User talk:NateBumber

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Discord

I expect you knew the drill from the moment you saw the notification, but: h'llo, how've ye been, and where have ye been Discord-wise? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:27, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

The War King's Homeworld

Would you be able to contribute to User:Cousin Ettolrhc/Sandbox/The War King's Homeworld, so that the page can be reasonable before being merged into the main namespace? I think my current structure is good, it just needs quite a lot of summarising from The Book of the War. I will continue working on it, but having someone else there will be helpful. Hope your doing well, Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 13:01, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

R4bp

I'll try to add that context. There's a reason I was so frustrated with quoting people and it took me days to think about how to do it. It's so easy when doing so to mischaracterize positions or present them in ways that could be interpreted in bad faith.

As for the idea that

This author clearly thought that an earlier story was connected or related to their current one, so we should be able to cite that story in the relevant context

I just don't see the case for validity here. Like. You could still do this in the bts section, and I'd support changing things so it goes into continuity instead. Validity is a more substantial business - it says not just that one story is talking to another in the particular context of that story, but that we use the previously invalid story on our IU pages across the whole of the wiki. And I don't see how the latter authorial intent of a completely disconnected author can ever get you there. I, frankly, do not care what Jonathan Morris's intent was about CoFD and how it might or might not relate to his own work. It's not his story. He doesn't get to usurp someone else's authorial intent on their own story. If Jonathan Morris didn't think CoFD was "really DWU", that doesn't change things, and if he thought it was that doesn't change things. Competing accounts are standard, and we solve it by saying that in one account X was held to have happened (where X is precisely what is shown, as there's no speculation) and in the other account Y is held to have happened (where Y is precisely what is shown, as there's no speculation). If we apply this same standard to validity we have the rules as prior to R4bp - where invalid stories, as written, are invalid, but specific references to them, insofar as they appear in valid sources, are valid.

But my lack of interest in latter authorial intent is ultimately not an argument I think we can base wiki policy off of, for the reasons I expressed in the sandbox. So I'm not going down this route. (Perhaps we could argue that the lack of symmetry between IU accounts and OU validity here is an issue? An interesting argument that I might incorporate, but not one that I think is particularly compelling. It would more be for those who prefer things to have this sort of symmetry in the first place and would likely not convince anyone else in the slightest.)

As for Thread:231309, I'm less and less convinced as to people pointing out the use of the word "canon" in the early days as if it somehow undermines the work done there as I've been perusing the archives. I don't agree with much of the work done, but the early editors were well aware that "canon" as used was simply a word to refer to what the wiki allowed for article coverage and it didn't refer to a broader notion of the term. It was, perhaps, proto-proto-validity. The thread was premised on fundamental misunderstandings of early decisions, as well as some particularly specific definitions in order to make its conclusions work.

As for the idea that R4bp may be too small, perhaps, but I haven't written the conclusion yet! The basic idea is that if R4bp is to stay, we have to re-examine many other areas of our policies in radical ways and we probably also have to reform it because as it stands it's ever so slightly incoherent. We can either do that, get rid of it, or, just, wave our hands, say "validity is what we want it to be", and ignore everything. (But, uh, I'm not gonna say this in the thread, but I'll probably be pretty annoying in the future to anyone who votes for that option. "Huh, it seems like the argument you're making here requires logical consistency. It's a shame you explicitly voted against using that in our rules earlier." :P) Najawin ☎ 17:56, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Also, to clarify,

In the latter case, one is saying "This author clearly thought that an earlier story didn't count, so no one should be able to cite it anywhere, even in contexts where it might be relevant.

If I understand you correctly this isn't what I'm suggesting. I'm not even sure what this would look like. An invalid story referring to a valid story as if it were part of the "invalid continuity", maybe? But idk how anyone thinks this is disqualifying, nobody has suggested it that I know of.

Rather, it's that we're not clear whether or not an author thinks a previous work "counted", we're not clear whether they think their current work "counts", and since we use narrative to determine authorial intent now, we can go either way, we can attempt to reason that both works "count", and this is supposedly more useful to a reader (many will say this isn't true, but I think you and I both disagree), or we can say neither count. We invalidate or validate the two as a group now. Scrooge made a similar argument on my talk page. (Re:T:POINT) I do have a response, believe me. It's just not written up yet. (In short, I think Scrooge is radically incorrect about where the burden of proof lies in this scenario. I'll elaborate for the thread. The key to the issue is that one of these is already invalid, and this changes the dynamics of how we have to think about things. Scrooge has some reasoning to try to get around this, I don't believe it's successful. It will be discussed. Promise.) Najawin ☎ 19:39, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Now you've got me started thinking about topologies of validity. Dammit Nate. Najawin ☎ 22:43, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

"Let validity, invalidity, and semivalidity be sigma algebras with the following properties..." - How my next forum thread after the R4bp one is going to start. Najawin ☎ 22:55, 31 July 2023 (UTC)