User:Najawin/Sandbox 10

Opening Post

Introduction

So, like, what even is validity?

Wait, no, come back, I promise this is important.

Validity isn't canon. It's not something given to us from on high by The BBC. It's also not really a thing that exists out there in the general fanbase, like, we don't poll the overall Doctor Who community to see what should be a valid source for articles on this wiki. We have Dr. Men as valid, and for the longest time didn't have P.S. as valid. I think anyone would say this is the wrong way 'round. We don't smash atoms together to find out what validity is, it's not a platonic form floating out there in the ether. It's not really a natural kind and probably not a social kind. It is socially constructed though, it's constructed by the actions of the editors of the wiki. I've opined before that we could, tomorrow, if we so decided, make it so that only Summer Falls is valid on this wiki. That's what validity becomes. It just becomes a fundamentally worthless concept. We're not factually incorrect to do so. It's just a bad idea.

Ultimately, and I do want to stress this fact, the users of this wiki can just decide to make something valid or invalid by sheer fiat, regardless of logical consistency, regardless of argument, regardless of strength of evidence or whether the rules we've written down elsewhere say otherwise. If we want to encode some sort of exception to the rest of our validity practices that mean any story that begins with "q" and doesn't immediately follow it up with "u" or "i" is valid, we can do this. It's a, forgive me, insane rule, but we can do it. So you all absolutely can simply reject the argument I'm going to present in this thread. But I don't think that this is a good idea. (Well, of course I would say that.)

But what does it mean for our validity rules to be good or bad?

Well. This is obviously a truly massive topic for discussion and not really something that I think anyone is prepared to discuss in full here. In part because I don't think anyone is fully cognizant of their own motivations! The specific reasoning that you or I have towards certain policies will be a subtle interplay of conscious and unconscious factors. I don't expect anyone here to have a completely fleshed out philosophy of what our validity rules would look like were they to be written from scratch - I certainly don't. But I have thought about some general principles that I think any change to T:VS should try to hew towards.

• Ease of explanation
• Ease of enforcement
• Continuity; in 2 senses
  • Continuity with past policy interpretation
  • Continuity with prior forum rulings
• Consistency of reasoning

Now, there are others, of course, such as maintaining that Summer Falls - that pure, pristine bastion of innocence - is valid, but I bring these up because I think we have a problem with a recent rule change that violates these specific four(five) principles. That rule change is, of course, Rule 4 by Proxy (hereafter "R4bp"), as detailed at Forum:Temporary forums/An update to T:VS, as those of you who know me are aware. I'll admit that in my crusade against this rule change I have at times sympathized with the following quote:

William James said that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant. Once a current of thought is under way, trying to oppose it with argument is like trying to plant a stick in a river to alter its course: "round your obstacle flows the water and 'gets there just the same'". […] Planting a stick in this water is probably futile, but having done so before I shall do so again, and-who knows?-enough sticks may make a dam, and the waters of error may subside.Simon Blackburn

I too may be shoving forward sticks futilely in an attempt to provide guidance to a torrent of water. But unlike Blackburn I think there might be a more optimistic route forward. While many sticks may make a dam - so too may they make a water wheel, and we can harness the tides of change towards something constructive. I think both options are possible outcomes from the reasoning this thread will present. The choice is up to all of you.

So what's this R4bp thing anyhow?

Well, as stated, the relevant thread is Forum:Temporary forums/An update to T:VS. The original proposal is that we "accept the retroactive validity of Rule-4-breakers which are later explicitly referenced in valid sources in a manner which seeks to "bring them into continuity" in one way or another". The proposal was met with open arms and an outpouring of praise from everyone except myself and User:Tangerineduel. With that said, I don't think it's particularly uncharitable to say that at least part of the reason why this proposal was so popular was due to the particular historical circumstances we found ourselves in. This was during the Forum:Temporary forums, when we only had six slots to discuss things, and as noted at the very beginning of the thread,

Within hours of Tardis:Temporary forums being activated, it began filling up with suggestions that we redeem all sorts of things from Scream of the Shalka to Vienna from {{invalid}} status.

Seriously, go look at the situation if you've forgotten or were unaware.

The policy could be characterized as a blunt instrument to save everyone time, if one were feeling truly uncharitable. I don't think this is accurate, I think User:Scrooge MacDuck truly thought about this problem as a disconnect between the users of the wiki and our validity rules and attempted to slice through the particularly tricky Gordian Knot. But I don't think this view of the situation is accurate. I don't think the reason why people were so frustrated with, say, Dimensions in Time being invalid is because Storm in a Tikka referenced it. It may or may not have made the issue worse, but this isn't the fundamental reason for why people care about this story. Thread:211495 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 mentions it once, and not as motivation. Certainly some threads bring up narrative connections, either as an attempt to use it as procedurally required new evidence (Thread:267931, ibid) or by a new user in reference to a thread that could be construed as doing something similar (Thread:240617, ibid). I'm rather convinced that the frustrations with the various stories listed are that often there were perfectly good threads that argued in favor of validity and certain people just shut their ears. Most infamously Vienna, of course, but there was a Death Comes to Time thread not too long before the forums closed. (In the effort of full disclosure, Thread:179549 and Thread:207499 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1 do seem to have these concerns, and there are some comments here and there that hint at the same idea. But this is very much not the standard perspective in the forum archives.)

Now, perhaps it doesn't matter ultimately that this isn't what people thought, even if it's explicitly stated to be part of the motivation in the thread. But, you know, imagine I put some pretentious comment here about the different sword strokes you could make while cutting a knot and how it's dangerous, as well as maybe how you might just want to untie it, yada yada Sword of Damocles. You get it.

Now, the reasoning presented for why we should accept this reinterpretation, aside from solving so many problems all at once - because what the people arguing about these things in threads really care about is continuity and not authorial intent - is that if we accept the fundamental premise before, that the majority, or even a substantial number, of these discussions kept coming up because of continuity concerns, and then that we even cared that people made these discussions rather than just ignoring them and kept ruling them invalid, this overall methodology was sound because narrative continuity was evidence of intent. Specifically,

as I see it, in-story continuity serves as (sometimes strong) circumstantial evidence of intent-of-continuity, without meaning that one is reducible to the other in all cases. What else could Rule 4 mean, save something like intent-of-continuity-with-some-prior-DWU-source? It cannot sanely be divorced from some concept of "continuity", lest it turn into an arbitrary tag pertaining only and exclusively to a story's status under T:VS itself (and that would be a terrible thing, as it would mean that decades' worth of now-dead writers simply weren't in a position to have any opinions on the matter!) or, at best, some kind of question of "branding"

Cards on the table, I straightforwardly reject this. I think the "arbitrary tag" formulation is largely correct, in that there's a "DWU" as the wiki understands the term, and then a "DWU" as every individual author understands the term and for R4 statements we do some translation between the two. (Indeed, this is just a logical consequence of my view above on what validity is along with our article on Doctor Who universe making clear that for the purposes of the wiki we mean something very specific and technical.) I rather assume that no author understands the term quite like the wiki does, though Scrooge, Nate, or a few others might if they really wanted to put their editor hats on while writing. For the wiki I think it's simply a label and doesn't refer to continuity in the slightest. As I think you'll see later, I'm far from the only user to have said similar sentiments in the past.

I could say more, but I don't want to rehash old discussions, as that absolutely would be in violation of T:POINT and this is just meant as a summary for those who either weren't present or have forgotten. The thread was closed in favor of the policy, noting that

In general, it is safe to assume that, if information presented within a source pulls another source into the DWU, that is sufficient for validity under rule 4 by proxy as presented by Scrooge MacDuck. While it is often possible to find quotes about the "DWU-ness" of a source as a whole, I feel that it is much less practical to expect to find quotes affirming the "DWU-ness" of separate stories that an author happened to reference.

With this context in mind, let's turn now to the ways in which R4bp might fail to meet the principles I've laid out above, and how we might solve these problems.

Explanation

It is my contention that we both want our validity rules to be easy to understand for new editors to this website and that R4bp fails to meet this mark. I mean this not in the sense that new editors won't understand the reasoning, we'll touch on that briefly later, but that the rule itself seems poorly worded and ambiguous at first glance. Let's take each of these things in turn.

First, why would we want our validity rules to be easy for new editors to understand? This, I think, is trivial. So that new editors can swiftly begin having input in our discussions surrounding whether certain sources are valid. Indeed, not only new editors, but people outside the wiki community should, ideally, be able to understand our validity rules. I think this is probably impossible to ever get to, especially on the more technical issues like what to do when an entirely new form of media springs up for us to cover - our wiki just has too many moving parts - but you know, it's a nice ideal. Indeed, many other people have felt the same, while User:CzechOut noted in Thread:207499 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1

The four little rules "chart", for lack of a better word, was never intended as the be-all, end-all of validity on the wiki. It was meant to be a simplified guide to the whole page of text at T:VS.

the 2020 rewrite of T:VS greatly simplified things so that everything referred back to the 4 rules, making it much easier for new editors to onboard. Most recently there was the decrying of the idea of a "secret rule 5" at Forum:The Daft Dimension and Doctor Who? as parallel universes. Easily accessible validity rules are something that many people profess to want.

How does R4bp fail to meet this mark? Well, the official standard given in T:VS is

a later story makes an effort to bring an otherwise invalid story back into the DWU [...] [i]n general, in-story evidence may be used for this purpose

This is literally so vague as to be meaningless. Look at our page on Doctor Who universe.

Much like the related term of canon, its scope is somewhat debated by fans. Fans often disagree about whether some stories and series are considered part of the Doctor Who universe, and some dispute the concept's meaning or utility altogether.

This wiki has established rules about what is and is not part of the Doctor Who universe for its own purposes (see our valid source policy for more information), but this wiki has no authority beyond its borders.

What does it mean to make efforts to bring stories back into the DWU? Does the fact that our wiki has rules for what constitutes the DWU impact what it means to "bring a story into the DWU"? Would it mean something else if we weren't considering the wiki rules? Does this distinction matter to R4bp? None of this would be remotely comprehensible to a new editor. You're only making them more confused.

So let's try another tactic.

We return once more to the thread that enshrined R4bp and see instead that the original proposal that passed is that

we accept the retroactive validity of Rule-4-breakers which are later explicitly referenced in valid sources in a manner which seeks to "bring them into continuity" in one way or another

Well, what does "bring them into continuity" mean? (Putting aside the notion of intent here.) I'm certainly not confident that a new editor will understand this. The standard given in Forum:Temporary forums/Trailers ties this directly to the wiki notion of continuity.

[we have] a lot of precedent about what we as a Wiki call "continuity": the continuity sections we have on all our pages.

Now, I personally find this a little difficult to square with how continuity is used in the original R4bp thread, but ultimately it doesn't seem too far afield. I'm slightly more concerned about two other areas. One is an issue of enforcement, so we'll touch on it later. But fundamentally I don't think new editors are all that clear about the difference between continuity and references. Hell. I'm not, even as people try to explain it to me.

Now, I know, I know, some of you think I'm tilting at windmills here. But I'm just fundamentally not. See Forum:References and continuity: what exactly is the difference?, Forum:DWU, Canon, Continuity and References - rename them, and Thread:117229 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I. In the first thread we have one admin and one of the rare users granted rollback rights express their lack of understanding of the system. In the second it's still the same fundamental confusion and we have our longtime bureaucrat User:Tangerineduel seriously propose tying the words "canon" and "continuity" together for the section. In the last thread User:Shambala108, who would later go on to become an admin, proposed the same. This last thread never had a clear resolution that I can see, but dear lord, just read it. There's no consensus. There are people like Shambala or User:OttselSpy25 who say they just intuitively understand the difference, but also users like User:Mewiet and Czech who fundamentally don't. Quite frankly, I find the arguments presented in this thread by Czech and User:SOTO to be foundationally damning to the difference between references and continuity and I can't see any coherent way to separate them consistently. (Note also that User:Amorkuz, who would go on to become an admin, would later express the same confusion later on at Thread:195859 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Reference Desk. Shambala says that she plans on doing a post discussing the difference, but no post ever materialized.)

But that's not the point. The point is that if we have admins who can't agree on the definition of continuity as we use it on our pages, if there's never any resolution to these threads and experienced users are truly confused, it's certainly reasonable to expect that a reasonable amount of new editors will encounter the same problems and simply be unable to truly understand the policy when it's first presented to them. No matter who here thinks it's obvious and trivial, the fact remains that there's strong evidence that experienced editors have struggled with these concepts!

Enforcement

It's an occasionally repeated line on this wiki that

All rules of the wiki have to be clear and easy to administer.

With not only Czech holding this, but other users occasionally repeating similar sentiments. Is this a good standard?

I think so, even aside from the reasons for onboarding new users. First and most obviously it reduces workload on admins and editors, this is a wiki with >100k pages, it could easily take up an admin's life and it's trivial that there's always more work to do. Next, if rules become heavily bogged down in minutiae and byzantine procedural steps that it's hard to work with it can easily cause users who are already present on the wiki to feel put off from editing - like the things they do on the wiki are valued less, that their views are being dismissed out of hand, that they aren't having due process, etc etc, and can lead to diminished user base. Indeed, we've seen this in the past. I think most everyone here can remember it. Finally if the lack of clarity extends to a fundamental ambiguity, if the rules are, in fact, guidelines, this actually can cause existential damage to the wiki. Replacing due process and rules with purely community discussions, as some may wish to do, will slowly undermine whatever trust the larger community has in us. Would we ever do something as insane as invalidating a BBC Wales episode? Likely not. But if we constantly rule by diktat, with any semblance of firm policy thrown to the wind, these worries will emerge. Now, the slope is only slightly slippery, and we haven't truly begun to go down it yet at all, but it's worth being aware of all the same, if only as motivation for why consistency matters.

So where do the worries emerge with R4bp?

As stated above, I think the criticisms of SOTO and Czech in Thread:117229 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I are fundamentally damning to any clear distinction between continuity and references from the perspective from this wiki. As such, I don't see a way in which policy can be meaningfully based on one of them (and not the other). Now, perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there's only one potential way for R4bp to maneuver around this, as it explicitly denies the necessity of statements of authorial intent, and it's the second issue I referenced above. At Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy we're told

R4BP applies when the natural assumption is that the validating story is making a continuity reference to the validated story.

Perhaps we could make these assumptions so clear, so unambiguous, that nobody could dispute that they're continuity references. But the statement made is decidedly unclear yet again. Is this truly what "natural assumption" means in this context? Is "continuity" here referring to the wiki's (incoherent) usage of the term, or some other? It's tea leaf reading and subjective interpretation all the way down. And this is without getting into the metaphysical and linguistic ambiguities of what it means for a "story" to "refer" to "another story". (I'd make a joke here about how the ambiguities make me want to cosplay as Neurath, but I think that ship has sailed. /Groans from the audience/)

Consider the following example, of SOTO's comments at Thread:117229 (one again at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I)

the Doctor saying he once had an android boyfriend in Time. That's not a reference to any specific story from a real-world perspective, but it's still a reference to something in the DWU

And then consider Thread:207499 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1

The Eleventh Doctor mentions having an android boyfriend, and the creators of the webcast have stated that, yes, the "Shalka Doctor" and the Master were a couple.

What to one person is a reference is to another continuity. Is this clearly trying to bring Shalka into continuity? Who knows? The only options available to us are to attempt to divine Steven Moffat's mental state, given that he's close friends with Paul Cornell. But even this doesn't guarantee that this is an intentional continuity reference to that story rather than a fun gag that happens to resemble that story, given how notoriously forgetful Moffat is (dude literally forgot an entire story he wrote, as well as that he created the Memory worm). There is simply no way to determine intended continuity references when they look like this without explicit statements of intent. And even if you insist that it's too big a coincidence given Moffat's friendship with Cornell, consider the hypothetical where another writer wrote this. It's such a vague statement - which is why SOTO saw it as a reference rather than as continuity. Can this ever be a "natural assumption"? I dunno. I think some people think it's obvious, and others clearly won't. Just as is the case for every discussion of references v. continuity linked above. (And to those who think such a thing is a clear reference now that it's pointed out to them, it's not just SOTO who didn't see it if true. See Thread:148474 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2.)

So far from being a way around the issues referenced by SOTO and Czech, appeals to "natural assumptions" that a work contains "continuity references" to another only serve to underline just how damaging these criticisms are to this proposed framing of R4bp.

Previous interpretation of policy

What's the difference between policy interpretation and forum threads?

So for me, the difference is pretty obvious, but, as stated before, what's obvious for one isn't always obvious for another. If we have written, codified policy, like T:VS, but there's ambiguity in how to interpret clauses in it, so long as these ambiguities are not resolved in a closing post to a forum thread that comes under the head of policy interpretation. Generally we care about admin interpretation, as they're the ones who write policy. However, prominent dissenting interpretations that find favor among the rest of the editor base are also relevant to what I'm going to be considering here.

One caveat in the effort of full disclosure, usually policy interpretation of this type is found either on talk pages or on forum posts that aren't closing comments. However, there are so many talk pages on this wiki and this post is ever so slightly rushed that this area in particular will be fundamentally incomplete. I can't do the due diligence I would like to on this particular issue in regards to talk pages. I'm relatively confident in the research elsewhere in this thread. But talk pages are the big blind spot, and they should really only impact this section.

So why should we care about continuity of either type? Well, notice that I say continuity and not consistency. I don't want to insist that the wiki be static, never changing, that everything we do in the present must 100% line up with what we've done in the past. Far from it. But we shouldn't make dramatic changes that lack precedent in either prior policy decisions or don't have strong basis in prior interpretations of policy at the drop of a hat. Why's this? Again, at least part of this is, in the extreme example, for the sake of the broader community we serve. If our rules constantly change and it doesn't appear to have consistent rhyme or reason to an outside observer, we lose their trust. But in a less extreme example, it's for returning editors, if someone comes back and finds our policies have deviated massively over a short or medium period of time based on discussions and opinions that fundamentally have no precedent in our wiki's history, they're probably going to feel a little put off. And while one particular change that lacks continuity isn't an issue, a barrage of them will potentially effect active editors as well, as it doesn't allow them time to readjust to the new status quo. There is, of course, also the issue of Chesterton's fence, but I personally take a more nuanced view on that topic. Worth bringing up, not instantly disqualifying.

So about those interpretations

I mean, let's just get the obvious ones out of the way, those of then admins commenting on the topic. (Some of these will be in closing posts, but they're merely stating what the going interpretation of T:VS is.)

From User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1

Thread:125464 in April 2013,

A thing can have narrative connections to the DWU and yet still be excluded from the wiki.

I mean, after all, fan fiction has narrative connection to the DWU. What's the point of fan fiction unless it's totally hooked into what you see on TV? If it's not narratively connected to the DWU, then it's no longer fan fiction but originalfiction.

Therefore, inclusion debates are always settled by out-of-universe, real world, behind-the-scenes factors. [...] If we relied on narrative continuity to make these decisions, the wiki would become absolutely unworkable, because so much of the narrative contradicts itself. If we instead went on the notion that narrative links were the basis of inclusion, we would then start excluding a ton of things that were meant, at the time of publication, to be taken as a legitimate extension of the DWU, like the John and Gillian era of the comics. [...] Assessing authorial intent allows us to keep in many more narratives than some subjective assessment of narrative worth. Yes, in this case, the way we do things means that we're not covering something you possibly have bought and are enjoying. But it's an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good of the wiki.

(Later comment) To the contrary, I've addressed this in every post. This sort of messiness is precisely why the existence of narrative continuity is not used to determine validity. The whole virtue of T:VS is that it doesn't matter what the continuity is.

Obviously a controversial thread, but, to note what the interpretation was at the time.

Thread:179549 in November 2016,

We don't, as a general practice, apply validity retroactively.

From Thread:208658 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon III in December 2016,

We do not consider stories invalid for purely narrative reasons, ever. Doctor Whohas been around for a long time, and there will always be narrative inconsistencies. What makes this one invalid is the real world intent.

From User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2

Thread:231309 and its sequel, Thread:231746 in April 2018,

We say something isn't valid around here not because of continuity issues, but because we've made a good-faith effort to ascertain what those who made it (and/or owned it) intended, or what the controlling creatives subsequently said.

The whole point of T:VS is to divorce ourselves from trying to make a subjective assessment of narrative continuity.

Changing from a rendering of "invalid" to "alternate universe" is a fundamental shift in what we've been trying to accomplish here for this whole decade. Your proposal would seek to supplant our current system that stresses production realities with something based on subjective analysis of the narrative.

And finally, only a few months before the forums went down, Thread:267931 in May 2020,

A novel written by someone else doesn't count as new evidence. We don't allow new works to make previous valid stories invalid, and we don't allow new works to make invalid stories valid.

Now, I find myself in an awkward position when it comes to statements from non admins during this time period. I have far too many quotes against the idea of using continuity to determine validity to cite all of them, and a good deal of the people who are today prominently supporting R4bp strongly condemned these notions in the past. Now, I want to stress that I'm not holding anyone to statements they made years ago - peoples views change and all of these archives are at least 2.5 years old. But it's certainly difficult ground for me to walk in representing these views as being present in the community given how easily they could be constructed as "gotcha"s, and how they seem to have either have changed or been substantially more nuanced than what was expressed at the time. I do feel the need to actually cite them and note who said them just to prove that it's actually users whose views we should actually care about, due to number of edits in the past, or because they're still around. (I don't think a comment from an editor with 5 edits in 2013 matters that much, tbh.)

Another nuanced point to make is that there are quite a few comments made throughout the forums arguing that various sources should be invalidated due to conflicts of continuity. Most often these comments were made by new, inexperienced editors who weren't aware of our policies who didn't stay editors for very long. There is one notable exception where a user who I am intentionally declining to name as they are still an editor attempted to argue that Husbands of River Song invalidated Last Night after being on the wiki for a year. Suffice it to say that I am not considering these examples. Why? Because the proponents of R4bp decry them. It's insisted upon that R4bp only broadens our scope as a wiki rather than restricting it, whereas these are arguments specifically about restricting it. As such, I'll be considering the comments made about whether we can broaden the wiki in this way continuity, or use continuity as a guide to validity in general.

This last bit has an even further wrinkle that points made talking about continuity generally, rather than unidirectionally, are at times made in a specific context that is about validating or invalidating things specifically. I'll do my best to relay this context, but at the end of the day I've spent so long agonizing about how to properly reference these older discussions. I've concluded that it's basically impossible to do so without the possibility of making a mistake on how I interpret a comment or lose some nuance or perhaps slightly misrepresent something. All of which aren't my intent, but are obviously a real possibility in a topic this complicated. The only way to avoid this would be to ask everyone to just go read the original threads. So this is the best I can do.

Anyhow, f it, we ball.

Thread:208658 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon III is a confused mess of a thread in the beginning (though it does develop into something quite interesting later on!), with the OP trying to say that T:VS was intended to get rid of discontinuous works and that people had been using authorial intent as a loophole to get around it, so they wanted to reword T:VS to be about continuity in a way that didn't actually solve the problem. But it does give us the following comments from User:NateBumber in two separate posts:

In other words, this entire line of discussion about "fitting in with continuity" is completely antithetical to the current rules of the Wiki, and I think it should be run away from at all costs.

This sounds dangerously close to saying that stories should be excluded if they disagree with continuity, which is entirely missing a point.

I do want to stress that these comments are at least in part about using narratives continuity to invalidate things. To me the first comment reads a little more subtly, and Nate goes on to be very skeptical about User:Amorkuz referring to the idea of treating continuity as a relatively good guide for the DWU generally - though explicitly phrasing it in terms of invalidating stories for being discontinuous. Because, well, Amorkuz, and they were discussing Paul Magrs.

Thread:194725 ibid is one of the threads that has views running counter to this idea, from User:DENCH-and-PALMER.

First Frontier + officially licensed source = Valid + States Dimensions in Time is a dream (valid) = Dimensions in Time is invalid.

Though this view is very much rejected by others in the thread. Except, interestingly enough, Nate, in two different posts.

I'd also like to note that Zagreus established Death Comes to Time as an alternate timeline.

And frankly, I agree that there's no major difference between being INVALID and being in an alternate universe. Especially in the light of things like 12 referencing Shalka's backstory as part of his past, or the David Warner Unbound Doctor boxset, the line is getting more blurred with every release. I think the entire policy should be rethought.

Nate has informed me that he believes these views were influenced by a sandbox/private discussion going around that presaged Thread:231309 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2. But it is important to note that at the time the thread originator, User:OttselSpy25, was saying things that didn't quite jive with his later post:

Again, us deciding to consider The Infinity Doctors as an alternate timeline/dimension didn't just come about because it was weird. It happened because we have out-of-universe confirmation that further stories would have confirmed this aspect of the book, stories which will never be made.

I don't think we can or should use this as a solid precedent to make every story that's *kinda weird* into an alternate dimension. We need more than that.

Again, I note this not to attempt to hold someone to any standard, but to trace how messy thought processes are and how I don't think there's a clear and consistent trend towards R4bp. Both of those threads are around the same basic time, the turn of 2016/2017, commencing within 2 months of each other.

Thread:214342 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 in early 2017 is an interesting beast. There's some discussion of it being discontinuous and thus maybe speaking to Moffat's intent of invalidity from User:Thefartydoctor, but this is rejected strongly by everyone else present. It's really more important for the actual ruling, but it does feature a prominent editor suggesting we use continuity as evidence of authorial intent.

In the beginning of 2020 we have User:Chubby Potato suggest the same at Thread:232095 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon IV

So, I propose we call stories like the Cushing movies what they are generally agreed on to be: an alternate continuity

However this view is strongly pushed back on by User:Scrooge MacDuck:

If we were dealing with an actually walled-off continuity I'd agree, but see my post directly above. The thing is that although no clear, consistent answer (whether a parallel universe or otherwise) has been given on how the Cushing movies "happened" in a way that impacts the mainstream universe, many sources say that they did.

Also, that "are generally agreed on to be" also irks me. It's long-standing policy on this Wiki that Rule-4-compliance (that is to say, whether something is intended to be set in the wider DWU) is determined strictly by authorial intent at time of release, not by later stories ignoring it, let alone by general public opinion. Without solid evidence that David Whitaker & Co. meant for the movies to be "an alternate continuity" back in the 1960's (as opposed to just fanciful retellings like the novelisations, or to a parallel universe), it is my belief that we can't go about making that kind of sweeping statement, especially as it'd only make it harder to cover the problem we originally started with: the many, many cases of references to "Cushingverse" media in mainstream Who.

The thread's a very nuanced and well thought out one, and I think it's a damn shame that the forums were closed without a resolution to it. If I can get on my soap box for a moment, going from that to "it's valid, R4bp" is, in my mind, an unimaginable downgrade.

Note also that a non prominent editor proposed a R4bp reason for validity in 2016 at Thread:205534 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1 and was completely ignored.

And then finally Thread:231309 and its sequel, Thread:231746 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 in April 2018, kinda suggest something like this, where we just approach everything like a parallel set of canons. These are... Intriguing threads, but premised on fundamental misconceptions, as Czech points out.

There are... Other comments that talk about continuity, but much like Nate's comments cited above, they're very context dependent and I'm deeply hesitant to include them. I'll be referencing a few of them below, as many of them come from one thread in particular, but I encourage people to actually read the thread, it has a fair bit of nuance. I personally don't see a clear and consistent trend from users towards there being an opposing viewpoint to T:VS across the history of the forum archives like Scrooge is suggesting. I see viewpoints that changed over time and thread to thread. (The one exception being User:Pluto2, who was so consistent in their view that continuity --> validity that they were accused of acting in bad faith when they tried to get Dirk Gently declared valid. I reject this in the strongest terms. They were doing nothing of the sort - they had the courage of their convictions. I support you Pluto2, even if I think your views are insane. Godspeed.)

With that said, this is ultimately somewhat subjective, and I admit that my view here comes from taking into account the entirety of the forum archives. The quotes I gave above may lead some to the opposite conclusion, since I intentionally tried to be as charitable as possible. I do not believe this section is necessary to my overall conclusion - even if people wanted to use continuity as a metric historically the other flaws discussed would cause re-evaluation of the project.

Forum threads

The elephant in the room

So perhaps the biggest issue we have to deal with here is that the community actually had a thread that touched on R4bp and explicitly voted against it and it simply wasn't addressed in the R4bp thread. No, I'm not joking.

The sequence of discussion can be traced at Talk:The Curse of Fatal Death (TV story)#Part of the DWU, User talk:CzechOut/Archive 4#Curse of Fatal Death, User Talk:Revanvolatrelundar/Archive 1#Curse of Fatal Death, User talk:CzechOut/Archive 4#Forum Page, and, finally, Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon?. Now, by our standards today this thread isn't exactly up to snuff, but for the time it was a pretty well attended thread. And CoFD being validated explicitly through R4bp means was overwhelmingly rejected by the wiki. Indeed, the opening post explicitly criticizes the methodology being suggested.

I say we shouldn't be trying to make CoFD canonical based on what amounts to a sentence and a fragment. The average reader simply won't wear it. It's so counter-intuitive.

(Indeed, I thought about making a post against the validity of CoFD and arguing that R4bp couldn't be used for it because of this thread but that wasn't so much toeing the line of T:POINT as tap dancing on it.)

An interesting note about this is that it's actually at least partially what caused us to banish unlicensed stories (and Faction Paradox :P) as well! See Talk:Fred/Archive 1 leading to Forum:BBV and canon policy.

Now, I do want to stress, it's not that we can't overrule this old forum thread. We can. But surely it should give us pause that this was explicitly discussed and dismissed in the past during the build up to T:VS. While Czech was writing T:VS the editors at the time had this discussion about how they wanted to progress as a wiki and they explicitly rejected the pathway we've recently taken. It should also give us pause that nobody (and here I blame myself as well and it's one of the reasons why I've been trying to do my forum archaeology) actually noticed this during the R4bp thread and brought it up. The decision recently made is profoundly discontinuous with this historically important discussion - it, in fact, explicitly contradicts it.

It's important to note that User:Scrooge MacDuck has called to my attention that he was aware of this thread, but didn't think it imperative to discuss for his proposal so it slipped his mind. I think it's perhaps slightly more important than he does, but let's review the reasoning here.

the thing, is that a lot of Czech's argument relied on rather pedantic nitpicks about whether the text's descriptions were clear enough to state as fact that the text was even referring to Curse [...] This isn't to say that there were no other grounds for rejecting the proposal at the time, don't mistake me.

But still, between that and the usage of "canon", it just painted the whole thing as falling some ways short of still-live jurisprudence. The ruling was made under a foundational assumption of "we cannot identify a character as [X] in the main namespace unless they are explicitly, unambiguously, nominally [X]" that we abandoned long ago

[Another post] What I mean is that the thread was also predicated on an underlying assertion (a "présupposé", as we say in French) that the Tomorrow Windows references were too flimsy anyway. And I see two ways in which that's damning to the thread. First, this foundational assumption had ceased to be current practice by the time I made the R4BP thread, which calls into question whether the thread as a whole was standing policy at all, and either waycertainly justified a new thread based on new facts. And secondarily, in rhetorical terms I think spending so much of the OP on arguing that the would-be type-case for proto-R4BP was speculative on the merits, did an unfair disservice to the theory in terms of how it came across to the community at the time.

Again, I think we should have discussed this at the time even given Scrooge's views here, and I apologize for not having done the digging yet to be aware of it. It's something that at the very least would have informed our decision and could have cast things in a different light, even given the reasoning for one editor not thinking it relevant. With that said, I do emphasize that I don't think this thread is itself a slam dunk reason to dismiss R4bp out of hand - it's not, as we sometimes say, a defeater to the position - but it is reason that we might want to reconsider R4bp or at least think about it a bit more critically.

The hippopotamus in the room

While the former is a largely historical note, albeit one that speaks to how radical and abrupt this change truly is, this next thread speaks to a fundamental tension in how R4bp has been applied on this wiki. Namely, Thread:212365 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2. Also known as the "sequels to invalid stories" thread. Yes, the thread itself is full of interesting comments here,

No one on this wikia has cared about "continuity" in at-least half-a-decade.

if a valid story can't make another story valid by default by connecting to it, then surely an invalid story can't make another story invalid by default, either.

Let's have policies that are enforced across the board, policies which are measurable and scientifically consistent and are not based on dated fandom ideas of "canon."

Either all stories that reference or connect themselves to "invalid" stories are invalid by association, or this policy has no merit. Either Frozen Time and Storm in a Tikka are both equally valid adventures, or their coverage needs to be equally purged. There is no space in-between available.

The concept of "continuity" is a veiled comeback of "canon" and is not how the Tardis Wiki works, and the only justification for "invalid by association" cited thus far, that I could see, relies on the idea of continuity.

Now, again, these are all made in a somewhat specific context, but it should be striking how similar these comments are, either near word for word, to arguments one could make against R4bp, or arguments one could make if they just reversed the direction.

The thread is interesting in that OS25 begins it asking for sequels/prequels to R1-3 breaking stories to be made valid, so long as they don't fail any of the 4 rules. This is not quite the conclusion reached. The thread decided to apply the conclusion to invalid stories of all types, so long as their sequels don't suffer from the same problems.

References or connections to past stories which have been disqualified from validity for reasons which do not apply to the newer entry do not make them automaticallyinvalid.

(Equally, it should be noted, assertions made in valid stories do not retroactively change the rule 1/2/3/4 violations of past sources--outside very special cases in the forums, anyhow.) [Najawin note: We'll get to the case SOTO is referring to shortly.]

This is because validity is not primarily determined by continuity. Any illusion of having one easily traceable continuity for Doctor Who has long been shattered. Instead, our one rule to do with DWU continuity is about intention. Just as contradictions between stories mean little to these rulings, continuity nods to stories that don't count here don't swallow the rest of the narrative whole. If it can be established that the same problems don't plague the "sequel", and if it's not clear that the writer(s) of the newer work actually intended a non-DWU setting, then it should be considered on its own terms.

Remember, our determination of invalidity is external: we should not take it as given that authors share our same point of view, writing in a time before this site existed.

So what's the immediate problem here? Well, it's that sequels/prequels to invalid stories are explicitly marked as valid in this thread due to the wiki's insistence that continuity has no influence on validity. But we've just recently decided the opposite! This fundamentally undermines the reasoning present in the sequels/prequels thread, meaning that the very things that need to exist in order to reference these invalid stories and lift them into validity are on logically shaky ground, leading their validity to be questioned as well. Neurath's boat has been lit aflame as we sail.

Whenever we have a new source that enters the wiki, one that references both invalid and valid works, we're now presented with a choice. Is it meant to be valid and lift the thing it references up into validity? Or is it referencing an invalid work in order to showcase its own invalidity? There's simply no easy answer here.

I emphasize that I'm not the only person who sees this problem here. Many others did in the thread back in 2017-2020. The quotes given above are only a small sampling - continuity was actively decried in this thread.

The rhinoceros in the room

Now, there is one bit of precedent that might look R4bp-adjacent if you don't quite look close enough. The reclassification of "unbound" audios from invalid to valid was due to narrative evidence. One can certainly see some similarities here between this and the basic ideas behind R4bp, sure. But there's a twist as to why these two decisions aren't really comparable. To note, every thread is at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1, we want Thread:197392, Thread:197509, and Thread:207240.

In this situation we have clarification of original intent - as the term "alternate universe" was at least somewhat ambiguous. Moreover, the focus was on the nature of the range, and whether "what if?" --> "not DWU" from the perspective of Big Finish. We were clarifying the authorial intent of one of the parties involved by using the narrative of a later release of theirs. I find this... suspect, personally, but it is far less objectionable in my mind to what our current rule is. Indeed, others have suggested that this was their original reading of this policy! (Modulo the intent being from one of the original parties to the work, which is rather imperative for my taste.)

In this case, the reference to the story in another book is simply evidence that, yes, in this instance where there's a lack of certainty on the topic, we have clarification that these stories do take place in the DWU.

Ultimately I don't consider these two policies particularly similar. Indeed, I'd find the one used to validate Unbound being applied with a broader brush to be something to keep an eye on, but not inherently objectionable. However, as with all things, the particular daylight between these two policies may seem somewhat smaller to you.

One other thread

Thread:214342 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 is somewhat relevant here, in that it explicitly affirms that authorial intent changing over time does not matter. (As opposed to using later statements to clarify previous authorial intent.) This is not quite equivalent to R4bp, but they share DNA.

Inconsistent reasoning

Before anything else one must ask the question - why does it matter that our reasoning might be inconsistent? Well. I quite like the construction in this paper on a more abstract level - it's one of the more accessible ones I've found, but let's bring it down to earth even further. It is perhaps only slightly controversial that one should avoid directly contradicting themselves, so if R4bp somehow ends up contradicting the underlying ethos of R4 (and I think it does), I don't think people here will need to be convinced that this is an issue.

Instead - I made need to convince people that changes to a rule should be consistent with the overall reasoning enshrined in other rules as well. After all - these are separate rules, why would we apply standards for one as standard to another? I think this is incorrect in two ways. The first is the obvious - we have obvious concerns about what we signal to other people with these changes, returning editors and outside parties. If the reasoning is this disjoint it raises doubts as to our competence and stability over the long term. The second is that these are not multiple rules, though they may appear that way and we often call them so. The "four little rules" is best understood as "four little criteria", not as "four little operating policies for Tardis Wiki". They together constitute a single operating policy for Tardis Wiki, T:VS. And this single operating policy needs to have coherent reasoning throughout in much the same way that we would want R4 to be coherently written throughout. Could we write T:BOUND in a way that's ever so slightly in tension with T:WRITE POLICY? Sure, and it's worth bringing up and discussing, but it's not an immediate disaster, it's more that it's going to have eventual problems and that it signals potential worries to other parties. But this is all one policy. We'd hope that it's a coherent whole.

Given this context, I want to begin by emphasizing that it's important to note that this rewrite of R4 has made R4 inconsistent with the original reasoning that led to R4. See Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?.

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.

R4 was written with the express skepticism of trusting writers to tell us what is "canon", as they could be self interested. (Or, for R4bp, nepotistic, or big fans of something, or still self interested.) We were supposed to consider the inverse comments because they had potentially negative effects to the authors and they simply would have no motivation to say this other than that it was the truth. Now, I think this view is somewhat naive, I've read through the ra.dw archives surrounding CoFD's release. But it's not entirely wrong, and it's certainly the case that it stands in stark contradiction with R4bp as well as many of our recent rulings related to R4.

So that, in itself, is an issue, that the reasoning behind R4bp contradicts the reasoning behind R4. But there's another concern here, and it's the concern that shows a potential path forward if we want to keep R4bp. Allowing later works to modify previous intent is incoherent on the face of it. And, indeed, this is not what R4bp attempts to do. Rather, R4bp simply says that we no longer care about the previous intent of authors because some new author has insisted that the previous work really truly does take place in the latter author's understanding of the DWU. Now, this reasoning is fundamentally philosophically suspect - the standard view in philosophy of aesthetics contemporarily is that of actual intentionalism - there's just no reason we should care what this latter author thinks in how it impacts our reading of the first work. But this is perhaps too technical a point for a wiki to base their policies off of, and I think it clear that not everyone will have the background to engage in a discussion on the topic.

Rather, let's ask the obvious question. If R4bp is not about clarifying intent of the original author, or of trying to clarify original intent in the original text (as if this could be distinct from the author), but instead of inventing new, R4 satisfying, authorial intent, why are there not analogous RXbp's for the other 3 rules in T:VS? If we truly wish to commit to R4bp and be logically consistent, I don't see a clear way out of at least considering them.

Let's briefly touch on what each RXbp might look like.

R1bp - See Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy. It was ruled that Deleted Scenes are often R1 breakers, not R3 breakers. It's not trivial that they all satisfy R4, I admit, but we at least see some rough outlines of what R1bp might look like in this thread, how deleted scenes might become valid under R1bp rather than R4bp - being referenced in later fully fledged works of fiction, even as they themselves are fundamentally incomplete but satisfy R2, R3, and potentially R4.

R2bp - So there are a few ways to go about this. Obvious the requirements that need to be met are that it satisfies R1, R3, and R4. So it needs to be intended to be in the DWU before anything else, let's make that clear. The two different approaches here are ones I'm going to call the "Cyberon" approach and the "Audio Visual"s approach.

In the first, you merely don't need to have licensed DWU concepts in the story - if it's intended to be set in the DWU and later referred to using these licensed elements in a valid DWU story (so the DWU elements are also licensed), it too is brought into the wiki's notion of the DWU. (I note here that I still dislike the usage of continuity and would prefer not to use the idea of "referring to the story" - I have it here for symmetry's sake. I think the better option is to simply declare the concept retroactively a DWU concept.)

The second is to allow stories to actively violate copyright so long as later valid stories reference them in a way that attempts to "bring them into continuity". There are a few Audio Visuals that have sequel stories. These would count. (I note here that my preferred tactic above has no obvious analogue here. I think it has to be some sort of "continuity" move and you have to clear up what continuity means.)

Relevant threads off the top of my head are Thread:174552, Thread:177311, Thread:207146, Thread:184791 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1, Thread:137866 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon II, Thread:240280 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Help!, and Forum:BBV and canon policy.

R3bp - A bit of a difficult one to imagine, I admit. Largely because there's so little R3 jurisprudence. Both Tangerine and myself contend that deleted scenes violate R3 as well, but Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy ruled against us. T:OFF REL refers to things like video games being in beta - perhaps if a game has a public beta but simply never officially releases. Aside from this page the only thing I could find was a comment from Amorkuz talking about how media released at conventions didn't count as an official release (see Thread:258247 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 'To summarise, things sold at conventions and through direct mailing are not "commercial releases"') I'm not sure if this is official policy, or just a then admin giving their opinion. Potentially we could let these sorts of things become valid if so, if they're later referenced by fully valid works. But I admit, this is perhaps the hardest to work with, simply because we need to have the thing to wikify it.

Finally, and I think this is a very minor point - it's one I didn't even stumble across until a recent conversation with Nate - there's now a profound lack of symmetry between how we handle in-universe coverage of events and out of universe determination of validity. Let me explain.

We all agree that for various events in the DWU competing events are relatively common, yes? And it's important to report neutrally on these accounts, stating what each source tells us, and not to speculate further. So if in one source we see precisely X and in another Y, we say that in one account X was held to have happened and in another Y was held to have happened, refusing to speculate further, refusing to say further than what X tells us, and refusing to say further than what Y tells us. And previously there was some symmetry between how we handled these cases and invalid sources and valid sources referencing invalid ones. An invalid source says X, but it also, implicitly, says that it cannot be trusted and we can't use it to write articles, so we ignore it, and then a valid source says precisely Y, so we say Y. But now we've decided to break this symmetry. (One could argue that we're maybe violating some sort of "meta NPOV", but I think this is a bit silly.) Now, I don't think many will find this argument even slightly compelling; like many here it's not a slam dunk, but just another building block in the overall construction. Plus, symmetry arguments make my mathematician brain happy. So I have to include them. Sorry.

Potential responses

But we just validated all of these things!

But if it was a mistake to do so in the first place this just can't be a response. Perhaps these stories deserve to be invalid! Regardless, I don't think the situation is quite so dire. Many of those things recently validated by R4bp had perfectly reasonable R4 arguments for their validity. Indeed, at least one editor in the thread insisted that R4bp shouldn't wall off the ability to make normal R4 arguments as well. People have just declined to use this by and large, since we have a shiny new hammer and a lot of problems look like nails. Indeed, much of the frustration here, I believe, contra Scrooge, is that we've had fantastic R4 arguments for validating so many of these stories and the threads have simply been closed summarily or not addressed. As to the specifics of what we've recently validated, for what I can remember off hand,

Cushingverse - there was an incredibly detailed and nuanced thread at Thread:232095 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon IV

Vienna - I mean, C'mon. From User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1 there's Thread:125464, and many more discussions.

Death Comes to Time - Thread:267931 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2

Dimensions in Time - should never have been validated. The issue here was R2 worries primarily, R4 was an afterthought.

Daft Dimension - I mean, I'm not convinced, but I don't think it's too difficult to validate it elsewise if you truly believe it should be valid.

Friend from the Future - Maybe there's an issue here? I don't think it's trivial that there is, and even if there is, it would fall under a more restrictive "allow authors to clarify their intent later" policy.

The fluffy little Pomeranian in the room

So.... Uh.... What about my thread? What about Forum:Temporary forums/Non-narrative fiction and Rule 1? Aren't I being a touch hypocritical here with calling out R4bp as being a massive change with all of these problems when my thread has these same problems? (Says the hypothetical interlocutor.)

Am I maybe being a touch inconsistent?

I mean, probably, to some extent, all humans are. But I don't think so in the obvious ways, at least. The relevant concerns would be the four(five) principles at the beginning of this post, yes? I think, bearing in mind the various ways things could have turned out - there were a few different ways in which I proposed that we could move forward - ease of explanation and ease of enforcement are obviously satisfied, as is continuity of past policy interpretations on the part of such things like Type 40 Operational Handbook. This leaves us only to worry about whether or not the reasoning is continuous with other threads and/or inconsistent with itself or other rules.

Even supposing it was - I want to stress - I don't think that failing a single condition here is itself grounds for reversing our decisions. My concerns with R4bp come from the quantity of issues in all their different forms, not that a single issue exists.

But I'm certainly not convinced that the change given was inconsistent with the other rules. Perhaps it's discontinuous with prior threads? But if this is the case, it's because the issues concerning R1 were coming to a head as the forums closed. If you wish to ding me on this, you may. I don't find the situations particularly comparable, and if R4bp was in an analogous situation I certainly wouldn't be merely complaining that it lacked quite the right precedent because we were merely discussing the issue prior to the forums closing in multiple threads. But if you wish to do so that's your right.

Other potential responses

One immediate criticism that springs to mind is that in attempting to argue that the references/continuity distinction is, uh, of questionable legitimacy, I'm perhaps opening myself up to the obvious riposte that we just do use these sections without controversy and they work quite well. For more on this discussion, see the ongoing conversation at Forum:References into Worldbuilding.

I, of course, strongly deny the veracity of this statement. Our continuity sections, as mentioned in said forum thread, are a mess. There simply is no clear standard as the wiki currently operates for what places something into the continuity section. And let me try to guess why this is the case. It's because nobody really cares?

I mean, I'm being a bit harsh here. But if I see something a bit sketchy placed into a continuity section, it's just not really worth it to fight over 9 times out of 10? Like. Look. I despise this from The Timeless Children in Story Notes:

The premise of this episode also fulfils several elements of the Hybrid prophecy from Season 9.

A hybrid creature (the Spy Master had merged with the Cyberium), would stand over the ruins of Gallifrey and unravel the Web of Time (the Master had hacked into the Matrix), breaking a billion billion hearts to heal its own (the Master had also slaughtered the Time Lords after he became distraught at learning the truth of their origins).

I want to force whoever started this nonsense to rewatch Hell Bent over and over Clockwork Orange style until they understand it. It's clearly not an intentional reference, and it fails to fulfill one of the parts of the prophecy, it's just silly to note. But I don't really see a reason to remove it on a page like this, it's well within the bounds of what's on other pages.

In a delightfully circular way, because there's no real standard to decide on what's a real continuity reference and what's just us seeing connections where none exist it devolves into just editors bickering. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. There are no official standards, so anyone can place anything, so nobody cares enough to enforce community driven standards.

But here's a fun little nuance that nobody has figured out yet. We've decided to base R4bp off of the wiki notion of continuity, no? As it stands, this is wildly broad, and I don't think this is what Scrooge intends, as you can see from the thread discussion above. But just as nobody cares about continuity now, and is willing to let these contested facts stay there currently, what happens when people realize that policy fights over individual continuity sections can, in aggregate, effect interpretation of R4bp, by either expanding it or weakening it? Just as we have arguments from people over R4bp and people just can't see eye to eye, we're going to have arguments over individual continuity sections as proxy wars with people seeing clear connections on one side and other people clearly rejecting these connections on the other.

These sections only "work" because people don't care about them, and they hardly work at that. R4bp has placed undue emphasis on them, if in a roundabout way, and I think people are going to find that they'll buckle under the strain.

So finally, let’s discuss a criticism that Scrooge suggested to me with the potential idea of "invalidity by proxy".

Why [in short, allow forward R4bp but not reverse], rather than the pre-Sequels thread way of doing things? It's all in the fact that a licensed story is assumed to pass Rule 4 by default unless there is "extraordinary evidence" otherwise; and that is a very old, very well-established piece of policy indeed. What the Sequels thread did, was establish that (as you recently argued in the Daft Dimension thread!) authors' understanding of "the DWU" cannot be trusted to correspond to the Wiki's boundaries of validity; such that we cannot safely assume that by referencing something we call invalid, they are intending to set themselves outside the DWU. In other words it established that the in-narrative continuity-references weren't good enough to meet the threshold of "extraordinary evidence" that we require to cancel out the default presumption of Rule-4-validity.

Whereas there is nothing procedurally wrong with the R4BP thread establishing a different, "lower" standard of evidence for the completely different question of whether a source intends to bring another one into the DWU in some way. It's not a contradiction to have different thresholds of evidence/different default assumptions, for different questions. The default assumption should be that a Who story is intended by its author to be in the DWU, therefore very strong evidence is needed to contradict that claim and minor in-story instances of discontinuity don't suffice; meanwhile, the default assumption (or so the R4BP thread decided) should be that an author who references an "invalid" story intends to bring into the DWU, therefore we have a lesser threshold of evidence for confirming this scenario.

These aren't contradictory, and they don't even come from different mindsets: both positions flow naturally from a shared assumption that the default should be an assumption of Rule-4-passingness from any given author (whether it be for their own story, or the work they're choosing to reference) unless stated otherwise or suggested otherwise by extremely strong circumstantial evidence, like parody-ness or egregious fourth-wall-breaking.

There’s a crucial mistake here to my mind, and it’s one that was brought up by myself in the original R4bp thread and completely ignored. We’re not dealing with stories that have come to us from the aether, fully formed. We’re dealing with stories that have already failed R4. And it’s just not the case that the standards Scrooge is suggesting here are compatible with our normal procedures for how to deal with with stories that fail R4 in any other scenario.

Perhaps they should be! Perhaps we need to re-evaluate how we handle our validity debates for stories that have already failed R4. But they’re constantly highly contentious areas with very high burdens of proof placed on those who wish to readmit those stories back to the status of validity. This absolutely is inconsistent with how we handle R4 matters in every other area but R4bp. (Lest anyone think the above idea about different standards of evidence for different questions work as a response here, I ask you to consider whether you’d find a similar comment made by a mod acceptable 5 years ago when they were explaining, say, a blanket ban on Parody, as it was written down as an exception in T:VS. The question in, well, question, being whether the work is a parody. Reasoning is clearly not being applied consistently and special exceptions are being carved out.) The default assumption is that invalid stories are not in the DWU, so we need extraordinary evidence to validate them. Thus we’re back in exactly the same dilemma as before. With no clear way to make the decision - it takes extraordinary evidence to invalidate, it takes extraordinary evidence to validate.

This leaves us with one alternative, is there some higher level of reasoning that stops this from being special pleading? Is it that we just have to assume validity unless proven otherwise?

Well, yes and no. One could argue that nothing is lost if we just placed things in the BTS sections of various pages. There's been a recent trend on this wiki where people argue in favor of validity because they worry that we will lose information as lost to time forever because things are invalid. These fears are largely misplaced - the nature of invalid pages does not necessitate this, it merely dictates what pages information from these sources you can place information from them on. There are specific examples where work has been lost, but this is because of other factors, not merely invalidity.

I note that there's a caveat here, that some claim that in the past admins have discouraged them from editing invalid story pages. Well, discouragement can come in many different ways, and I really couldn't find any broad statements saying not to do it. I could find a few hyper-specific comments about individual users not rehashing certain discussions over and over, or about how admins were tired of the 2016-2017 inclusion debates, but never a broad level discouragement. With one exception. I did find User talk:DENCH-and-PALMER/Archive 1#Categories (And below it, Re: What?) where an admin explicitly says that invalid pages are considered to be less important. Now, this behavior is alleged to have happened for quite a bit longer, so I can only assume it happened in chat, somewhere I just didn't catch, or it was the more subtle forms of discouragement mentioned. I don't think this is an appropriate approach to take to invalid stories, let me be clear. And I can understand why someone would wish to validate as many things as possible given the past.

But more than this, I'm unsympathetic to the underlying idea in the first place. I do think we should be trying to have things as valid if we can, and that "invalidity by proxy" would be a deeply worrying outcome. But there's a third option here, between choosing invalidity by proxy as privileged and validity by proxy as privileged. We can simply cut the link between older stories and new stories. We placed it there in the first place. It's the link that's causing issues. We need either to rig it more successfully in one direction or remove it.

And even if we suppose that I cede Scrooge’s criticism, which I don’t, it doesn’t entail that the inconsistencies with the original intent of R4 go away, nor do the inconsistencies with the rest of T:VS not having RXbps. At best it isolates you from this particular Munchausen-ian problem.

In conclusion

Oh, wow, that's a long thread, isn't it? Let me try to summarize some of the points so that people can give their preliminary thoughts on just the introduction + conclusion before going back and reading the entire thing, as I'm sure they will. (And hopefully all of the threads I link, as they're important context. :P)

Over the course of this thread I've presented a variety of claims, and defended them with, I think, a fair bit of evidence. R4bp is poorly written both because it's confusing for new editors, and because it's arguably incoherent from a policy standpoint when we start using "continuity" in the manner that it references. It's wildly discontinuous from how our policies have previously functioned, and I don't think there's strong evidence that people have pushed for policy similar to it in the past - it appears to be a very near complete 180. Moreover, the reasoning used for the policy is fundamentally in tension with the reasoning for the original R4, as well as the reasoning used to justify sequels to invalid stories - meaning the very things now being used to validate invalid stories through R4bp are valid through questionable means, and it's not clear as to why R4bp doesn't generalize to other "Rule X by proxies". You may or may not find any one of these compelling reasons to doubt that R4bp needs to be reconsidered. You may or may not find my arguments compelling for each section. But I think, in aggregate, the case is clear that some level of reconsideration and change needs to be undertaken.

But given all of this, is the analysis I've presented really about R4bp? Nate recently suggested to me that it's further reaching than that - it suggests that we might need to completely re-examine our entire system of validity. And I can see the reasoning behind this, but I don't quite think it correct. The reason why this analysis is so broad is because R4bp, as it was constructed, had such broad ramifications that went unnoticed at the time. I think a full review of our validity policy would have to be even broader still, and as I allude to in the introduction, I don't think anyone here is prepared to do that at the present time, nor is this thread really the place for it. With that said, I'm not unaware of the reality that the analysis I've presented may suggest to some that there's an issue so deeply foundational at the heart of T:VS that a fundamental re-analysis of that policy from the ground up is needed instead. I, personally, am unconvinced, but I'm willing to accept that it's a third horn of what I thought was previously a dilemma.

So where does this leave us? Everyone has their own standards of evidence, and I can't comment on what you personally find convincing, but I think there's a strong case here that something has to give. Either R4bp goes, and we return to how we were - I note, I don't think this is particularly disastrous, many of the things we wanted to validate we would still validate, we have to seriously consider the other RXbps as well as most likely rewrite R4bp to focus on standards that are clear and consistent - explainable to new editors and to those of us who just have fundamentally never understood what "continuity" means from this wiki's POV, (this discussion might be shunted off to Forum:References into Worldbuilding, as a similar one has begun there, quelle surprise) or we just defer the issue until later - we say that fundamentally the tension here is that T:VS is fundamentally not working as it should to meet the needs of the wiki in its current day and we need to rewrite it from the ground up and work towards on the steps it would take to actually have that discussion. (As stated at the beginning, one last option is just to ignore everything and insist that no changes are needed even with the flaws presented here. But I rather presume nobody will do that.)

I have my personal preference. But ultimately my reasons for liking it among these three options aren't really the sorts of things I think you can base wiki policy off of. So while I strongly feel that one of these choices has to be made, and I'm going to defend that contention quite strongly here - I think the status quo cannot continue, it is up to the community which of these three options we should choose.