Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes

Opening post

Intro

So many of you have noted that in the past few months, since the temporary forum system has gone live, we have validated a long list of stories which were historically called "NOTVALID." Some are overjoyed by this, others overwhelmed and burnt out. Both emotions are "valid" as it were.

It is a fact that this website went years without having a forum system, so people are going to be excited to rush into these things. However, I have recently come upon a problem that I never thought would happen in a million years.

... I am starting to run out of things that I want validated.

I'm serious! I took stock the other day, and out of all the non-valid stories which don't have some OP either being discussed or drafted, I think I have less than five topics I still care about so deeply that I would be willing to loose some skin fighting for them. And as those of you who have been around and know me will attest, I invented pedantically arguing to validate random things. And now the biggest hot take I have is, like, that one Dalek flash game should be valid.

So to all of those who think we're entering a stage of some slippery slope where everything will be valid and RULE 4 WILL BE UNCEREMONIOUSLY DESTROYED, I think that's not the case. I believe that we're going to soon enter a plateau where we just... run out of topics which aren't hyper-fringe?

And as this happens, we need to take a step back and realize something. Some fiction on this website will always be non-valid. And of course the next phrase I say is "And that's okay." But really, I think if we want people to believe this, we need to commit to it.

I want to quickly talk about my editing experiences and ideology. When I started editing Tardis wiki, I was doing it often without any money and an ongoing obsession with fringe lore. So one of the first things I did when I joined the site was going on an extended-BBV/Reeltime marathon on YouTube. I was also heavily into the Cushing films and wanted to cover those as equally as any other Doctor's media. And from the moment I joined, I found that editing pages in the "Non-Canon" subspace was extremely frowned upon. This continued when it became the Non-DWU subspace.

I have this strongest memory of spending one weekend uploading images from the BBV film Do You Have a Licence to Save this Planet?. And an admin sent me talk page message and told me to hop into a Wiki chat window. There, two admins told me that there were Fourth Doctor TV stories that still needed plot summaries and images uploaded. If I wanted to upload images and add content, would I please focus on that?

Literally, in response to me enjoying wikifying fringe non-valid stuff, I was told "Please buy The Power of Kroll and watch that instead." And it worked, I was truly dissuaded.

I don't want to act like this is my supervillain origin story, but I often see people talk about the hostility on here when it comes to validity. "It shouldn't matter" people say. "Something being non-valid shouldn't be an issue." And I agree on principle... except that I truly believe our wiki is constructed to make the non-valid subspace awful on purpose so that people will be directed to not use it or edit it. Historically it's not only been awful - it's been incomplete! There's been a very fine window where non-valid coverage is acceptable. Only on character pages where the character originated in a non-valid story. NOWHERE ELSE.

If you want an example, one time I was adding info to pages from COMIC: Daleks Versus the Martians, invalid at the time. The story features the Martian Sphinx, AKA Cydonia (Mars). As this was before "From non-valid sources" BTS were a thing, and the Martian Sphinx already had valid coverage, I just couldn't write this info down anywhere!

As of today, I feel we've finally started to move stuff back the other way, with the creation of the /Non-valid subspace for valid story pages. You can check out some of my work at Omega/Non-valid sources and Ninth Doctor/Non-valid sources.

But my absolutely favorite thing I've done this week is Sutekh/Non-valid sources. I have always wanted to Wikify Oh Mummy!. Why? Because I thought it would be fun. That's it. But in the past, this would have been an instant NO. There is no precedent at all for [[Sutekh (Oh Mummy!)]] And because I never wanted it to be valid, as it doesn't pass my reading of Rule 4, it just sat in my mind for a decade. But now that there's a subspace, I'm free to do some creative stuff!

I've even recently seen people speak of adding a navigation system to the top of pages. So, for instance, some day when you visit Ninth Doctor, you might see a series of tabs linking the main page, Ninth Doctor/Gallery, Ninth Doctor/Appearances, and Ninth Doctor/Non-valid sources in a row. Sorta like what we have at the Robotech wiki (see w:c:Robotech:Rick Hunter).

So pretty soon, coverage of non-valid stories in an in-universe way will be treated as a valid, err, acceptable pass time for all editors. For readers who simply want to read about the stupidest Sutekh stories possible, they will have an immediate option to find that info without any judgement. The non-valid space can become a separate bubble on the wiki where you're still allowed to have fun, and once that's true it'll be a lot less of a topic of fury that some random oddity might still be non-valid.

However... we have a handful of small issues that I believe serve as a roadblock to this actually happening. These are, primarily, rules that I believe stem from the era of the wiki where it was frowned upon for you to edit sources and topics which were not valid or primary. And I think confronting these issues is essential to trying to mend some long charred bridges.

Continuity sections

So this is the big one, the official reason that I started this OP. Under our current rules, NOTVALID stories are banned from having continuity sections.

This is one of those infamous rules that's hard to explain to a new user. It's very much a contradiction that only exists because of history. I actually couldn't remember the story behind this rule... So I reached out to User:Najawin, who's pretty much the expert on any part of our website history, and I asked when and why this policy changed.

This is what he had to say:

Bit of a weird one. Nothing specific, moreso a few different T:BOUND issues that evolved over time, it looks like. I could be missing a talk page discussion, since I'm not up to the relevant time period and this is a very cursory glance, but I don't think so.

So it looks like that while invalid stories (well, non canon at the time) did have continuity sections, they were largely based around the idea that continuity = canon, and so it said something to the effect of "this story isn't canon". There are exceptions, (eg) but this is the rule of thumb, and they often either only said that, or said (eg) that in addition to also saying other things (1, 2). I'm not seeing any specific discussion to remove these, it looks like Mini-Mitch just woke up one day and decided to do so. Which isn't the most unreasonable thing in the world given how they were understood at the time, and I looked at his edits back until January of that year, he spent a fair bit of time in continuity sections, he clearly gave it a reasonable amount of thought. But I'm not seeing a specific forum discussion that preceded it, no. When DCtT was officially ruled NC its continuity section was removed, and Shambala removed the Pilot Episode's continuity section in 2015. So it looks like invalid = no continuity section is just a T:BOUND issue, not deriving from a specific thread. (Again, I'm not certain about this. There might have been a discussion made in the years prior or after this, but immediately surrounding these changes there's nothing.) Najawin ☎ 07:12, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

So that gives us the basic content. A user named Mini-Mitch removed most of the continuity sections in 2012, seemingly following no public debate.

However, I will refute that Mini-Mitch simply did this on a whim. Based on my memory, I think he was once an admin, and back in the day admins used to hang out in the wikia chat window and just talk shop there. So it's more likely that several admins thought it was such a non-issue that they agreed on the "no continuity sections" rule and just presumed any argument against their perspective was a non-starter.

Now personally, I have many reasons I think "no continuity sections on non-valid pages" is not a justified rule. Here they are:

1. I do not see "continuity sections" as a place to analyze the Doctor Who canon. I see them as a place to discuss connections to other stories.
2. Even if stories are not meant to be set inside the DWU, two stories which aren't DWU can still have connections. For instance, if the Cushing films were still non-valid, I think it would be fair to say that Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. has continuity to Dr. Who and the Daleks.
3. I think that non-valid pages have continuity to to valid stories. For instance, Strax Saves the Day references the Morbius Doctors (from The Brain of Morbius, not Matt Smith)
4. Not all stories are non-valid for breaking Rule 4, aka "not being set inside the Doctor Who Universe". Rule 4 is, realistically, the part of our rules which is closest to asking "Is this canon?" And indeed when admins explain this rule I usually see them say "Non-DWU stories can't have DWU connections." But what about stage plays? Fiction invalidated for having narrative quirks? etc? They still have continuity surely!
5. Every time I visit a non-valid story page which is even remotely fleshed out, it almost always has some section of the article that's being used as a continuity section. Sometimes it's in Notes, sometimes References. It's a load bearing part of our pages, we simply need them, people are going to write down that information anyways.
6. Not all readers of Tardis Wiki come to read in-universe biographies. Some come to just research Who history. If someone comes to read about the stage play Doctor Who and the Daleks in Seven Keys to Doomsday, they'll likely want to read the continuity section... Except there isn't one! We can't just assume that all people who read the wiki care about some fringe rules that only exist on our website. It makes for a very unhelpful design.

Before we move on, one extra note is that I do not want to have continuity sections on valid pages cite continuity to non-valid stories. So Dalek: Spoof Scenes should be mentioned in TV: Dalek's story notes, not in continuity.

If people strongly disagree with this, I think a subsection might also be a good idea. So maybe:

=== Continuity ===
==== Continuity to non-valid sources====

• Brian the Ood also appeared in NOTVALID: Time Fracture.

Game of Rassilon categories

So this is one that's not really stopping the wiki from functioning, it's just the principal of the damn thing.

When the Game of Rassilon rewards program started some ten years ago, it was quickly decided that categories featured in the game needed to be over-used on purpose to make the game actually work. For those who never pay attention to the system, one category in the game is Category:K9 television stories. So every K9 television story that is a valid source has this category, even when branching tree categories make this redundant. This way, you get points for the "K9 Television stories" reward, no matter if you're editing The Five Doctors, A Girl's Best Friend, the SJA pilot, or any episode of the K9 spin-off show.

However, from day one, non-valid stories were excluded from this. I'm not one to go searching for old quotes, but I recall being directly told at the time that this because the admin team preferred that people edit valid sources and not non-valid ones. So if you want to go and edit K9's Question Time, you won't get rewarded for it because it's not a valid source. And, low and behold, a lot of invalid story pages are unhelpful stubs!

Now, the Game of Rassilon is not going to be around forever. If you make a new wiki today I don't think you can add this feature, you can't add new badges, and you can't remove old ones. So probably in the next 5-10 years there will be some point where FANDOM decides to just throw it away. But until then, again for the principal, I think we should follow through and get rid of the "no non-valid sources/pages in the Game of Rassilon" rule...

BUUUT as an extra thing, I also generally feel this way about subpages. A recent ruling in the forums held that if a story has a biography that's "overly detailed", it should be moved to a /Biography page. The argument has been that this does not diminish the motivation to read or edit this page. If that's our understanding, then I think we have to have the GoR categories on all relevant subpages. So Tenth Doctor/Biography should have Category:Individual Time Lords.

Again, this is just a matter of principal, and a temporary one as I expect the Game may be over sooner than we think.

PREFIX change

Okay, so this is another really minor one, but I think it'll be really helpful for making these invalid subspaces more... functional to use.

For the longest time, it has been set-in-stone that NOTVALID is the prefix to be used for all stories we do not cover. If you want a quick history lesson, when this website started we did not have a prefix for the "non-canon" subset of stories. Then, 2012, T:CANON was retired and replaced with T:VS. In November 2012, NOTDWU launched. This was then later changed to NOTVALID.

So let's talk about NOTVALID.

In terms of how much space it takes up, this is our longest prefix, and I think has been since launch. From my memory, the reason this was done to make it very LOUD and OBVIOUS that stories tagged with this prefix are not valid sources on the wiki. The prefix might as well have been... (NONONONOTHISDOESN'TCOUNT: Dimensions in Time)

I think that's fine and makes sense. Really! I think for the most part of this website, NOTVALID is just what we need it to be. However, I think it becomes a problem on pages which are, themselves, in the NOTVALID "subspace." Here, readers might want more clarification about what is happening and what kinds of stories are being discussed. And in this case, NOTVALID is a frustratingly redundant prefix.

As an example, let's use a page I just recently made: Ninth Doctor/Non-valid sources. In this page, two stories are currently cited: NOTVALID: Blue Peter special 2005 and NOTVALID: Dalek: Spoof Scenes. I believe readers have the right to know that one of these is a TV story and the other is PROSE, and simply telling them HEYTHISISN'TVALID is silly because... Yeah, we know. It's Ninth Doctor/Non-valid sources.

Originally, I thought of suggesting we just retire the NOTVALID prefix in the not-valid subspace. But I realized that there might be cases where a /Non-valid page might want to cite a valid story, and there still needs to be a difference. So here's my idea.

In cases where the NOTVALID prefix is redundant and unhelpful by itself, we match it with another relevant prefix. So...

The Doctor told the humanoids he was busy and to come back later. (NOTVALID TV: The Web of Caves)

As a very specific example, so I can review my case for you, let's look at Konnie Huq. This is a page that, based on recent debates, need to be split into three parts. Konnie Huq (for the real world performer who played herself and also wrote a notable entry for a Doctor Who book) Konnie Huq (in-universe) (for in-universe character from Invasion of the Bane), and Konnie Huq/Non-valid sources (for the version of her in the Ninth Doctor blue peter sketch)

So the page on the "actor" should say:

Konnie Hug was a Blue Peter presenter who appeared as herself in TV: Invasion of the Bane and NOTVALID: Blue Peter special 2005.

Then the page on the character should just talk about the Invasion of the Bane character.

And the /Non-valid sources page might say:

Konnie Hug was present as the Ninth Doctor arrived in the TARDIS to destroy the Dalek compost bin, after searching through time for it. (NOTVALID TV: Blue Peter special 2005) Konnie was a host of Blue Peter. (TV: Invasion of the Bane)

We can also do a hyphen if y'all think that makes it look better (NOTVALID-PROSE: etc).

The only hiccup here is that we deleted our prefix for stage plays ages ago. So implementing this might mean restoring or replacing SP.

"NC"

This is just a bonus. Sorry if it's an annoying sub-clause... I love Template:NCmaterial. It's a great idea, great template. Can we please pick literally any other name for it. I just hate NC as an acronym. It looks like it stands for non-canon. I'm sorry, that's how I read it every time. It's just a bad template name.

I additionally feel the same way about NC. For those out of the loop, NC is a new prefix that is to be used for things we might cite but won't "cover." (It stands for "Not Covered") So, for instance, on Death's Head, a /non-valid sources subpage might link Wanted: Galvatron — Dead or Alive! with this. If you're wondering when we did this, it passed in Subpages 2.0.

I do understand that NOTCOVERED is a little bit ugly and overbearing in this case. But instead of NC, maybe NOTCOV or NOCOV could be a better option. Maybe then we can repeat what we're doing above, and try for (NOCOV PROSE:) or (NOCOV-TV:) etc.

The point is that NC is just a big no-no for me, even if I agree with how it's being used I am anti-that-specific-acronym.

note, i did not invent the idea of a "no coverage" prefix, so if you disagree please don't yell at me about it existing!

Final points

I think that making these few changes will have a lot of positive impacts on the website. One of the main reasons people get so impatient about validating stories is that they often have a temporary passion to wikify certain content. Historically, editors have either not been able to properly wikify non-valid content, or they've been actively discouraged to by the system.

Once these ideas pass, with the rewards system benefiting all edits equally, when someone wants to wikify something... They can just go do it. And if the source can later be proven to pass our four rules, then it's simply a task of moving the information over. For instance, if NOTVALID-PROSE: Search for the Doctor is validated at some point in the future, then the content I added to Omega/Non-valid sources can very easily be moved to Omega with just a few clicks.

And if it's something that really shouldn't be considered valid, then again they'll still be able to have the same amount of fun and reap the same intended benefits as the rest of the website.

With that, those are my... 3.5 minute policy changes I'd like to see to help ease the "valid/invalid" battle which seems to never end on this website. Please tell me your thoughts! OS25🤙☎️ 23:58, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

As the original proposer of this thread, I support all of these ideas (and I would prefer NC be moved to NOTCOV or NOTCOVERED). I actually think that the "Continuity to non-valid sources" might be a great idea, it'd be very useful and would make the "Story notes" section much less messy. I also think that we should undelete SP and move it to STAGE. Pluto2☎ 19:47, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Brief notes before I think about this further, I was aware that User:Mini-mitch was a mod at the time, my comment was just that he did this unprompted by any specific discussion. And while I'm thankful for the kind words, I don't think of myself as an expert on the wiki's history in any sense. I've just been doing a bit of research lately. Najawin ☎ 19:58, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Agree with Pluto2 here. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 20:06, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Certainly didn't mean to question your statement there Najawin, I just thought mentioning the former existence of the (correctly) unarchived Wikia chat window was important to the context of why there's no archived discussion. OS25🤙☎️ 20:16, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

I support all of these proposed changes and agree with Pluto about "Continuity to non-valid sources" sections and using STAGE instead of SP. Also, with the Game of Rassilon, I have spoken with some people on the Fandom Discord server about this feature when it is likely to be retired and one user's response to my initial message was "Honestly surprised it still works at all at this point". I really don't think that this feature is not going to last for long. Bongo50 ☎ 20:26, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

NOTVALID PROSE I think is far too long. May I suggest "NV PROSE" and I think if we make it clear what NV means then that'll be fine. That said PROSE lumps in every written fiction like novel, short stories, features and all. Whereas on screen is segregated TV, WC, HOMEVID. This is irrelevant, but my point is, actually I don't know. 81.108.82.15^{talk to me} 20:39, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

To respond to Bongo, I do agree that this policy change wouldn't last long. But again! It's about the principal here! If we end up rewarding people for two weeks for contributing to subpages, I think that's still an ideological victory! OS25🤙☎️ 21:06, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

I absolutely agree. Bongo50 ☎ 21:12, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Okay, let's try to respond now that I've got the time. Just to begin

A recent ruling in the forums held that if a story has a biography that's "overly detailed", it should be moved to a /Biography page.

The thread in question did not say anything remotely resembling this. What it stated is that we need to, on pages that have overly long biography sections, enforce a prior thread which said each story should have discussion of it capped at 3 sentences. This was a previous ruling that was merely upheld by this recent thread. The thread went on to say that a /biography subpage could then go into extra detail from this trimmed down version. Nothing is being moved. Nobody upheld the argument that motivation won't decrease. Completely distinct issues. I say this primarily for historical users coming to this thread in the future, since I don't care about TGoR and I too think it's likely to die sooner rather than later, as Bongo highlighted. (For instance, it broke down pretty easily when UCP rolled out. I think Spongebob had to forward some bug fixes for it, which must have been frustrating. I'm sure it will be put to pasture quietly.)

I have no strong feelings on NOTVALID-TV etc, though don't see much point. Agree with NC being tweaked.

I think the comments about how we sometimes make new users feel demotivated is a good one, and we should place structures and guardrails to encourage change. It's been a constant criticism of this wiki, and it's going to be especially important in the next year or two. I'm not suggesting that everything the wiki does is something we should instantly change at the behest of new users or the broader community, but there should be a gentler learning curve, resources to help them get experience, feedback rather than just reverting edits, etc etc. It's something we need to think about in the next, say, 6 months.

Important context left out of the OP that I mentioned on OS25's talk page is Forum:DWU, Canon, Continuity and References - rename them, for the mindset at the time, and some of my confusion to this day. Let me note, from our manual of style, how we define continuity:

Continuity is similar to the "references" section, really, except that it usually includes things of narrative significance.

I swear to God, I could not tell you what this means concretely. Quite frankly, I have no idea if I'm for or against this proposal because I don't understand what a continuity section is as opposed to a reference section. I try my best not to use them when I write up articles for the wiki, I usually leave "To be added" and keep a stub tag. To this day this distinction makes no sense to me. I don't get what a continuity section gives you that a references section doesn't. But I don't understand that for any page. Najawin ☎ 02:15, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Well, I think one important thing about the continuity section is it lists connections between stories, regardless of which way it goes. For instance, NOTVALID-PROSE: Search for the Doctor indicates that when Drax is incapacitated, certain functions of his TARDIS stop working due to the connection he has with it. This interestingly is a detail mirrored later by TV: The Christmas Invasion. Pointing this out would not be fitting for a reference section, but works really well in a continuity section. OS25🤙☎️ 02:44, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

I am in full support of this. Nothing more to say. Danniesen ☎ 06:19, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Related to Najawin's point about making editing easier for newbies, I'd like to highlight Wookieepedia's increadible "Welcome, newcomers" landing page and series of editing tutorials. This would take a lot of work and it's own thread or 2, but wouldn't having something like this be increadible? Bongo50 ☎ 09:34, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the proposals:

1. I strongly support Continuity sections on invalid story pages. I would also be in favor of Continuity sections on valid pages citing non-valid stories, without a separate subsection.
2. I have no opinion on the Game of Rassilon.
3. I am strongly against the proposed prefix changes. Prefixes are meant (a) to be short and non-intrusive, and (b) to contain a single atom of information about the source. "NOTVALID-PROSE" fails both of those goals! If we want to present readers with more information about medium etc, we should do it through Bongo50's {{cite source}} template, not by making prefixes longer and more cumbersome. Rather, I would support abbreviating NOTVALID further to NV.
4. For the same reasons, I am strongly opposed to turning the short and clear NC prefix into the clumsy "NOCOV". Those of us who've been traumatised by the wiki's past stance on canonicity may flinch at the acronym, but as noted in the (entertaining and well-written) "Intro" section above, there's been a total sea change since then. The explanation on the page NC is perfectly clear and non-problematic; let's leave the past in the past!

To end off, though, I will note that I agree {{NCmaterial}}'s name should change, albeit for other reasons: it's also used for invalid material, so presenting it as purely NC-related is misleading. But this won't require a forum debate to change: a discussion is already ongoing at Template talk:NCmaterial#Rename. – n8 (☎) 13:32, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

@Najawin, a note which I hope will help clear your confusion on the topic of "References" and "Continuity" sections — the issue, fundamentally, is that our "References" section is badly-titled. It is not meant as a list of references in the sense that anybody off-Wiki would understand it (that is, continuity references), but rather, as a list of referenced elements. Hence if a story contains an off-hand mention of never-before-seen aliens called the Examplons, we would put "The Examplons are mentioned" in the References section because "the Examplons are referenced". It is the "Continuity" section which houses a list of what the rest of the planet would call continuity references. (When I designed the Jenny Everywhere Wiki, I replaced the "References" section with a "Worldbuilding" section, which I think gets the same point across more clearly, and makes it more obvious that there is no real redundancy, or even much overlap, with the "Continuity" section. But I fear the ship has sailed with regards to the section-naming on Tardis.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 13:38, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, but I still think that to most people outside of this wiki's culture, it would be more than natural to presume that NC stands for non-canon.

As per Bongo's cite source template, while I think it's amazing I don't think it could or should be used to cite the most fundamentally basic info that any other story has cited at a glance, i.g. if something is TV or PROSE. OS25🤙☎️ 16:38, 17 April 2023 (UTC)