Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes

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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====

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. 81.108.82.15talk 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)

You're raising a much bigger point: whether medium is the most fundamentally basic info about a source. The wiki's approach has always been that "whether a story is valid or not" is the most fundamental info, hence all invalid stories getting prefixed as such. If we want to change that, we can, but I don't think the solution is to try to cram extra bits of info into our prefixes. As a compromise, I would support medium specification if we use NC and NV as prefix abbreviations, lest we wind up with overly lengthy prefixes like (NOTVALID-HOMEVID). – n8 (☎) 18:02, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure that's a completely correct characterization Scrooge! I don't have the time to find the threads at the moment, but at least in the early days of the wiki that I've been reading there were proposals to add a separate section that did this. Mainly with Czech leading the charge, iirc. The reason being that it would lead for easier searching/parsing for bots, SMW, etc, if we listed every specific entity in the DWU that was mentioned in a story on that story's page. These proposals never really got off the ground because people hated the idea. So at least early on references meant something different, (something nobody really could differentiate from continuity!) and if it's come to mean something else, it's only done so through the same inertia that has prevented us from changing its name. Najawin ☎ 19:41, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
That's entirely possible, yes; I'm just reporting that this is more or less how "References" has come to be understood. (Though more things than entities can be thus "referenced"; it's also the place to put any and all non-plot-relevant worldbuilding details like "the Doctor mentions having once studied cheeesmaking" or the like. So the modern "References" section isn't quite the same thing as Czech's proposed blunt list of mentioned entities, not to mention the fact that it requires context.) Didn't we just have a thread about this sort of situation? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:50, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm already a little unsure about our site's policy of putting incredible weight on certain forum decisions just because they happened in 2009 instead of 2019. I'm extremely, aggressively against the idea of assigning value to old forum arguments which didn't even pass. OS25🤙☎️ 20:24, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
Sorting not valid stories dab by medium will be helpful as I just added NOTVALID: The Waters of Mars to The Flood appearances as that's true. 81.108.82.15talk to me 21:11, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
Ah, I think this is a mistake OS25! We should always put weight on forum discussions and talk page discussions, even if they don't reach consensus. If there's notable disagreement, or even a well thought out position that people find reasonable but ultimately not compelling it can ultimately be the basis for revisiting our policy later. Think of it as a dissenting opinion in a court case. Yes, the majority opinion is the law of the land for the time being, but courts do change their mind as laws get reinterpreted, and often they turn to previous dissents to find the "legal precedent" for what they do - showing that they're not inventing policy whole cloth, but are instead affirming legal interpretations that simply didn't get their fair shake back in the day. In the same way, forum threads that don't end in consensus to change policy can still contain key insights for later threads. Najawin ☎ 21:44, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
You'll forgive me if I find it more important to consider how the wiki is run and edited today. For instance, there was a time where many admins on this website wanted to get rid of list of appearances. Not restrict them, not add strict rules, get rid of them. I think there's more value in no one today wanting that, rather than a few people goading for it historically. OS25🤙☎️ 22:13, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
I have absolutely no concern with placing emphasis in different places than these older threads. But we should still assign value to them and not dismiss them. Najawin ☎ 22:49, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
It is my belief that the decade old opinions of inactive users shouldn’t affect the wiki today. 81.108.82.15talk to me 22:54, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Hopping back in to add something of note. While I was writing this, I had this strongest memory that NC was once used on-site to mean "Not Canon." However, I couldn't find a prefix existing or anything like that.

HOWEVER, I just figured out what I was thinking of. Template:Nc was the original name for Template:Invalid, back when it exclusively dealt with if something was canon or not. So yes, historically NC did mean Not Canon. OS25🤙☎️ 18:47, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

(For interested parties, be they now or in the future, the thread I was thinking of was Forum:References and continuity: what exactly is the difference?, and I was misremembering it somewhat. Czech actually agreed with me that the distinction is incomprehensible, so wanted to make "references" a verbatim list of every term in the DWU mentioned in the story. Which is a choice.) Najawin ☎ 08:25, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
While doing research on other stuff, I found Talk:Devious (home video). Relevant to this discussion. Najawin ☎ 19:45, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
Ahah! There was already a thread on this, started by OS25 >10 years ago, it's just in the old forums. You can see evidence of it here. I think the panopticon is going to be the last board we'll get to see, understandably so, so can an admin extend this discussion for a week or two until we get access to that thread? It's possible this entire thread was started in error. (Let me be very clear, I'm 100% sure this was an honest mistake, this would have been one of the first threads in the archived forums, and it's 10 years ago. No way to remember this. But we should look at that thread.) Najawin ☎ 21:53, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
I would not say it was started "in error" even if there was in fact a discussion about this a decade ago. T:POINT for discussions on basic Wiki set-up aren't really a matter of "evidence" and more of shifting situations; and certainly the situation has shifted in a literal decade — the promulgation of NCmaterial and /Non-valid_sources alone would, IMO, justify rethinking the parametres of coverage of invalid content in other parts of the Wiki to match. Besides, I suspect this thread is broader in scope than the old one ever was — although we'll see.
But yes, let's officially extend this for as long as it takes for the old thread to become available. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:01, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Just want to clarify real quick that I would have still made this forum if I had found evidence that there had been a historic debate about this. Thus it was not, in any sense, "started in error."

Furthermore, I'm willing to guess that when we do find the original forum all of my arguments above will be in the exact same context. I do not really personally foresee any argument that makes me change my position here, especially not ones that are ten years old. OS25🤙☎️ 01:36, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Okay, looks like things have stabilized enough that we can reference the discussions in question and talk coherently about them. Obviously for future readers everything I reference will be subject to change, you might need to track down what I'm talking about. There are two discussions I think are relevant around this time, both at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I. Let's first discuss Thread:117229, which carries on discussion of renaming continuity and references, with both MM and Czech advocating for the reduction to the list style of DW concepts I mentioned, just a series of bullet points, with Czech suggesting a compromise might exist using SMW. Important to note that Shambala still thinks of "Continuity" as being "Continuity/Canon" but Czech rejects this hard. There is substantial disagreement over what these terms mean, and no clear resolution that I can see. Important context for how to interpret the next thread, in my mind.
That brings us to Thread:117767. Some of this is just, imo, MM conflating canon and continuity, as does Shambala (though Czech tells them straight up that this is wrong). Czech insists that no semantic games are being played, but confuses two distinct notions of continuity, the first being continuity as the wiki defines it for the use of our continuity sections and the second being, well, the normal sense of the word, a transformation in which certain features are either preserved or change "slowly enough". He does also note the following argument, one I think that's quite relevant:
The real danger of a continuity section on a story that is declared invalid is that editors naturally use the same style as they do on other pages. Namely, they write their continuity notes as if the story "counts". In so doing, they make statements they could not make on in-universe pages. This creates confusion for our readers, because the story page could say one thing, while the character page could say another.
Also formulated as:
If you just put it on the story page, like any other story page, then the reader would almost have to think that we're staying the story is, in fact, continuous with the rest of the DWU.
However, if, due to recent changes with subpages and the like, we can overcome this, which it seems quite likely, this isn't a defeater for the proposal. We might need to actually think about some specific ways on invalid story pages to indicate this difference, if we think this argument is compelling, however. Figure out a specific format. I'm bullish on being able to do so, but I think Czech actually has a point here.
User:Imamadmad suggests that we have a references section, not a continuity one, because:
although no other story is connected with it, it is connected to other stories. This may sound like a contradiction, but when you think about it it's true.
It's clearly true, just think of digraphs, but I don't think their proposed solution is the correct implementation.
With all of that said, the page does conclude by noting that fundamentally this issue is premised on a somewhat arbitrary editorial decision - one that emphasized the fundamental not-DWU-ness of invalid stories and moved continuity information to BTS sections as a result, on these pages. User:Bubblecamera offered a compromise solution, suggesting a "potential continuity" section, and Czech did note that this was a good compromise attempt were one to be needed, but one ultimately he didn't think it necessary.
My takeaway is that I think there's a total of one good argument in this thread - potentially misleading casual users. I think it's a decent concern, and if "continuity" as a name is tweaked slightly, or moved to a subpage where at the top the nuances of the issue are explained I think the problem is instantly solved. Ultimately, though, even Czech admits that this decision is somewhat arbitrary, so if people think that this argument is awful and doesn't merit a response, I can understand. But I'd suggest that it might be worth trying to accommodate these concerns. Najawin ☎ 02:08, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
Having read your post, I feel even stronger about my conviction. Czech's argument that non-valid story pages shouldn't have continuity sections because continuity sections encourage in-universe editing is... well, it makes no sense. Non-valid story pages do, very typically, justify in-universe coverage even if it's not in the valid space. Once again, this is an example of admins writing policy to discourage editors from editing content which is not "valid," thus building a difficult atmosphere in the valid/non-valid debates.
Czech's statement that continuity sections implies that "the story is, in fact, continuous with the rest of the DWU" again highlights the issue I have always had with terms like "non-DWU." Not all non-valid stories fail Rule 4. And some stories that do fail it in measures that the average reader might find difficult to understand.
I would have more concerns for avoiding "confusing" our readers with the continuity sections if "non-valid stories" were an actual academic weighable term. But it's not, as I've said many times recently. It's exclusively a terminology for Tardis Wiki to explain what stories "count" in the main space. A story being non-valid does not mean it's not DWU, or that it's "not in-continuity with the rest of Doctor Who." And all that these quotes have confirmed is that the foundation of site policy about invalid stories has greatly changed since the above quotes were stated.
Furthermore, I would say the policy suggested in the forum already compensates for this. We are still denoting a difference between valid and non-valid stories. Even those who want continuity sections on valid stories to reference non-valid stories want it on a subsection, for instance. So I really don't think it's a good enough issue to postpone a decision here. OS25🤙☎️ 19:17, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
Czech, quite simply, doesn't say
non-valid story pages shouldn't have continuity sections because continuity sections encourage in-universe editing
He says that the issue is that the statements made in these sections would be disallowed in in-universe sections. These are not the same statement, and there's absolutely no indication that admins have attempted to dissuade people from editing in-valid articles through this particular editorial decision.
Czech's statement that continuity sections implies that "the story is, in fact, continuous with the rest of the DWU" again highlights the issue I have always had with terms like "non-DWU." Not all non-valid stories fail Rule 4.
There's absolutely no relation to your dislike for this term and this usage, though, I, of course, note it. Stories failing the prior rules would also put them outside the remit of the DWU at this time. It was the official policy of the wiki that the DWU had to be built through narrative, and R2 and R3 would also obviously need to hold. (Arguably we could say that DWU is a term of art meant to refer to those things the wiki deems to be the DWU, but this gets dangerously close to circular, and renders R4 somewhat unhelpful.)
A story being non-valid does not mean it's not DWU, or that it's "not in-continuity with the rest of Doctor Who."
But it can mean those things. (At least the second insofar as Czech is using the term.) This is something I think even you admit. Formatting the page so as to explain these nuances for the individual story can only be seen as a good thing, clearing up misconceptions that might arise if we otherwise said "oh, yeah, of course everything has continuity".
So I really don't think it's a good enough issue to postpone a decision here.
Dude. We have another week on this thread. We can discuss some formatting changes to clear up Czech's one qualm. The sky will not fall. Najawin ☎ 20:09, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

There is quite the relation between my dislike of non-DWU and admins saying that non-valid stories are not "continuous with the rest of the DWU." The relation is that the admin is saying that non-valid stories are not continuous with the rest of the DWU, when this isn't true. Hell, I was just touching up Audio Visuals, a page about a series which has extensive continuity with the rest of the extended universe.

As per your statement that because some stories fail rule 4, those stories don't deserve continuity sections, I again refer you to the long detailed opening post I made which has not been disputed in any way by what you have found here. Hell! I'll just post part of the OP again.

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.

So AGAIN in my opinion continuity sections do not exist to analyze the Doctor Who canon. They exist to discuss connections between stories. Even stories which fail Rule 4 have continuity.

And I personally don't think you've raised any issues here which justify the forum being extended by a week. Sorry, dude, sorry bruh, but I think I have ever right to feel quite tired of these ghost arguments from years before we formed our current policy. OS25🤙☎️ 20:34, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you think arguments made in the past are any less meaningful than ones made in the present. If they're reasonable then, they're still reasonable now. Regardless, please refrain from putting words in my mouth. I in no way said
because some stories fail rule 4, those stories don't deserve continuity sections
I offered multiple options as to how to deal with Czech's critique, which applies to all invalid stories, not just those that fail R4. It's possible, given these options, that we might ultimately decline to have a continuity section, but I've consistently referenced proper formatting, and also alluded to subpages as being a potential solution.
As for the issue of continuity and non-DWU-ness, you, like Czech, are confusing two distinct notions of continuity. Having narrative connections is not the same as there not being rapid or immediate changes of certain features, properties, etc. I was very clear that there are two usages of the term being conflated, and that I was referring to a specific one in my prior comments, no? There's a parenthetical and everything! ;P
I'm not sure why you're finding this topic so exhausting and frustrating, but, ultimately, if everyone else thinks my request is quixotic, so be it. At the very least I think Czech has a point that people should discuss and a week won't kill us. If you're disinclined to engage meaningfully with that discussion, fair enough! Najawin ☎ 21:30, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
I want to weigh in before the closure of this thread, so I would like to voice my support of invalid sources being included in continuity sections and in Game of Rassilon categories. As continuity sections are essentially out of universe anyway, I do not feel segregating them into a subsection based on validity is reasonable, especially when some sources, like the majority of video games, are meant to "count" just as much as any other source but the Wiki doesn't treat them as valid due to misguided technical concerns about "which playthrough of the story is 'true' and which ones aren't". As for prefixes, while I like the suggestion I am not sure if I like the proposed executions. Perhaps we could revisit this with @Bongo50's citation templates in the not-too-distant-future? 19:52, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
Well, personally, I think that would only be helpful if the story being non-valid was what was being cited in Bongo's template. In this situation, we would thus abandon NOTVALID.
Because, while it's a controversial take... I would not be opposed to NOTVALID being retired. Our prefixes exist to clarify what medium of Who media we are pulling from. NOTVALID is not a medium, it is an arbitrary designation which only applies to our website. When writing stories in the non-valid subspace, citing TV or COMIC is much more important than citing NOTVALID. Furthermore, NOTVALID is a relatively new idea, as the site did not have a NOTCANON prefix. I question what it continues to add to the website, since it's only used in the non-valid subspace and in OOU essay-style articles. OS25🤙☎️ 19:59, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
Now you've said it, I find myself agreeing about "NOTVALID" not serving much purpose. I have been taking efforts to improve the quality of Wiki articles I write and employ information more relevant to a reader than a Wiki editor (so prioritising actual infomation about a source over whether or not we treat it as a valid source, and writing things like the [[2005 (releases)|2005]] television story ''[[Aliens of London (TV story)|Aliens of London]]'' over things like [[TV]]: ''[[Aliens of London (TV story)|Aliens of London]]'') so shifting away from a prefix that essentially means non-canon-by-another-name to the actual medium of the source would make much more sense and provide more concise info to a reader. Especially as the majority of casual readers confuse T:VS for canon anyway. 20:23, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
I too support replacing NOTVALID with medium prefixes. – n8 (☎) 21:26, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Conclusion

Introduction

I find myself wanting to start by echoing the premise of User:OttselSpy25's opening post. As the Temporary Forums wind down and we take stock of the legacy they will leave behind, it is wonderful and staggering to see to what degree we've been able to use them to "clean house". So many spurious, prejudice-based, or simply outdated policies cleared away to make room, at last, for legible, unbiased policy with transparent rationales. Nowhere is this more apparent than in matters of validity; at last no more aberrations like Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows), no more absurd exclusion of non-narrative fiction. The unforgivably, literally unjustified invalidity of the 10,000 Dawns crossovers was perhaps the last great bugbear of this website, the last black mark on our record, even if the delay in rectifying it was not entirely our own fault; and now that too has been cleared away.

So yes. The question "what's next?" does raise itself. And it is not "get rid of invalidity altogether". As we see its applications I am deeply ambivalent about the furthest reach of our recent reforms — the application of {{NCmaterial}} to the main, "valid" page in rare cases — precisely because it seems tantamount to such a thing. The difference does matter, and must matter; it's why it's so important that we not inaccurately label one as the other.

But if there is one last thing to rid ourselves of to complete our administrative regeneration, it is certainly that incredibly damaging notion that (fully-licensed) invalid sources "matter less", and that the non-valid parts of the Wiki should accordingly be edited less thoroughly than the valid ones. Covering the likes of Doctor Whoah!, fully and accurately, is as much part of our duties as covering Season 23 and Iris Wildthyme. It's part of Doctor Who's history in its own right; and moreover — if we don't Wikify it properly, who else will? It is one thing to stop short of covering all of Death's Head's appearances or the like — there are other Wikis on FANDOM which can reasonably take up the slack. But a DoctorWoah.fandom.com Wiki is never going to fly, let a lone a "that-one-tongue-in-cheek-Pyramids-of-Mars-DVD-extra.fandom.com" Wiki. We have to do it; and we have to do it right. No one else will.

And that idea has few explicit supporters nowadays; certainly we saw none in the present thread. But it is, as it were, a systemic issue within the Wiki. The infrastructure was designed with a second-class-citizen status for invalid fiction in mind. /Non-valid_sources, despite the teething pains, has helped with that; but there is more yet to clear away.

Ottsel is absolutely right about these principles. Now, for the implementation!…

Continuity sections

This was one of the more contentious issues, fraught with discussion of multiple meanings of the word "continuity" and basic confusion about what "Continuity" and "References" sections are even for. The following will not speak to what the Wiki's earliest founders had in mind when they created those sections — both because of our recent reforms to T:BOUND making this moot, but also because I've seen enough that their brains, at the time, were, on this issue, all fogged up with a fundamental confusion between "validity", "canon" and "continuity".

Regarding what we mean by "continuity" on this Wiki, User:Najawin tried multiple times to establish a distinction between "two distinct notions of continuity": the first being the one which pertains to narrative connections between stories, with DWU-ness, and with that great fell beast called Canon — while the second is the ordinary, non-fiction specific sense of "a transformation in which certain features are either preserved or change ’slowly enough’". This is praiseworthy, and clearer than the alternative, but still imprecise and in places too broad. I think most people were using a narrower sense of "continuity" than the general one, one specific to how to think about works of fiction; but, unfortunately, not always the same one.

  • First, there is "Continuity" as a singular thing to which everything from An Unearthly Child onwards belongs; "Doctor Who continuity". It is similar to popular notions of "canon", but is somewhat more informal; it survives a minor "continuity error" or two, and it is not a specific, authoritatively-delineated body of works ("a canon") but moreso the half-illusory sense of "the great big story that it all adds up to". In an important way, this "Continuity" is synonymous with the DWU that Rule 4 is talking about: when we ask "does the author intend to be in the DWU" we essentially ask "do they intend to add their own, humble brick to wider Doctor Who Continuity". I think that something like this was User:CzechOut's sense of "Continuity" and the meaning he had in mind in those early discussions. (I also surmise he viewed the Wiki's task as being to document this Continuity; such that works which don't "play ball", however licensed and however otherwise connected, were to him a hindrance, as opposed to things which it is just as much our duty to document as any other.)
  • Second, there is "Continuity" not as a wider thing that is, but as something that individual works do/contain/get-done-to-them. "Continuity" as in (forgive me) "continuity references". Narrative connections, or worldbuilding connections as the case may be (two pieces of non-narrative fiction might have "continuity" with one another). In this understanding, if one work of fiction we cover references or ties into another one we cover in any way, that is something to be discussed in the "Continuity" sections of those two stories. Doctor Whoah! 371 is not "in continuity" in the first sense; it is not intended as, and should not be covered as, something which adds to the ongoing multi-player game of crafting "the DWU". It's outside The Game, it's not meant to "count". But nevertheless it includes what any media-literate person in the 21st century will recognise as a continuity reference to Tooth and Claw.

There is a fairly large overlap between what you put in a Continuity section if you're going by Meaning #1, vs Meaning #2 — for valid stories. So it's not surprising that the confusion has lasted this long. Invalid stories are just the special cases proving that the Venn diagram is not, in fact, a circle.

This is what was being grasped towards with the proposition that "although no other story is connected with it, it is connected to other stories", but that was still not right. A Rule-4-passing work might very well have retroactive connections with an invalid one. Sometimes this leads to validation via Rule 4 By Proxy — but not necessarily. Under current policy, for example, take any reference to a story that's invalid on Rule 1 grounds for being multiple-choice. Search for the Doctor might both have continuity-references to other stories and have other stories make continuity-references to it, and still remain rightfully invalid under the current paradigm.

The point is not only that works which fail other parts of T:VS can still have continuity to and with other works, valid or otherwise (which is true, to begin with), but also that some works can be out of continuity (in the Rule 4 sense) while having continuity (in the "continuity references" sense).

(Obviously this is terribly confusing; and trying to minimise this is as good a reason as any for us to use "the DWU" instead of "continuity" when we mean the Rule 4 thing in policy contexts, although there are of course other issues with that term.)

So the question becomes: what meaning of "Continuity" do we use for the ==Continuity== sections? Historically, as I said, it seems early admins sometimes had the first thing in mind, if they made any distinction at all.

But this is where the Introduction comes into play. This was wrong, because it treated Rule-4-breakers as less important. It treated the fact that we had no good place to document the continuity references that they contain as an acceptable sacrifice on the altar of making the distinction between them and valid sources as obvious and intuitive as possible. Moving the information to "Story notes" or BTS section or somesuch is no real solution: these sections have their own purposes, and we're just muddying everything up if, on invalid pages, we also use them for purposes which would be improper on valid pages.

So yes. Pages about covered invalid sources should have ==Continuity== sections, going forward. (If they need them.)

Two caveats have been raised: I will now answer them.

First, as regards the case of valid works having references to non-valid ones — as far as cases where this is not grounds for Rule 4 By Proxy, these seems to be more support for the idea of a ===Continuity to non-valid sources=== section than for indiscriminately including invalid works in the Continuity section of valid sources directly. I initially mentally dismissed this as unnecessary, but then I noticed something very interesting: the proposal has been for "non-valid", not just invalid. This means that such sections could also discuss anything under the /Non-valid_sources umbrella — including not just invalid sources but also the other side of a crossover, or partially-unlicensed, partially-licensed stories like Iris Explains. This seems like a natural other-shoe to the introduction of /Non-valid_sources as a general concept, and if we have this, we may as well put regular-invalid material in there also. (A slightly counterintuitive, but, I think, warranted implication of this is that an invalid story could have such a "Continuity section + non-valid-continuity subsection" itself. Yes, yes, it's odd, but think about it: if Doctor Whoah! references another parody, or a charity story, it is doing something different from when it references Tooth & Claw, isn't it?)

Second, there is User:CzechOut's old objection about instilling confusion in readers. This one is legitimate, as User:Najawin was right to point out — to a point. I think some people didn't quite grok the issue, so I'll explain it before I resolve it. The problem is this: on a typical valid-story page, a point of continuity between The Snowmen and The Web of Fear — for example — might be phrased like this:

Now let's apply this to good old Doctor Whoah! 371. Following the same reasoning, we might be tempted to put this in the continuity section of the page on DW!371:

Do you see the problem? Here, a sentence with an in-universe POV, describing information from an invalid source, is followed by a parenthetical that cites a valid source. Anywhere else on the Wiki, this would mean the thing about Victoria II is a valid tidbit, citable to Tooth and Claw! What fresh madness is this!

Yes, yes, but… we kinda… sorta…

…shouldn't phrase things like that on valid pages either?

Sometimes ==Continuity== are written more like this:

This is much clearer; it's more subtle and more legible. And it would remove the issue with invalid use-cases. Both formats are currently allowed, and there seems to be a numerical advantage of the less-clear "in-universe" format, but this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and this sort of issue is precisely why. The truth is that such a statement as the one about the Ingellience and the Underground would still be verboten outside of a ==Continuity== section, all validity asides: what the heck are you doing, citing a sentence about the Eleventh Doctor to The Web of Fear? This is as likely to mislead casuals about how our citation formats work as anything is.

Going forward, an out-of-universe perspective should be favoured in all continuity sections if possible. This is a big ask, and although it's an ideal to trend towards I will not demand that we pull out all stops making valid stories' sections conform to this. However, given that we're going to be creating Continuity sections when none existed, I can and will ask that all continuity sections on invalid pages, and "continuity to non-valid sources" sections on valid or invalid pages, be written from an out-of-universe perspective. I think that ought to solve Czech's issue, to whatever extent it may have otherwise been a concern.

Digression: a word on "References"

I left some thoughts midway through this thread on what "References" sections are for. I believe it may be helpful to have them in black and white in a closing post for future — er — reference, so here they are again, lightly edited.

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.)

That doesn't mean it should just be a blank list of links. More things than entities can be thus "referenced"; it's also the place to put any and all non-plot-relevant worldbuilding details like "the Doctor mentions having once studied cheeesmaking" or the like. So the modern "References" section isn't quite the same thing as Czech's proposed blunt list of mentioned entities, not to mention the fact that it requires context.Myself, upthread

Game of Rassilon categories

Not very much to say here. Yes, it's all abstract and may become moot tomorrow. But yes, User:OttselSpy25 is right that, as long as we go through the trouble of keeping the good old rickety thing running, we may as well make it fair. The lack of GoR-points-giving categories on invalid pages was part of the warped incentivisation system which systematically discouraged in-depth editing of intvalid sources. Let us fix that while we still can, rather than let the Game pass into the dark blue yonder with, as it were, unfinished business.

/Non-valid_sources subpages of valid pages should be placed in all GoR-relevant categories that the main page is placed in, for as long as the Game of Rassilon endures. (This will of course be revised when its inevitable downfall does in fact take place.) And yes, the same applies to /Biography subpages.

Prefix reform

The NOTVALID Conundrum

First, an irrelevant note: the OP is incorrect (though a totally understandable misconception!) that "based on recent debates, Konnie Huq needs 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 (or the version of her in the Ninth Doctor blue peter sketch". To begin with, the non-valid subpage, if there was one, should be a subpage to the valid character, not to the real-world page: so Konnie Huq (in-universe)/Non-valid sources. But in any case, with a single invalid appearance to her name, the fictionalised Huq does not in fact warrant a whole Non-valid_sources subpage — just an ==In non-valid sources== subsection in the BTS section of Konnie Huq (in-universe). This is irrelevant to the wider discussion because a modern "==In non-valid sources==" subsection functions like a mini-/Non_valid_sources subpage in terms of formatting and presentation, but I just wanted to get that cleared up.

With this out of the way… whew boy. I hesitated on this longer than on any of the other sections. (Apologies for the delay in posting this closing post: real-life obligations aside, it mostly went into rethinking this one out, over and over.)

But in the end, radical as it is… yeah, what is NOTVALID for, anyway? The hyphenated prefixes would be a pain, but we don't need them. NOTVALID sources are only cited, with a prefix, in areas of the Wiki that are already signposted as invalid by other means, whether it be a section header, an {{invalid}} tag, or simply being a /Non-valid_sources subpage. We don't need to restate "this source isn't valid, and this source isn't valid, and this source isn't valid…" at every turn, when people already know they're in Invalid City! Medium prefixes would be much more informative. That way Sutekh/Non-valid sources can point out that some of the unserious Sutekh lore comes from a live-action HOMEVID skit while some other piece might be from a comic or a RPG game — this is far more readily interesting and useful than "the sources on the Non-valid_sources pages are non-valid"! Well, you don't say.

The one exception is the rare {{NCmaterial}}-on-the-main-page use-case, which I honestly think can and should be rolled back soon enough (though lest anyone misunderstand, the present closing post is not ruling as much: that would need its own discussion). And even that has a big screaming "some of the sources cited below aren't valid" banner on top: is it really such a problem if people have to click through (or check the expandable citation format once we have it live) to know precisely which? Is it?

And likewise, yes, as Ottsel mentioned in the OP, sometimes we cite valid sources briefly in Non-valid_sources — but is it such a problem if for that span, they are cited in the same way as invalid sources? Is anyone really going to be tricked by "The Ninth Doctor, who had met Rose on the Powell Estate (TV: Rose) later revealed on a quiz show that he was secretly the Powell Estate's landlord (COMIC: Last of the Landlords: A Doctor Whoah! Extravaganza)" appearing on Ninth Doctor/Non-valid sources into thinking that Rose is an invalid source? Even if they momentarily think this, will requiring them to click through to that page to find out otherwise really be any kind of hurdle at all? I don't think so.

NOTVALID will not be deleted, for archival purposes as much as anything; but its usage should be wound down and eventually discarded altogether. Ottsel proposes that a real-world page might still say something like "Konnie Hug was a Blue Peter presenter who appeared as herself in TV: Invasion of the Bane and NOTVALID: Blue Peter special 2005", but the fact of the matter is that outside of ==Continuity== section, using prefixes in plain text is actually discouraged. Just say "in the The Sarah Jane Adventures TV story Invasion of the Bane, as well as in the Blue Peter special 2005, which is not considered a valid source on this Wiki"! It's clearer, more informative, and links to T:VS (a page that will actually explain what the special's non-validity means) rather than the blunt NOTVALID blurb.

All of this will of course be reviewed when we are ready roll out {{cite source}}. But I think the basic reasoning outlined above will be found to still make sense. In 99% of contexts where we're going to cite Oh Mummy!, its invalidity will already be clear from the framing, and if we want to restate it in the citation, that is what should be off-loaded into the expandable citation, while the medium remains the default bit of information presented at first glance.

NC to NOTCOVERED

As the man behind NC (albeit just extrapolating from Nate's {{NCmaterial}}, whose naming the man himself now disavows for other reasons!), I ultimately find myself agreeing that the name is less than ideal. It's not even just that people might mistake it for "non-canonical" in particular. It's just not very clear. To a novice it might well just as well mean "Non-Continuous", in the "Meaning #1" sense of 'Continuity', and thus they'd mix it up with NOTVALID. And I think that's a reason we went with NOTVALID instead of NV, and it applies here too. It's not that "NV" could be mistaken as being about "canon"… but at first glance it's just obscure. ("Non-video"? "Non-verified"?) We want these thing instantly legible: that's the point. (Yes, yes, WC. But WC is the exception, not the norm, and honestly its non-intuitive naming is just one more reason why an overhaul of that particular prefix, too, is long overdue as many have noted in the past in scattered talk pages.)

For the same reason, NOCOV is right out. It's impenetrable. It doesn't even seem like an abbreviation, it sounds like the name of a minor character in Goncharov. NOTCOV is a little better, but it still doesn't quite outrun that "generic imaginary Russian name" feel. (Actually, Notkov is in fact a name people have, says Google.) Ultimately, I just think we had best take the plunge on NOTCOVERED, even if it's long. It won't take longer to type, after all — just type "NOTC…" and auto-suggestions will do the rest.

Conclusion

As ever, thank you to everyone who participated, and don't hesitate to leave further questions or requests for clarifications on the talk page! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 01:13, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

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