Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?

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I move that we rule The Infinity Doctors non-canonical, in the sense that it can't be used as a valid soure for other articles.

• The incarnation of the Doctor is uncertain, with different reviewers saying "it's definitely the Eighth Doctor", "it may be the First Doctor prior to leaving Gallifrey", or it may be a future or alternative timeline version of whom we've never heard elsewhere

He's clearly not the eighth Doctor of mainstream continuity. He does look like Paul McGann.Lance Parkin

• The time setting is, by the author's admission, intentionally vague. With no clear setting, how can we possibly speak of any of the events with anything like certainty?
• Reviewers can't seem to agree whether the book even happens in the normal DWU
• Lance Parkin said in an interview with the old BBCi that it was meant to be book one of a two book series, with the second book containing a "reset button" that would allow the story to return to the "normal" DWU. Without this reset button, the story languishes in a weird nether world
• Because of the vast narrative uncertainties, it is extremely problematic to allow even basic information from this story into our other pages. Basic factual writing requires that we define the who-what-when-why-and-how of situations, but the novel doesn't allow us to precisely know the who, what or when of almost any statement we'd care to craft.

Obviously, I'm not suggesting that we delete the page The Infinity Doctors, but I think we do need to quarantine it from the rest of our pages. Thoughts?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">04:57: Fri 20 Apr 2012 

I agree. It doesn't make any sense in the context of DWU canon. Tardis1963 talk 01:02, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

I also agree. Just makes pages weird and confusing. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 12:17, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

I vehemently disagree. If we start picking and choosing what is canon we're no better than the Trek people. If the BBC breaks its longstanding rule and comes out and says it's not canon, then OK. Otherwise what's next - the entire Eighth Doctor Adventures line? "Fear Her"? What about all the comic strips? Don't fall into that trap. Simply police the thing to remove speculation based on facts not in evidence, and restrict the use of events in the book to something like "during an unknown incarnation XYZ happened". Simple. If this licensed book or any other licensed work is declared non-canon just because it's inconvenient or difficult to work with, then delete everything that isn't directly taken from TV, or simply kill this website because it'll be useless. 70.72.223.215^{talk to me} 19:36, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

You do have a point there... But I think the problem here is that nearly everything written about the book would have to be either speculation or very careful. But you do have a point. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 19:59, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

Also keep in mind that Telos published 2 novellas with unspecified Doctors too - The Cabinet of Light being one. And that one pegs the entire Time Hunter continuity. So you can see where a domino effect is possible. 70.72.223.215^{talk to me} 20:13, April 22, 2012 (UTC)

I think you've missed the point, 70.72, that the author himself does not believe the book to be in continuity. If the author doesn't believe it's the "real" continuity, why should we?

I'd point out, too, that the issue isn't that it's an "unspecified" Doctor. It is, rather, that the author has explicitly said that it's "not the eighth Doctor of mainstream continuity". There's a big difference between an unidentifiable Doctor and a Doctor who's positively identified as being out of mainstream continuity. We also know details about how there was supposed to be a second book, and that the second book was going to show the relationship between the universe in which The Infinity Doctors took place and the genuine DWU. Because that second book didn't happen, however, there was no "reset button" and The Infinity Doctors was left out on its own island of continuity.

Though I understand your concerns about bad precedents being set, you're overreacting. This thread is only talking about the very narrow issue of this one book, where there is significant evidence — just as there is with The Curse of Fatal Death — that the piece is not a part of the normal continuity.

That said, thanks for raising the issue of precedents so that I can categorically state that the thread is not setting one.

I think, too, you're misapprehending the current usage of the phrase "Is X canon?" on this wiki. We're not trying to stop anyone from believing what they want to about their personal canon. Nor are we actually trying to define what canon means for DW fandom in general. What it really means is, "Is X allowable under our canon policy?" All we're saying is that there must be limits to what this wiki covers. The flip side of what you're arguing is very much scarier for me. If we have no limits, then the wiki will become unmanageable. There must be some metric by which we define our borders, or we'll be pickin' Rose/Dodo lesbian fan fic off the walls. This is why we have recently introduced the very simple notion that the fiction must be licensed by an appropriate copyright holder and it must not be parodic or obviously intended to be out of continuity. This arose from a longlived and productive discussion that's ended with formalisation about which specific BBV releases are covered here and which aren't.

All of this still lets in a heck of a lot of stuff, and firmly protects the EDA range, the John and Gillian stuff, and most everything you've mentioned above. In fact, I've probably uploaded more John and Gillian-related stuff to the wiki than anyone!

So don't worry, this isn't the first battle the long campaign to turn this into a TV-only DW wiki. Nor is this an effort to actually delete the page. The Infinity Doctors will always be on this wiki. It's just that it will not be a valid source for the writing of other articles. This will force all information about The Infinity Doctors to be on that page, which will make that page much better and clearer.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">23:56: Mon 23 Apr 2012 

I disagree with this suggestion as well, though perhaps not as vehemently as the anon above. I think that the key phrase in the Parkin quote is "of mainstream continuity". The Infinity Doctors exists as a sort of side-step from the main EDA range, but it's not parodic and it's just as authorized.

In terms of continuity, I think it's similar to the situation with the Faction Paradox range. Thanks to The Ancestor Cell, pretty much all of the FP-branded fiction — and indeed some of the previous EDAs touched by the War — take place in an "aborted timeline." But we include information from the FP series, with appropriate caveats. Now, we don't know exactly what the relationship between TID and the rest of the Eighth Doctor stories is, but the possibilities include an alternate timeline for the Eighth Doctor, or a young Doctor prior to An Unearthly Child. It could even be the Eighth Doctor of the regular timeline, between The Gallifrey Chronicles and the Time War. That's sufficiently outside of any established narrative to be apart from mainstream continuity, but it could conceivably still be part of the same timeline.

I think that saying "we don't count this" is too easy. I agree that including it is a challenge, but I don't think it's an insurmountable one. Overall, I think that OS25 has it right when he or she says we have to be "very careful". Rather than excluding TID altogether, we should just decide on a standard phrasing ("according to one account", perhaps?) which allows for TID's ambiguous status, and allows the reader to decide whether and how to fit it in to the larger narrative. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 15:00, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I also agree with the above 70.72 anon.

It's not speculation and we can't take what the author says to be a ruling on whether it's canon, it was published by the BBC, it's a narrative published by the BBC, it's got Doctor Who stuff in it. That is how we've worked through the canon policy and how we've worked through the BBV stuff that CzechOut mentions. This novel was published and licensed and approved by the BBC.

Authors in the past have declared their Doctor Who fanfic to be canon and we disallowed that. Isn't that just the reverse of this statement? What of the many things Lawrence Miles has said with regard to the Enemy arc and the Faction Paradox related stuff?

So the argument is it should be got rid of because it's TOO HARD?! to fit into article??!

What of The Dalek Factor which is also ambigious about its Doctor and outcome?

I do agree with OS25, we need to be careful with how we use the information in this novel, and refrain from using vague information, but explicit information like any other narrative source should be used. And as Josiah Rowe says we can also fall back to our "one account states" phrasology when conflicting information is present. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:55, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I think The Infinity Doctors is a legitimate source for descriptions of Gallifrey and Gallifreyan culture, but not necessarily a legitimate source for describing events that happened in the life of the Doctor of "mainstream continuity." The background detail is in accord with other references to Gallifrey, but the particular events of the novel may have taken place in an aborted timeline. For example, one of the founders of Gallifreyan civilization mentioned in The Infinity Doctors was also mentioned in The Ancestor Cell. That said, people are free to disregard the source if they want to in their role as viewer/reader/interpreter. It may be appropriate to warn readers of the wiki that the legitimacy of the novel is in question, but I don't think it's appropriate to "quarantine" the novel entirely. -- Rowan Earthwood ^{talk to me} 16:06, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I sympathize, Rowan, but that's setting the boundaries a bit fine, don't you think? Boblipton ^{talk to me} 19:10, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I'm not quite understanding the level of negativity to this proposal. This is a perfectly ordinary part of our normal processes, consistent with other specific inclusion debates. We've had enough of them that there's a whole category of them. Yes, we have a general rule that goes something like, "As long as it's licensed, it's included". But I think the last few posters have forgotten that we do make exceptions. We have to. The BBC has played with its property in ways that are clearly outside its own continuity. The Curse of Fatal Death was decisively rejected by our community, with only one anon user voting in its favor.

There is no difference between Curse and this. Both are fully licensed stories. But we reject Curse totally on grounds of authorial intent. It was intended as something out of continuity. The same thing happens in other fandoms, as with Star Wars' "Infinities" or DC Comics' Elseworlds ranges. And lest you consider responding with "we're not Star Wars or DC Comics," don't forget that we have Unbound and a few comic stories that are absolutely parodic. I mean, Dicky Howett's entire body of Doctor Who work — which spans years and years — is outside of what we allow to be used to write in-universe articles. Why? Because it's not licensed? No. Because it's not professionally published? No. It's solely because Doctor Who? is parody, meant to be read as out-of-continuity. Similarly, we don't run around talking about the time the Doctor was a woman who worked in a grocery store, because the non-parodic, fully licensed Exile is clearly labelled as Unbound. Also, we reject Scream of the Shalka, not because it's parodic, not because it's unlicensed, not because the BBC told us it wasn't canonical, not because the producers (initially) told us it wasn't canonical, but because RTD told us not to believe in it.

Tangerineduel has made the point that we can't believe a writer who says that their work is canonical. That's very true. But, in my opinion, he's incorrect on the reverse. I think we do have to believe a writer who declares, "Look, this isn't a part of the mainstream continuity." After all, we've believed it before. I don't see any rational argument for doing something different in this case. Moreover, it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity will have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you do take it seriously, because they're acting against their self-interest.

I think for reasons of easy administration, we've got to cut this thing off at the knees. Otherwise we'll get a completely unmanageable situation, like the thing Rowan Earthwood is suggesting. Do we really want to count what the book says about Gallifrey, but not what it says about the Doctor? That's tantamount to assigning "semi-canonical" status, which isn't really possible. Yet I suspect that's what people actually want to do, and why there's so much resistance to this proposal. I think people are reluctant to let go of The Infinity Doctors because it's arguably the most detailed description of the mysterious Gallifrey. But if those revelations are made through the use of a Doctor that isn't a part of normal continuity, they're no better than the descriptions of Tersurus in The Curse of Fatal Death.

My argument is absolutely not "it's too hard to fit into articles". Obviously, inconsistencies are the rule in DW canon discussions, not the exception. I am only after the bath water, not the baby, so I'm in no way suggesting anything that's out of line with a series of other steps that have been pretty easily accepted by the community. The Infinity Doctors exactly fits the arguments used to rule other things out of our canon policy. It's simply illogical to deny the BBC-licensed The Curse of Fatal Death, Doctor Who?, A Fix with Sontarans, and Dimensions in Time but keep this.

Generally, everything licensed is an acceptable source for writing articles. I firmly believe that's the best metric for shaping the boundaries of the wiki. But there are exceptions. And this is one of them.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">21:03: Tue 24 Apr 2012 

I'm not sure why you're lumping this in with licensed-but-parodic works like The Curse of Fatal Death. Dimensions in Time is perhaps a closer fit, but even that isn't quite the same. The Infinity Doctors was published as part of an ongoing line of novels, but doesn't fit with that line in terms of narrative continuity. To my mind, that makes it more like The Shadow of the Scourge or TV Action! ... or even Mission to the Unknown, if that hadn't been followed by The Daleks' Master Plan.

I think you may be reading too much into Parkin's use of the word "continuity". In context, all that I think it means is that it doesn't fit into the ongoing narrative of the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures, not that it's any less a part of "real" Doctor Who than they are. We've got several other versions of the Eighth Doctor, whose narratives may or may not be compatible. This could just be another one. (Or a pre-Susan Doctor.) I don't see why this should be treated any differently than The Cabinet of Light or The Dalek Factor. They could fit into the ongoing narrative of the Doctor's life — we just don't know exactly where or when. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 22:01, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I hear ya. But the flaw with it, in my opinion, is that it requires an assumption you could only make after about 2000 — and Infinity was written in 1998. If this book were written after there was Big Finish, after the EDA range had started to lay down some continuity that was a bit incompatible with the comic books, and especially if it were actually an EDA, then there might be an argument for the idea that it was some sort of meta-textual riff on the Eighth Doctor's continuity issues. But it's a very early PDA, written most likely in 1997/early 1998, prior to the establishment of much of anything' in the great "tripartite" Eighth Doctor continuity. There was no Big Finish at this time, and the books and comics were just getting started. Moreover, this was commissioned and published as the 35th anniversary story. So it's really just a book that's trying to do something "clever" for the anniversary, by going out of continuity in order to examine Gallifrey in a "safe" way that doesn't actually establish anything that .

I think, too, that the fact that it's part of the PDAs, rather than the EDAs, makes it more vulnerable to dismissal from our canon policy, since we put another PDA —  Scream of the Shalka — outside the fence, too. And the PDAs that are novelisations of audio stories are nominally the inferior, or secondary, versions of those stories. The PDAs are just a different editorial deal, because there is no "BBC Books continuity" going on with them, except maybe with Fear Itself. They're all self-contained adventures, so pulling one out doesn't invalidate the whole range.

And I'm not lumping this into "licensed but parodic" works. I'm saying it's a part of the "licensed but outside continuity" gang, which includes not just parodic stories but also Unbound, Shalka and other "serious" stories. I stressed its relation to The Curse of Fatal Death largely because there was a clear and well-remembered forum discussion about that particular story in our recent past. Also, the issue of whether a story is comedic or straight really has nothing to do with whether we consider it allowable under our canon policy. A story is a story is a story. So therefore you can hold up a parodic example against a straight story, and vice versa.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">05:00: Wed 25 Apr 2012 

Just a brief discussion of Czechout's statement that the story being a PDA rather than an EDA makes it more liable to dismissal as non-canonical. While there are undoubtedly issues that would make a PDA more likely to be dismissed -- mostly due to lack of eidetic memory causing the author to contradict something on the label of a can of pasta, a problem that grows with the antiquity of the can -- the general rule should be:

1: All licensed narrative works are canonical until removed from canon. 2: Once removed from canon, nothing in a work is canonical.

Please bear with me while I discuss these points at length. The basic issue is that this Wiki need a relatively easy set of rules to follow -- there is far too much detail, I am convinced, in the manual of style as it is. However, back to the point I am trying to make: if you have a canonical work in front of you and are adding information to the Wiki, just add it. Other requirements would be unreasonably onerous.

Likewise, once an item has been declared non-canonical, a "semi-canonical" status is simply too difficult to parse. Some people wish to include the descriptions of Gallifrey from The Infinity Doctors. I have not read the book, but filtered through the lens of a non-canonical overview, every chapter, every sentence, every comma would be subject to examination to see if it be suitable for inclusion. Does this statement contradict anything in canon? Do any of the implications contradict? Is that a serious statement or a joke? Might it be a typographical error?

The net result would be to get into Talmudic arguments that are not worth the time and energy of almost all the people involved -- as an aside, this is why I think we should declare the TV movie non-canon while leaving the novels, audios and strips canonical, but that's another issue entirely.

I appreciate that people would like to include the information offered by The Infinity Doctors on Gallifrey. However, even if we were somehow to decide for our purposes what information should be included, could we do so with any sense of certainty? The author has stated that the book is not mainstream continuity -- id est riddled with lies. We see a building. Is that building there in mainstream continuity or not? I can't tell. We can argue about it endlessly. I do not wish to argue about it endlessly.

Likewise, the suggestion that we add "according to some accounts" is a complete crock. "According to some accounts" is an acknowledgment that someone screwed up and we are in trouble -- check the article on Anji Kapoor and Lance Parkins' comments. "According to some accounts" is a kludge to deal with problems. It should never be an excuse to create more problems.

Finally, let me note that I have an issue with the lines of reasoning in support of including some material from The Infinity Doctors in canon. It is Bat Logic. It is starting from the conclusion -- "this "fact" should be in the wiki" actually, "I want this fact in the Wiki" -- and searching desperately for a line of reasoning, no matter how specious back to a proposition. It is intellectually despicable. Boblipton ^{talk to me} 12:23, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

Well, I'm convinced. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 14:08, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

I'm not. To be clear, I'm not arguing for "semi-canonical status", whatever that might mean. I'm arguing that we treat The Infinity Doctors as fully canonical but of uncertain placement in the Doctor's timeline. We would be saying, "Everything in this happened, but we're not sure which Doctor it happened to." It's exactly the same as The Dalek Factor.

We exclude Scream of the Shalka, The Curse of Fatal Death and Death Comes to Time because they're just not reconcilable with the rest of the Doctor's life. That's not the case with The Infinity Doctors. It can fit in at least two spots in the Doctor's long life, putting it in roughly the same narrative position as Shada. Including TID is far less problematic than saying that Human Nature happened twice to two Doctors, but we live with that. Why is this different?

Finally, I strongly reject the accusation of intellectual dishonesty.The difference of opinion on this hinges on two debatable points: how much weight to give the author's statement that this is "not the Eighth Doctor of mainstream continuity", and how to interpret that phrase. In light of the splintered nature of the different narratives told about the Eighth Doctor, I think it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that a remark made by Parkin in 2011 could indicate that this should be treated as yet another "strand" in the tangled rope of the Eighth Doctor's history, rather than as a point on one of the previously established strands. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 14:54, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

I would also like to state that I did not mean to apply semi-canonical status to The Infinity Doctors in using statements like "some accounts state", I was merely alluding to how we deal with contradictory information like information concerning Leela presented in Lungbarrow and the Gallifrey (audio series). I didn't think the suggestion would cause any more problems than the ones we already face with similar information.

I was under the impression we removed Shalka because of the BBC's statement of non-canon evident between the first and second editions of Doctor Who: The Legend Continues and not anything that RTD said (I wasn't even aware that RTD had said anything on the subject).

I disagree with lumping this in with other stories CzechOut has mentioned; Fatal Death etc are all parodies or things like it.

I'm a little confused about CzechOut's argument in response to Josiah Rowe, about where this could fit in. Does it matter? There are enough references in the novel I believe to make a good attempt at placement of much of the information.

Lance Parkin says himself in AHistory (Second Edition) about The Infinity Doctors "is a story set on Gallifrey that takes all information from every previous story (in all media) set on Gallifrey - and other references to it - at face value and incorporates them into the narrative". This would suggest that if we look at the wider stories there shouldn't be anything problematic in incorporating it into the wiki. I admit he also says "The Infinity Doctors' super-adhearance to established continuity actually makes it impossible to place at a particular point in continuity without contradicting something established elsewhere." This, I don't consider an issue because we deal with contradictory information all of the time. He also states in the same body of text that "References in Seeing I, Unnatural History, The Taking of Planet 5, Father Time and The Gallifrey Chronicles all make it clear that The Infinity Doctors (or at the very least events identical to it) took place in the "real" Doctor Who universe." --Tangerineduel / talk 16:08, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

One further point: if TID is declared non-canonical, Patience (which is already confusing) will become completely nonsensical. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 20:44, April 25, 2012 (UTC)

I really can't believe some of the arguments I'm hearing with this topic. It's clear to me that most of you haven't actually read the book, and therefore you should really learn more about the content of the book before making these opinionated judgements. It has never been the policy of this wiki for us to base the majority of an argument on what writers say about the product, in fact, quite the opposite, we make policy on the sources themselves and the in-universe content of them. So really, what Lance Parkin has said about the book, in large part, is irrelevant. I agree entirely with Tangerineduel on this one, several sources which are listed above refer directly to events that take place within TID, and some even have characters that overlap with the book. Seeing I is more or less a sequel to TID where the I are concerned, and certainly without TID, most of Seeing I's plot wouldn't make sense. And then we have the example of Larna; who crosses from TID into both The Gallifrey Chronicles and Unnatural History. Therefore from an in-universe perspective, it is clear that TID does have quite a large overlap with the DWU; even if there is doubt as to whether it takes place within the same timeline as our "mainstream Doctors". --Revan\Talk 22:15, April 25, 2012 (UTC)