Forum:The Unspecified Cyberman Debate

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I was recently reading through The Brilliant Book 2012 and noticed that it states that the "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Closing Time" Cybermen (although it says nothing about "Blood of the Cybermen") are infact 'Mondasian' (for want of a better term) and not 'Pete's World' ones. I suppose the debate now is: Do we consider The Brilliant Book/s to be canon? I can see why some people wouldn't (a lot of it is written out-of-universe), but I also understand that the views on continuity expressed inside the book are also those expressed by the production team. So should we go ahead and merge the information into Cyberman (Mondas), or are there some people who object or something? The preceding comment was made by Bigredrabbit (talk to me) 23:26, October 29, 2011 (UTC)

If the fact that the more recent Cybermen are actually the main universe Cybermen actually does come from the production team or from Moffat, then I would say that we should consider that canon. I would think that writer's intent is really what is important in this case. Still, I'm sure that their are plenty of people who would disagree.Icecreamdif ^{talk to me} 20:19, October 30, 2011 (UTC)

I think there's a debate as to whether reference material works as a source. I'm sure I read somewhere that it's preferred to be placed in the "behind the scenes" section. Am I wrong on this? That said, if it's absolutely said with the production team's blessing, rather than just whoever wrote it... -- Tybort (talk page) 20:55, October 30, 2011 (UTC)

There's s0me debate as to whether reference books are 'canon'. This wouldn't be the first article that demonstrated information from REF prefixes as 'canon'. Even the CyberMondasian, CyberNeomorph, CyberFaction, etc. stuff is mainly based on REF: Cybermen. So I really think we ought to consider The Brilliant Book 'canon'. 220.244.162.100 10:02, November 1, 2011 (UTC)

The issues are seperate in that particular case. The CyberMondasian / CyberNeomorph / etc. info comes from the book Doctor Who: Cybermen which is a very unique case, as it contains both in-universe narrative and out-of-universe reference material. The in-universe reference stuff is presented in the form of a reference work by in-universe characters. So the in-universe stuff from Doctor Who: Cybermen is okay to cite in-universe regardless of how we feel about out-of-universe reference works like The Brilliant Book, and we can't base our policy on out-of-universe reference material on how we feel about CyberNeomorphs. — Rob T Firefly - Δ∇ - 21:37, November 1, 2011 (UTC)

The Brilliant Book cannot be used to assert in-universe information. Our canon policy is immensely clear. Narratives are primary information. Secondary sources — that is, reference works — cannot be used to source of in-universe information. Secondary sources may be used to add notes to "behind the scenes" sections but that's about it.

Although I've got a lot to say on this subject, it's actually really simple. In-universe sections have to come from in-universe sources. Behind the scenes sections contain real world information. Ne'er the twain shall meet. And since the in-universe portion of articles is mandatory, if you don't have a narrative reference for a topic, you can't even start the article at all.

Here's a practical example. Let's say there was a book called Uncle Terrance's Guide to the Whoniverse. And imagine that Terrance Dicks, feeling a bit impish, put in an entry about a place called "Devon Motorworks", which he asserted was the company that built Bessie. You can't then create an article which says:

Devon Motorworks was the automobile factory that created Bessie. (REF: Uncle Terrance's Guide to the Whoniverse)

It doesn't matter that it's written by Terrance Dicks, key production team member during the years that Bessie was in use. The problem is that you're using an out-of-universe source to cite something which is in-universe.

I know it's tempting to use information said to be straight from the word processor of Steven Moffat, but we just can't do it. It's the "thin end of the wedge", as Humphrey Appleby liked to say. We'd then have to let in a lot of material:

• Offhand comments made on DVD commentaries. (And then we'd have to settle the question of who's right. For instance, Julie Gardner firmly asserts The Woman was the Doctor's mother, but RTD is more coy about it in PCOM: The End of Time part 2.)
• Stuff in the production notes section of DWM, or notes from the producers at the front of annuals. Was series 5 actually Season Fnarg? It is if you take Steven Moffat literally in the pages of DWM.
• A literal ton of material from old Doctor Who and Dalek annuals that we don't even want to think about, such as text which introduces activity pages, which is sometimes done non-narratively, but in-character. This sort of creep is already happening on the wiki, largely from the DWBIT range of magazines. Some editors are quoting from non-narrative "factoids" that appear in BIT and it simply can't be allowed to continue, much less expand to other publications.
• God does not know how much we'd have to include from The Writer's Tale, The Nth Doctor and other books which contain information about narrative avenues not actually taken. We're already on shaky enough ground sometimes using the credits and the script (hello Zaggit Zagoo bar, I'm lookin' at you) to name things which the finished episode does not. We don't want to open ourselves to the mentality that "anything which comes from the mouth or pen of The Creator deserves an article/is canon here". Sometimes great artists just doodle. We don't want to be in the position of creating an article for all the things that almost were.

Another thing I'm seeing as dangerous is the suggestion upthread that some reference works are better than others. This would be a very difficult arrangement to administrate. A reference work is a reference work is a reference work. One written by RTD may be more valuable to your own personal sense of canon, but it'd be hard to let some in but exclude others. Other people, who generally disapprove of RTD, would be quick to say that they don't particularly care what his opinion is in a specific book. Thus, the disqualifying factor here is not the writer, it's the perspective from which the work is written.

See, this is a wiki about a fictional universe. The DWU is created by and indivisible from narrative. This isn't like the Star Wars universe, where Lucasfilm has a canon policy. It's okay for w:c:starwars to use the Star Wars Encyclopedia because that's explicitly canon to Lucasfilm.

We don't have the organisational luxury of a BBC-provided list of allowed works. So we have to set some sort of boundaries. If we didn't, we'd soon be including fan works or things that have no actual bearing on the DWU.

Now, we have a pretty broad church here, but it's not infinitely expandable.

If you look at DWU reference works, as a general group, they're not the most accurate things in the world. JNT wrote The Companions and erroneously asserted that Sara Kingdom was a companion — something Jean Marsh has strongly denied ever since. JNT later asserted in another book that he had absolutely no problems with Tom Baker, something we know isn't true from the preponderance of other evidence. He's a big part of the production team, though. Should we take him more seriously than Jean-Marc Lofficier, who once notoriously asserted that Polly Wright's last name was "Wright"? I don't see why we should. Philip Hinchcliffe is well known as a non-expert on the narrative history of DW. I wouldn't trust him if he set out to make a DW encyclopedia, nor would I expect Verity Lambert to have been terribly accurate on the details of her tenure in the years before her death. I mean, this is surely the lesson of DVD commentaries. They're not that accurate, even though they may include people who we'd otherwise deem to be authoritative. We'd expect Tom Baker to remember things about The Ribos Operation. After all, he was there! But his memory is often spotty.

The point is, as a class of works, it is simply better for the quality of our information to stay on point. Our subject is the DWU, not other people's impressions of the DWU.

Such a stance forces us, as editors, to actually watch the episodes, or read the books, or listen to the audios. Everything in the DWU begins and ends with the narrative. "Reference" works are — by definition — someone else's distillation of the stories of the DWU. Now, of course, it's relevant to note what various people important to the production of the DWU think about it. But these notes must be in their proper place — the behind the scenes sections of articles.

Now, allllll that said, I happen to believe that you don't need The Brilliant Book to tell you that the S6 Cybermen are Mondasian. This is readily apparent in their design, in their ability to travel into deep space, and in the design of the shapes of their spacecraft — which clearly match those seen in The Invasion. The visual evidence is that they are "proper" Cybermen, and I've long held that we've put the burden of proof the wrong way around. The question is not, "prove they're Mondasian". Rather, it's, "using only the evidence at hand, prove that they're Pete's World."

We're being far too literal, expecting a bit of dialogue or a screen to tell us that they're definitely this universe's Cybermen. Such dialogue is incredibly unlikely. We can positively assert they're Mondasian, because they're obviously NOT Pete's World, and we've been given no reasonable expectation that there's a "third option" out there.

It's better to say that it's unclear how or why the Mondasian Cybermen came to have a somewhat similar appearance to the Pete's World Cybermen than for us to assert that the s6 Cyberment are a "third, unknown type" of Cybermen. We're just making that up. The visual evidence points to the fact that they are Mondasian, and that we're simply missing the bit of their history that connects, I guess, Silver Nemesis with A Good Man Goes to War.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">01:37: Wed 02 Nov 2011 

Their ability to travel into deep space is not much of an argument for them being Mondasian, as the Cybermen with the Cybus logo in The Pandorica Opens also have this ability. And the third option is not them being a completely separate type, but a result of an alliance/merger between the Mondasian Cybermen and the remnants of the Pete's World Cybermen. Ausir^(talk) 11:37, November 3, 2011 (UTC)