a loss of detail there. (Also, I have misgivings about the current form of NOTCOVERED, so it might not be around forever… But that's a separate conversation and I suppose it's not really within the spirit of T:BOUND to say "well, we can't rely on such-and-such policy because some people want to change it later".)

It occurs to me that there is perhaps a pathway to formalising Option 3 in a more airtight way than trying to think of it in terms of "the prime Dirk Gently universe being a DWU concept": looking at subseries instead of individual stories. That is, we might say "the book series (Holistic Agency + Tea-Time of the Soul) and the IDW comics run (Kings + Spoon + Salmon of Doubt) each feature Chronotis, and therefore each should be covered in full; the Barnett TV show doesn't feature Chronotis therefore it shouldn't". Tea-Time is a direct sequel to Holistic, and the three IDW comic stories lead into one another, so bringing a bit of that Incomplete Death's Head spirit wouldn't be insane. I still think the first two options are probably wiser, but if we're going to do Option 3, we should probably think of it that way — as each subseries being a wider "story" featuring Chronotis. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 13:01, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Option 1, specifically the elaboration Scrooge has just given in the above message. Cousin Ettolrhc ☎ 18:01, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

I don't understand — the elaboration above was for a revised Option 3, not for Option 1. Which do you support? --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:56, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

I am not sure exactly where I stand on this, but I agree with Option 1 at minimum. When I read the first Dirk Gently book, I really picked up vibes of Adams writing a "Time Lord by any other name". There are also a few other things to note:

• The Shada novelisation has a nod to the first novel in mentioning that Chronotis was having trouble with his phone lines.
• The 2017 version of Shada made a very interesting change compared to its unfinished counterpart. The unbroadcast version featured Chronotis's TARDIS in the Time Vortex as an entire displaced room, whereas the 2017 version depicts it as solely a door. The exterior of the time machine being only the door is exactly how it worked in Dirk Gently.

• 

  The unbroadcast 1979 version, showing Chronotis's TARDIS as a room

• 

  The finished 2017 version, showing its exterior as a door

• And for what it's worth about what people may have made of it at the time, I happened to notice that the letters page of DWM 138 (July 1988) had a letter from a fan remarking how unsubtly Adams re-used his ideas from Shada. An image of Chronotis also appears on this letters page. So that's just to affirm, people knew what Adams was doing when Dirk Gently was published.

So I do think we should cover stories with Chronotis. I somewhat like the idea of Option 3, but at the same time it seems like it could be a bit of a stretch. Chubby Potato ☎ 06:23, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Thinking this over, now that I have a little more time, I think as far as coverage is concerned, my preference is 4>3>1>2. 2 seems to be entirely untenable to me. 4, the maximal option, is probably the correct option as per our policies, and so I'm gonna support that, but I get that others might not like it. (As in Forum:The LEGO Dimensions Conundrum, Reconsidered.) Validity... I agree that stories are innocent until proven guilty, but the sofa example actually is the sort of thing that suggests to me that Adams was just making sly, unserious, jokes rather than a serious attempt at worldbuilding. It actually makes me less likely to think this is valid. But nowhere near enough to overcome the burden necessary here, I think. Najawin ☎ 07:08, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

@Scrroge: oh, right. The revised Option 3 would be my preference, with 1 as a backup and 4 as my last choice.Cousin Ettolrhc ☎ 07:23, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Hmm. I'm going to have to post an erratum regarding the Dirk Gently sofa: it has been pointed out to me that there is a single line I missed later in Dirk Gently that seems to give another explanation for its mysterious appearance, and which I'd misinterpreted on prior readthroughs. So, alas, the sofa in Dirk Gently is not the same as the Shada/Hitchhiker's sofa. (Not that this changes matters that much, given that Hitchhiker's and Dirk Gently have connections of their own so that it all averages out in the end… Plus, as I said from the start, the sofa was only ever just icing on the Chronotis Cake.)

@Najawin, I'm not quite sure what you find more untenable about #2 than #1, particularly if we take into account the "St Cedd's debuts in Five Doctors" of it all so as to not have to think about delayed debuts? (I'm also not sure I understand your objection to the sofa, provided I hadn't been seeing things re: the Dirk one. If we knew for certain that it was indeed the same disappearing-and-reappearing sofa streaking through all three books, then surely that'd be a textbook example of a shared-universe 'nod', "red skies"-style? But since the sofa is turning out not to matter so much, and you don't find it definitive either way, I won't press the point.)

@Chubby_Potato, thank you for the additional evidence! I think there'd be an argument for the two 2010s Shadas subtly R4BPing Dirk Gently, yes, if it were necessary. But I don't think we need get into that hypothetical. No proxy necessary. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 08:52, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Alternatively, the sofa could be a joke, rather than a serious indication of authorial intent, the sort of thing which does happen all the time in many stories and properties. Not everyone is as multiversal as us. The way it's written, combined with the Hitchhiker's connections, lead me to read it more as a joke. But, again, R4, etc. As for St Cedd's, perhaps it's just my confusion here, but I'm just not sure how we can get this to be both a DWU element and something Adams has the rights to. He was script editor for S17, and I believe the general understanding of contracts from that time was that script editors didn't retain IP. Which is why it's then available for Five Doctors. I think there's a plausible R2 violation for #2. Najawin ☎ 09:18, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

But surely that would apply to Chronotis himself, if that were so — he was created for S17 just as much St. Cedd's, and it's a fluke that some of the "stock" footage of St Cedd's showed up in the Five Doctors footage but not Chronotis. Unless there's a highly specific contractual quirk, either nothing is licensed, or all of it is. "Dirk Gently's Holistic Agency (fan work)" would be… well, it would be somethin'.

(It's true that the rules for script editors worked as you say — but again, if it applied to Shada, it would have covered Chronotis too. And yet he did not change the name or specifics of Chronotis in any way. I think we must assume that after filming Shada initially fell through, some clause was enacted, or renegotiation entered, which freed Adams of the original obligations; since at that point, pre-JNT, no one at the BBC was thinking of it someday being completed, I find it unsurprising to suppose that Adams would ask for his IP back and have that request granted without fuss.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 10:23, 19 April 2024 (UTC)