Forum:BBV and canon policy
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
There's been some chatter on Talk:The Doctor (Party Animals) and between Revanvolatrelundar and Tangerineduel that has seemed to produced the basic sentiment: "If it's BBV, it's canon to us." Indeed, it would seem that the ill-nuanced canon policy is behind such a notion.
But I'm not sure such a blanket policy makes sense.
BBV weren't like Big Finish or IDW. They never, ever had a full license to produce Doctor Who fiction. In fact, they had no license whatever from the BBC. So characters that looked like wholly-BBC-owned characters, like the Doctor, couldn't actually be those characters. The Nick Briggs BBV character, Fred, is therefore Fred, not, as was previously intimated by redirect, a version of the Doctor who appeared briefly in official DWM comics. I think we need to remember and clearly state in our canon policy that BBV productions are at best semi-canonical, because they never involve the rights of the BBC. However, at worst they're not at all canonical, because quite a bit of BBV's output doesn't involve the rights of even Doctor Who writers.
Actually, this "Fred" character shouldn't be mentioned by us whatsoever, because all his adventures involve the Cyberona, who are themselves rip-offs of the Cybermen. There's zero legal tie whatever to the DWU, so why are we covering them?
I get why we're including some of BBV, like that which uses Autons, Zygons, Krynods, the Rani and Sontarans. But for the life of me, I can't understand why we allow things like The Time Travellers, as the explicit point of these is that they have been designed so as to come as close as possible to portraying the Doctor, but to do so in such a way that explicitly avoids copyright infringement. It's zirconium — not a real diamond. And since we don't cover/allow in-line references to any other unlicensed stories, we shouldn't be covering these, either.
Seems to me that the such a stance would compel a few actions:
- The rewriting of tardis:canon policy. The rule should be: BBV productions which involve the rights of people who contributed to televised Doctor Who are valid resources on this wiki. However, works which are 100% copyrightable by BBV Productions should not be referenced here. Thus, if the production uses Auton, Zygons, Krynoids or any other race or character seen on Doctor Who, it's allowable. If, however, the production uses only characters that are close approximations of those seen on Doctor Who — as in The Time Travellers, The Wanderer, The Stranger, Adventures in a Pocket Universe and the like — they're not allowable.
- The creation of a template, like {{nc}}, to be clearly displayed the top of allowed BBV articles. It should read something like, "'This topic related to BBV Productions is only semi-canonical, as rights to create it were granted by the original Doctor Who writer, but not by the BBC.
- The transfer of all the non-compliant BBV material to the Doctor Who Extended wikia.
- The eradication of most of the links to the non-compliant material from our in-universe articles, and the redirection of real world links to the DWE articles. (Really not as daunting as it sounds; you can create a redirect directly to the DWE article. And there wouldn't be that much "eradication", as most in-universe articles have shied away from BBV, anyway.)
Thoughts?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍
I agree, ive just been going through the BBV stuff I just got (hence the interest in the subject atm) and things like the PROBE and even the Stranger has nothing to do with the DWU (The Stranger branches away and i didn't even see too much of a resemblence to the Doctor or Peri anyway).
I'll get a list together of all productions that are definately in the DWU, those i havent tried yet or are unsure of and lastly the unrelated productions.
watch this space
--Revanvolatrelundar 20:38, January 29, 2011 (UTC)
