Inclusion debates/10,000 Dawns and its place on the wiki (continued)

As the previous discussion on this topic unfortunately had to be closed for unrelated reasons, here is a new thread on three particular crossover stories between the 10,000 Dawns series and various DWU series—Rachel Survived, White Canvas, and The Gendar Conspiracy—and whether they qualify as valid in-universe sources according to the “four little rules” defined in Tardis:Valid sources. (This pertains only to these 10,000 Dawns stories that cross over with licensed DWU elements, not any others, akin to how we cover Assimilation² but not all of Star Trek.)

Apologies if I am just going over known facts for most people here, but I do recall the participation of some new members of our wiki in the last discussion, who seemed less familiar with our policies, so for the sake of clarity I will err on the side of over-explanation and present all the facts in as much detail as possible.

Now, a word on inclusion debates in general. The principle for judging a narrative's validity as an in-universe source is explicitly defined by Tardis:Valid sources as follows:

We specifically do not consider the quality of the narrative when deciding whether to exclude a story. Instead, we are guided by the legal status of a work as well as the authorial intent. Those things which don't have the permission of all relevant copyright holders, or those which were never meant to be continuous with the established DWU, are excluded. Except in the most obvious of cases, community discussion is required to declare a story invalid. In these discussions, sufficient evidence must be provided that that the story either doesn't have permission from all relevant copyright holders, or that there are solid non-narrative reasons to believe the story does not occur in the DWU.

In other words, community discussions such as this one do not produce validity—no amount of fan interpretation can change a professional work’s "legal status" or the “authorial intent” behind it; these intrinsic aspects of the work exist whether or not an inclusion debate has taken place to recognise them, or indeed whether or not this wiki itself exists. A community discussion thus only functions as a venue where evidence can be collected and presented, so that the community may gain knowledge of the facts.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the “four little rules”, the foundation that T:VALID is based upon.

Rule 1: “Only stories count.”

This seems to be the only one that hasn’t stirred any opposition. The three pieces of prose in question are clearly narratives and therefore pass.

Rule 2: “A story that isn’t commercially licensed by all relevant copyright holders doesn’t count.”

There are two parts to this one: the idea that a story needs to be sold or commercially available to be valid, and the idea that a story needs to be licensed by the copyright holders of any characters or concepts used. This rule is also linked heavily to the policy at T:NO FANFIC.

Let’s investigate the commercial aspect first. It is well-documented that Wylder has sold physical copies of these stories for profit at conventions and via direct mailing. In addition, he has also noted plans for the three stories to be available physically to the wider public in an anthology in the near future. Even ignoring these, the “blog” that Wylder posted the stories on is used for a commercial purpose by Arcbeatle Press and is never described as being for personal use in the content itself.

It was raised that, as Arcbeatle Press is run by James Wylder and James Wylder was the author of the stories, the stories are self-published and therefore fan fiction. Firstly, the idea that something that is self-published is automatically fan fiction is a strange notion indeed, without any backing in wiki policy; secondly, Arcbeatle Press does not exclusively publish Wylder’s work (there are too many examples to list of other works featuring contributions by other authors: for instance, Greater Good and Echoes; 10,000 Dawns: Poor Man’s Illiad; a reprint of Dracula; et cetera), so it is really best treated as a small publisher. There has long been a precedent on this wiki that small publishers like Arcbeatle, BBV, or Telos are not treated differently from larger ones, even when the CEO is involved in the published stories: take Nicholas Briggs’ massive 300+ catalogue of credits at Big Finish Productions, for instance.

Finally for rule 2, there is also the stipulation that a work has to be licensed by all relevant copyright holders. Firstly, it should be noted that Wylder claims he has obtained the necessary permissions and is willing to provide evidence of this if required. The full list of people that had their copyrighted concepts used in the three stories are Andrew Hickey, Jacob Black, Nate Bumber, Niki Haringsma, Simon Bucher-Jones, Lance Parkin, Alan Bednar, Elizabeth Tock, David Koon, Jo Smiley, and Stuart Douglas. Two of these people (namely Bumber and Haringsma) participated in the original debate and argued for inclusion whilst also vouching that Arcbeatle had obtained the other rights as well; . One struggles to think of a reason why two people would want their copyrighted material that had been used in fanfiction to be on an official Doctor Who wiki (rather than Doctor Who Expanded, say). Additionally, Obverse made a post regarding White Canvas stating it was “some Faction Paradox crossover fiction” further highlighting the company’s stance on the matter of licensing. We have never questioned publishers of a similar size (such as Candy Jar or Obverse) regarding their copyright claims so I have no idea why Arcbeatle should be any different.

Once again for full transparency, even though it isn’t directly related to the debate: the presence of some comic strips titled Lil’ Doctor Who that featured appearances from the Twelfth Doctor and Clara (and others) on the Arcbeatle site caused some to cast doubts over the truthfulness of their other copyright claims. However, these strips were well-established to be parodical and, as per copyright law, parody falls under fair use. This means that the BBC need not be consulted so the integrity of Arcbeatle’s, and Wylder’s word remains perfectly intact.

Rule 3: “A story must be officially released to be valid.”

This rule is covered more fully at Tardis:Official releases so I will direct my analysis there.

In the original debate there was much talk of what counted as “officially released”. The fact that the stories were initially released for free online and whether that counted as a publication was a subject of much scrutiny. Yet again, there is precedent for stories being released for free online being valid, even if they weren’t later collected in a physical volume. Candy Jar is an example of the former with lots of their stories being released for free and then later sent out to readers as physical editions. The BBC has many a story that has been released online for free and then never available in print. A poignant example that comes to mind is Martha Jones’ MySpace blog which to this day is neither available for money nor even accessible on the internet anymore.

Another method of determining a verdict from rule 3 came from whether it possessed an ISBN. Our wiki has never required a story to have an ISBN, as it is not representative of any form of legal or copyright protection. The International ISBN Agency describes ISBNs as beneficial rather than compulsory. It was raised that previous Arcbeatle releases bear the name of a different publisher on ISBNsearch.org, but that hasn’t posed a problem for our wiki in the past: for instance, Resurrection of the Daleks is listed on our wiki as being published by BBC Books, when ISBNsearch lists its publisher as “Penguin Group UK”. Another minor point raised was that the phrases “All stories are publications of Arcbeatle Press” and “Publisher: James Wylder” were incompatible, but it was pointed out that “publisher” is also a job at a publishing house.

There was also some dispute over the release date that should be provided for these stories. T:OFF REL states, “For prose fiction, release date is whatever is given by the publisher as the release date.” Arcbeatle Press has said the first releases of these stories were 8 December 2017, 25 December 2018, and 5 March 2019 for Rachel Survived, White Canvas, and The Gendar Conspiracy respectively. As dictated by policy, these are therefore the release dates as we should recognise them.

Rule 4: “If a story was intended to be set outside the DWU, then it’s probably not allowed. But a community discussion will likely be needed to make a final determination.”

The second part of this rule is not relevant, as this is the community discussion in question, but I left the full rule in to ensure clarity regarding the “probably” clause.

Harkening back to the rule 2 argument, one struggles to imagine why Wylder would go to such an effort to get permissions for characters and concepts from the DWU only to set the stories outside of it, but let’s look at the evidence. These three stories have very clearly been established as crossovers between 10,000 Dawns and Faction Paradox and/or Doctor Who. Once again, it has been well-established (see Assimilation²) that we only cover the crossovers which is why this debate is only focused on these three stories.

In its 2017 release, Rachel Survived is described as “a 20th anniversary crossover”, and as being the product of “[getting] permission from a Faction Paradox author to write a story crossing over a character from his novel [Head of State] with the universe-hopping heroes of [Wylder’s] 10,000 Dawns book series”.

In its 2018 release, White Canvas is described as a “licensed crossover between the 10,000 Dawns, and characters from the universes of Doctor Who and Faction Paradox”. It features concepts and characters from the Virgin New Adventures, BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, and Short Trips. Additionally, it is said that the novella “acts as something of a prequel to a few of the stories” in Obverse Books’ The Book of the Peace, and at the time of its original release Obverse itself acknowledged the story as “some Faction Paradox crossover fiction”. The intention of its DWU setting doesn’t come much clearer than that.

In its March 2019 release, The Gendar Conspiracy is described as “a prequel to [Wylder’s] novella White Canvas” and “like Rachel Survived and White Canvas, [is] a licenced crossover, pulling characters and settings from the universes of Doctor Who and Faction Paradox”.

Finally, in the anthology release of August 2019, the release of the three stories and their relation to the DWU is described as follows: “In 2017, Arcbeatle Press put out the first of our beloved licensed crossovers between 10,000 Dawns and the Universes of Doctor Who titled Rachel Survived. Since then, we went on to put out two more stories…”.

In every iteration of their releases, these three stories have unambiguously been described as crossovers between 10,000 Dawns and the DWU. So in regard to rule 4, the three stories clearly pass.

One of the concerns raised in the original thread weren’t directly related to any of these rules about validity, but rather concerned Wylder’s tweet saying that he would be willing to let “any other folks writing officially licensed Whoniverse works (that is, not fanworks)” borrow the 10,000 Dawns characters for their own writing. This led to a tangent in which it was claimed that the validity of these three crossover stories would lead to “anyone” being able to publish works in the DWU that the wiki would have to cover. This is not true, as the tweet clearly only opens the request to those who are writing stories already set in the DWU; furthermore, even if it was open to anyone it specifically concerns Wylder’s 10,000 Dawns characters, and as per the analogy to Assimilation², non-DWU related 10,000 Dawns stories are of no concern to our wiki.

This tangent also led to a discussion about how people like Gareth Roberts, who have been accused of posting trans-misogynistic posts online, could take advantage of Wylder’s offer to force the wiki to cover transphobic slurs. Most posters in the last thread seemed to agree that this had nothing to do with the matter at hand, as policy dictates we “do not consider the quality of the narrative” when deciding validity; we already have an (albeit obscured) page for the n-word without purging everything relating to The Celestial Toymaker from the wiki.

I believe this is an accurate and comprehensive summary of the arguments raised for and against the validity of these three stories in the last thread. Personally, I haven’t seen any convincing arguments against validity, as the three stories seem to clearly pass all four rules, but this debate is nevertheless appropriate and to a degree, necessary as this is the first Doctor Who-related work Arcbeatle has done. As defined in T:VALID, it is the job of an inclusion debate to prove invalidity, not validity, so if there are any new concerns about these stories, this is the place to please raise them!

(As a final note, as mentioned in Thread:256955, anyone professionally involved with Arcbeatle Press should please refrain from joining in this thread. Thank you.)