User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-45314928-20200610043202/@comment-6032121-20200723215336

The last thread was an inclusion debate. There are, broadly speaking, three possible outcomes of an inclusion debate:

• coverage as valid;
• coverage as invalid;
• no coverage.

I have never heard of an inclusion debate that limited itself to just the first two options, and simply put the third one out of its purview completely.

The possibility that How The Monk… was simply fanfic was brought up numerous times (by you, as it happens) in that inclusion debate, and no one ever acted as though it was off-topic then. Deletion was very much on the table in that debate. The closing post ruled invalidity instead.

As you say, coverage and validity (and by the same token non-coverage and invalidity) are different things. Invalidity is the status of "stories which we cover, but cannot use as sources for valid in-universe pages". Something invalid is by definition covered to some extent or another. The Lego Batman Movie, for example, isn't an "invalid source" — it's simply not covered because T:NO FANFIC.

The inclusion debate for The Lego Batman Movie, as a matter of fact, started out as a matter of validity; the OP didn't really pose the question of coverage in itself; yet evidence against licensedness was found partway through, and so the story was eventually deemed outside the bounds of what the Wiki covers, as opposed to merely valid or invalid as the binary was originally presented.

This is a route that inclusion debates can and do go; it was not the case with that one.