Forum:Rule 4 by Proxy and its ramifications: considered in the light of the forum archives

Index → The Panopticon → Rule 4 by Proxy and its ramifications: considered in the light of the forum archives

Spoilers are strongly policed here.
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

Opening Post

Introduction

(Note, this is a very, very long opening post. While you absolutely should read the whole thing before engaging in discussion with it, and probably all the linked threads too, it's structured so preliminary thoughts can probably be given if you just read the introduction and concluding section.)

So, like, what even is validity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what's this R4bp thing anyhow?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explanation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let's try another tactic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enforcement

It's an occasionally repeated line on this wiki that

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

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

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

So where do the worries emerge with R4bp?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous interpretation of policy

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

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

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

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

So about those interpretations

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

From User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1

Thread:125464 in April 2013,

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

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

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

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

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

Thread:179549 in November 2016,

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

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

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

From User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyhow, f it, we ball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forum threads

The elephant in the room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hippopotamus in the room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rhinoceros in the room

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

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

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

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

One other thread

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

Inconsistent reasoning

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

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

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

Tangerineduel has made the point that we can't believe a writer who says that their work is canonical. That's very true. But, in my opinion, he's incorrect on the reverse. I think we do have to believe a writer who declares, "Look, this isn't a part of the mainstream continuity." After all, we've believed it before. I don't see any rational argument for doing something different in this case. Moreover, it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity will have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you do take it seriously, because they're acting against their self-interest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potential responses

But we just validated all of these things!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fluffy little Pomeranian in the room

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

Am I maybe being a touch inconsistent?

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

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

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

Other potential responses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But more than this, I'm not unsympathetic to the underlying idea in the first place. I do think we should be trying to have things as valid if we can, and that "invalidity by proxy" would be a deeply worrying outcome. But there's a third option here, between choosing invalidity by proxy as privileged and validity by proxy as privileged. We can simply cut the link between older stories and new stories. We placed it there in the first place. It's the link that's causing issues. We need either to rig it more successfully in one direction or remove it.

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

In conclusion

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

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

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

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

I have my personal preference. But ultimately my reasons for liking it among these three options aren't really the sorts of things I think you can base wiki policy off of. So while I strongly feel that one of these choices has to be made, and I'm going to defend that contention quite strongly here - I think the status quo cannot continue, it is up to the community which of these three options we should choose. Najawin ☎ 14:59, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

Can I have a TL;DR?

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

15:29, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Let me first of all say that this is a rare case where I not only disagree with the OP being pitched here, I disagree with the need for us to have this debate. Usually I would find such statements unhelpful, but this is a very specific case.

We codified R4BP at the end of January 2023. With all things considered, it has barely been six months since we passed this. In the past, restarting a debate which is so recent has been explicitly against site policy - for instance, when an Infobox image is picked on a talk page, it is often said that the topic can not be revisited for another twelve months. In the olden days of these forums, it was typically frowned upon to respond to a failed validity proposal by restarting it a few months later - I recall being reprimanded for this at times, and I eventually learned that restarting recent forum debates simply wasn’t cordial (even if I was right about the topic at hand).

The fact that much of Najawin’s opening post here relates to him simply quoting a forum post from the last six months and disagreeing with the conclusions is, I think, a big issue; especially as this is now the fourth or fifth forum in these six months wherein he has openly debated how “real” this policy actually is.

Indeed, one of Najawin’s biggest arguments here revolves around him attempting to find some ambiguity in the difference between references and continuity on story pages, partially through citing former historical forums. This is disturbing as we have already had a recent debate where he did this, which had a closing post that resolved the issue. Accordingly, an extensive amount of the arguments in this post are not new and we’ve, in fact, had these debates recently.

Moreover, it was very smart of us to tackle this issue in the temporary space and at the start of the year - before we were allowing a huge influx of validity debates. The reason is that Rule 4 By Proxy and adjacent topics influence at least half of any validity arguments which we are likely to have. There are discussions ongoing right now which now must sit in limbo, perhaps unable to be closed due to this forum creating a convoluted case of T:BOUND (although I obviously leave this up to the admins, I think in this case we should just continue closing forums regardless).

I am going to be attempting to go through as much of this OP as I possibly can. But I will often be discussing other topics which I find more relevant. But this opening post, in my opinion, is meandering, incorrect, and in violation of T:BOUND.

At the start of this forum, Najawin begins things by stating one simple opinion: Validity is not canon.

Surely this is true to some extent - validity is not entirely canon. But the important thing is that, long ago, validity was canon. In the olden days of the site, we attempted to decipher what was canon, as can clearly be identified by taking any sort of glance at T:CANON. However, as the official stance of the BBC became “there is no canon” or even “everything is canon,” the site pivoted. T:VS was soon created, instituting “four little rules.” One of those rules, “was this intended to be set inside the Doctor Who universe,” was at least for a time not significantly different from asking “is this canon?”

Now, I would not go out of my way to say that the current reading of our rules and policies today involve any debate about if something is canon. But, for a time, the worst parts about said discussion bled into every aspect of this wiki.

For instance, many rulings in our past insinuated that “the Doctor Who Universe” actually meant “the BBC Wales Doctor Who universe” - that is, the universe of Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Paul McGann. So a story which could not have properly adjusted itself for this universe - such as Scream of the Shalka - was deemed to have not sufficiently placed itself inside the correct DWU.

Worse yet was the factor that “Not-DWU”, like non-canon, could be something assigned to a specific story at any point. One example is the 1992 Shada was originally declared Not-DWU is because someone working on the 2003 Shada said that the Tom Baker version was not canon.

Thus, in spite of that author never working on the original production or the 1992 VHS, we judged that the Baker Shada was to be non-valid for the rest of time, because this was an “official stance” by someone in 2003.

The issue here is that we can find quotes like this about a lot of media - Moffat himself has said Lungbarrow isn’t set in his Doctor’s universe, same for the rest of the Virgin novels. Shall we say they fail rule 4 now?

If I write a story for Titan Comics, what’s stopping me from saying on Twitter that The Forgotten comic isn’t canon? Would that be good enough to remove that story’s right to rule 4? I’d hope not.

This is made even worse by the fact that, before the start of this decade, we consistently considered the “DWU” to actually mean the “BBC Wales DWU.” As in, the Shalka Doctor isn’t a part of the Christopher Eccleston DWU - thus it’s not DWU. This is the messiest of messy slippery slopes, as even in the revived series a consistent canon is impossible to find with this franchise.

(An infamous example of all of this, highlighted in the OP above, is that there is no evidence that Dr. Who and the Daleks did not intend itself to be set in "the Doctor Who universe" as it was defined in the 1960s. But fans decided it wasn’t set in the "Doctor Who canon” of the Classic series, and the BBC eventually agreed. Thus, it was non-valid - because the “Doctor Who universe” meant the specific universe spanning William Hartnell to (at the time (but also currently I guess)) David Tennant.)

So, eventually in our site history we decided that authorial intent at time of release is what really mattered most, not retroactive intent. You can intend to have your story be DWU, but a future work can not remove you from that status. So Chris Chibnall can’t just say “The Time Crocodile isn’t canon” with the expectation that this will effect our judgement.

And we sorted this out even further in the late 2010s, when it was decided that something being related to a non-valid stories does not make it non-valid immediately. A Dimensions in Time sequel does not Rule 4 simply because an admin (incorrectly) claimed that Dimensions fails Rule 2. Fixing a Hole does not fail Rule 4 simply because the original has a weird fourth wall moment. (You’ll forgive me if I’m not hunting for historical quotes. I was there, thus I don’t need historical quotes.)

Changing this was not just an arbitrary choice - it fundamentally fixed a huge problem on our site. That being the ultimate toxicity of the concept of canon and how it bleeds from story-to-story. In a world where mentioning the plot to Dimensions in Time is a sin, we are judging canon. It’s as simple as that - our validity policies reflect canon if we’re allowing such things. And since “no canon” is the biggest rule we have, we again fixed our policies and did not, in fact, contradict them.

Now, one thing I want to get ahead of in this debate is the idea that Rule 4 By Proxy is a brand new rule invented this very year. This is absolutely not true, as all we have done in 2023 is codify a concept which has always been on the site.

Long-time users will know that I would often joke in forums that the only thing stopping the Cushing Doctor or Lenny Henry’s Seventh Doctor from being valid is some comic story illustrating them as existing in some alternate universe. And I was hardly a lone wolf on this.

As my key piece of evidence, I would like to bring up a series Najawin has not so far. If Rule 4 By Proxy is thrown out and we enforce the opposite, this series will be non-valid the very next day. That is Big Finish’s Doctor Who Unbound.

This series was called non-valid very early into the site’s history. In fact, the rule as per WHY Unbound was invalid still exists in T:VS - any “what if” story is immediately not-valid until proven otherwise. Shortly after I joined the site, I questioned why Unbound wasn’t valid if the series has been depicted as an alternate universe. The following forum says a lot.

in Forum:Is the Doctor in Sympathy of the Devil of mainstream continuity because he appeared in The 100 Days of The Doctor?

Here is a very shortened version of the conversation:

I hope that my question can be understood from the title. The Doctor (Sympathy for the Devil) is a page with the Nondwu tag on it, and for a very solid reason; he was introduced in a piece not meant to be cannon. But he appeared briefly in The 100 Days of the Doctor (audio story) when the Doctor and Evelyn "side step" into his universe, so should he be considered mainstream because of that? Keep in mind that this is different from Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon? because that was covering a very vague reference to the alternate Ninth Doctor, while this story is an obvious appearance.

And if he is "in-universe" or however tou want to say it, does that mean that his original two stories are as well? OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 05:25, November 24, 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps.

That the Doctor side steps / crosses over to another universe, based on our other sources would make it valid.

The difference here that others may point out is that the Sympathy universe was intended to be non-canon (a term we've by now established doesn't really exist) or to be a "what if" scenario (which Big Finish uses). Our own Doctor Who Unbound article uses the term "premises fundamentally altered" linking to parallel universe. Forum:References to BFDWU as alternate or diverging timeline also discusses this separation and CzechOut stated in that discussion "they're meant to be outside the DWU. That's why they're called unbound — as in "not bound by continuity"."

But now brining in this extra reference of the Doctor going there, that means it is a place that can be visited by the Doctor and it, by its reference in 100 Days makes it linked to the main DWU. --Tangerineduel / talk 08:16, November 24, 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, it's been a while since I've heard this one. Does David Warner actually appear in The 100 Days of the Doctor? ... Well, there are worse ways to spend half an hour. I'll let you know after I've listened to it. ... Neither Warner nor Nicholas Courtney appear. What happens is that the Doctor claims to be travelling "sideways" into alternate realities, and then he gives a barebones description of that world's Doctor and Brigadier. There is, by my reckoning, exactly one sentence which ties it to Sympathy for the Devil: "He goes on and on about his time with the Brigadier in Hong Kong". Evelyn says that he gave up his TARDIS' dimensional stabiliser so that Six and Evelyn could get out of that reality, so in that sense there is a tangible connection between the two universes. And obviously the mention of "Hong Kong" is an Easter Egg for the "Unbound au fait". But it's really, really minor. It's perfectly possible to believe that there's no connection whatsoever.

For the ease of writing articles around here, I think it's better just to make a little note about this at The 100 Days of the Doctor and leave it there. Opening up the possibility that all Unbounds are merely parallel universes off of the main DWU — just because of two quick lines in a highly meta-textual celebratory episode — is going a step too far. If David Warner actually appeared, I'd say you'd have to do it. As he doesn't, the reference is suggestive more than definitive. It's very much like the situation in The Gallifrey Chronicles where the Rowan Atkinson Doctor is supposedly alluded to. It's kinda/sorta the Warner Doctor, but maybe it's not.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  01:15: Sun 25 Nov 2012

[Emphasis mine, not theirs]

And indeed, when the Warner Doctor returned and was explicitly from another universe, all Unbound material was made valid, ignoring and reversing that the series was “unbounded from continuity.”

Now again, we are not bound by forums this old, and in fact Czech personally requested that we ignore and in some cases redo any debate from this far back. See the opening post of Forum:The New Forums.

In his post, Najawin argues that this is NOT what was said here. Instead, he thinks that the agreed upon concept of Unbound being retconned into an alternate universe was actually clarification of authorial intent. Big Finish was not retconning that the series existed in a parallel reality to the Doctor’s - they were just clarifying the original intention of the series. Personally, I think this is simply a slanted reading invented to try and ignore the fact that Rule 4 By Proxy, the idea of something which outwardly fails Rule 4 being brought back into continuity by a future story, was clearly understood in theory while T:VS was still being written.

In fact, in the above quotes, we see direct reference to a theoretical story bringing Unbound back into continuity via a future retcon. The quote is not “Well, a future story might make the authorial intent more clear,” it’s 100% “A future story can bring a story back into continuity.” Czech’s response here is swift: “I’d say you’d have to do it.”

(I would go as far as to say that if Najawin’s pitch passes here, Unbound should immediately be non-valid again as a series, because “What if” fiction is directly banned in the fine text of T:VS. Thus, it is only valid through some version of the R4BP concept.)

In fact, what you can see here AND in the forum about Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon? is that the concept of R4BP was never disputed. However, how explicit the connection needed to be in the text was argued about in detail, as we can see here in Czech saying that the events of Sympathy of the Devil being referenced is too vague to form a debate around.

However, we have more recently more clearly defined a community standard for what “continuity” actually is - and there is no need or justification to redebate the topic. To quote the recent closing post of Forum:Temporary forums/Trailers:

Some of the points made by User:Najawin about the proposed R4BP rationale struck me as a little strange. Specifically, he claimed that "there's no continuity here" about the scene in Christmas on a Rational Planet, where Cwej finds a disused Prime computer near the TARDIS control room. I can only echo PintlessMan's replies here, minus the focus on "humour" which Najawin disavowed as the crux of his disagreement:

If, say, a Past Doctor Adventure set in the 1970s had a villain hyping up his powerful new supercomputer and then it turned out to be an ordinary Prime 200, that would be an in-joke. It might be funny to fans who remembered the advertisement but would imply no continuity connection. But what we have here is a very direct connection to the narrative situation of the advertisements: the Seventh Doctor is shown to have, in storage aboard the TARDIS, a Prime computer which he has clearly acquired at some point in the past. We know exactly when he acquired it, and what the circumstances were, because we have literally seen this happen on television in a story starring Tom Baker and Lalla Ward.User:PintlessMan

A character finding a recognisable object from a past adventure, gathering dust in the very place it was last time we saw it, is a textbook example of "continuity". It's "continuity" to City of Death when, in COMIC: The One, the characters find a spare Mona Lisa in a spare room of the TARDIS among other Fourth Doctor memorabilia, and we note it as such in the "Continuity" section. It's "continuity" to An Unearthly Child when TV: Remembrance of the Daleks lingers on Susan Foreman's history book, left lying around in a classroom — even though, famously, that reference doesn't even actually make sense! This is absolutely a "continuity reference", not just an "easter egg". (It's both. The world is a complicated place where things can be two things at once. We seem to be coming back to this theme in this closing post!) (User:ScroogeMacDuck

As per T:BOUND, the argument as per if a continuity reference being minor impacts it being continuity is finished. It has been tackled here and then here just this year alone. I will not argue against the idea that easter eggs can’t be continuity, because it is policy that they can be and we are bound by policy. There is no new debate to be had.

(This is fundamentally true for many of the recent arguments we’ve had in the forum. Since January, we’ve consistently resolved arguments, seen closing posts explaining policy, only to have said arguments restarted the next time the topic comes up. It’s tiring.)

Rewinding back to the history of this policy in the 2010s, at the most basic understanding of this topic, two things are clear.

1, that no story has the right to remove another story’s “Rule 4ness” after-the-fact. We can’t call the John and Gillian comics NOTDWU simply because some people have sought to “revoke” their “rule 4ness.”

And then 2; that retroactive continuity assigning some level of DWU-ness to a story is an equivalent to the former. Just because the 2003 Shada no longer invalidates the TV Shada does not mean that it’s a contradiction that The Library in the Body validates Sympathy for the Devil. These are separate concepts entirely.

So by the end of the 2010s, precedent and policy was clear: the status of being DWU can not and should not be removed from any fiction by future retcons. BUT, the status of being DWU can be grandfathered in. We did not invent Rule 4 By Proxy this year, we merely wrote it down and made the site better. This wasn’t a contradiction then, it isn’t a contradiction now.

I think something about this forum which I find kind of insulting is A) that we’re all having our motivations brought into question (which is against the rules by the way) and B) that Najawin has continued his favored passion of implying that his opinions are backed up by logic, reasoning and philosophy while we’re all just kind of acting out carnal impulses without thought. I think I’m allowed to be insulted, and frankly I am insulted.

Moving on from that, let’s go ahead and talk about the biggest elephant in the room. The thing that Najawin and I have most publicly disagreed about: what matters more? The present or the past.

As far as I see it, there are three kinds of policy. Policy which is written down, policy which exists through implementation and clarification, and policy which once existed through implementation/clarification but has is not the current headspace or modus operandi of our users/admins.

I have no allegiance to the third thing. None at all. All of the weight and importance comes from the first two - all of it. The third kind should really only be used to clarify historical aspects of the website or to figure out why things exist. But if there is some policy which was never written down but was the belief of an admin in, say, 2015... That has much less weight than the current community saying “We don’t like that.”

As an example: When Scrooge, an active admin in our current community, gives a passing judgement about the difference between Continuity sections and References sections, that has MUCH MORE weight than admins arguing that there is no difference between the two a decade ago.

And if an admin in 2013 has an opinion that goes against current judgement? Then they can show up today and argue that stance again, if they still even believe that in the first place. It’s not my job to debate spirits - and I dislike the implication that the opinion of someone a decade ago is more important than the people who show up here every day.

Hell, one of the big quotes given in this forum is from the original forum about Vienna, with the admin in question arguing why we shouldn’t cover it. The stance represented in this post, if you read the full thing, has absolutely no relevance to how we judge tangential validity today. And yet, it’s quoted here as if it is a completely relevant approximation of how policy works in 2023 - when it’s simply not! This is not the only time this has happened recently, and I personally feel many of these quotes hold less weight in-context.

Another person cited, Amorkuz, is not an admin today because they were unceremoniously stripped of the title. And yet, when an old quote of theirs is found, we often see that presented as being more important than the words of our current, active admin team.

In a previous forum, Najawin responded to me calling such out-of context and ancient quotes “ghost arguments” by saying:

You call them ghost arguments. But what they really are is arguments you don't like. Do we just refuse to read Aristotle because he's dead? Descartes? Kant? Absurd. If the arguments are good the arguments are good. They don't have to have someone around to actively promote them.

My response to this is that I believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Aristotle believed in the Geocentric model - that the sun revolved the Earth. If I am giving a presentation on why the Earth revolves the sun, I am speaking of our current understanding of the world and how it operates. If someone said “Well, Aristotle said the sun goes around the Earth, and he’s as important as current experts” I think that’s stupid. Aristotle died 2,355 years ago, he can get dunked on.

Let’s bring up this idea of designing our site to be friendly to new users. I, personally, believe that an editor who joins this month can figure out what continuity is. It’s the connections a story has to other stories and the connections caused by a story. It’s the beautiful thing that wikis are created to document.

What I can not expect with these new users is for them to become immersed with sixteen years of convoluted forum debates. For them to not only read a forum from 2013, but understand all the words they have to swap out for it to make sense with current policy. I can’t tell a new user, when asked why a rule is as it is, “Hey, read this thing from 2009, then read through these four Threads which are extremely inaccessible and often embarrassing for everyone.”

I understand that context as per how our rules formed are important but I just do not agree with this idea that I must consider something a former admin said in 2016 more important than the admins who are with us in this exact moment. I said it before, I will say it again. The present is more important than the past. We are here right now - and our current community has more importance than anything else.

So, yes, the ideas we all have about making the wiki better are important. Saying “Well, you’re motivated by the fact that you want to cover certain things!” Yes. Yes I am. I want to make the wiki a better place, that’s my motivation.

The big reason I feel so strongly about Rule 4 By Proxy is not only that it makes sense, but also that it’s essentially only made our site better in every case that it’s been used. We are meant to be a Doctor Who fandom dedicated to discussing the most obscure parts of the universe - and the obscure connections between stories that almost no one has ever heard of! And yet, due to our outdated policies of the past, we were once expected to essentially lie about the contents of stories in order to preserve some sense of “validity.”

Yes, we can have a “valid” page about Cushing’s Dr. Who, or the “aristocrat Doctor” without validating the Dalek films or Shalka... But they must be forceful stubs, because in spite of these characters returning in valid fiction, we can only allow short blurbs about the “real” stories where they appear. Policies which force pages to be terrible are anti-user, and thus do not serve a purpose other than following rules for the sake of following rules. I have no love for bureaucracy, and I will not act cordially towards the idea - we should make our website a good website.

There is no need to turn around and make stories like Scream of the Shalka non-valid, and the core reason is that very few people want that and it doesn’t make sense. I would say most people active in this forum prefer a more open-minded site where people come to their own conclusions rather than being told “Nuh uh, this doesn’t count.” And the reason this is preferred is mostly that, since at least the Moffat era, this has been the official stance of the BBC!

The biggest issue with our site has always been that so much of the history of if something is “valid” has come down to just judging canon but by a different name. We have the ability to change that, and we’re trying to. And I just don’t get this idea that I am meant to be moved by you finding quotes from 2016 where someone says “I don’t know if this is a good idea, I’m not sure what the boundaries would be.” We know what the boundaries are because we’ve discussed said boundaries countless times in countless resolved forums. We’ve discovered the boundaries. We’ve established precedent and policy.

Najawin’s primary new argument - that “Rule 4 By Proxy” might lead to a threat of “Rule 1 by Proxy” or “Rule 2 by Proxy” is... Well, hardly moving.

The boundaries stated in the closing post of the deleted scenes forum was very clear. A story must be released by itself, as a stand-alone piece of fiction, probably given its own title, before we will consider it a standalone work of fiction with its own release. I do not disagree with this conclusion because it at least creates a coherent policy on the topic. What it does not do is create a rule that a story can be pulled back into “being fiction” by being mentioned by a future story. That doesn’t make sense. For instance, if you agree that 1992 Shada isn't a full piece of fiction, does the 2017 Shada count as R1BP? No, that's stupid.

The horrid threat of us POTENTIALLY COVERING STORIES WHICH BREAK COPYRIGHT IN ORDER TO DISCUSS THEIR CONNECTIONS TO LICENSED WORKS... Feels forced when we currently allow that? It’s called NOTCOVERED? And the Fan works pages? We’ve had a good amount of discussions about this??

The Amorkuz quote about a story needing to be “commercial releases” is noted, but does not leave an impression to me because A) Amorkuz was stripped of his role of admin without ceremony, and B) no part of our rules say a release can’t be commercial. This goes back to my old argument about the three kinds of policy.

Rule 3 insisting on a commercial release is neither written policy or the beliefs of the current commmunity of editors and admins. The fact that a select few admins, 5+ years go, disagreed... Who cares? I don’t, and I refuse your request for me to change my mind.

Truthfully, the only way that something can gain “Rule 3ness” when is if it is simply released. For instance, when Doctor Who Discovers Pirates was released after being lost media for decades, it passes Rule 3. It doesn’t qualify for R3BP. That is not a thing.

Since there isn’t even a coherent theory pitched for any of these three rules, their existence as the end of a slippery slope does not become corporeal. I’m not threatened because these ideas aren’t actually real.

The big difference, in my opinion, between Rules 1-3 and Rule 4 is that Rules 1-3 cover concepts which are academic to some sense. If this fiction? Was this licensed fully? Was this released?

Whereas Rule 4 is something truly arbitrary. Was this intended to be set inside the Doctor Who universe - which is, depending on whom you ask, either a literal fictional universe, a metaphorical term used to describe a story’s closeness to the Doctor Who brand, or just a state of mind that we have to judge on vibes alone. Or, to others, it is simply “Is this canon?”

This is naturally going to be the rule to have the most complications because even we do not always agree on what definition exists for “DWUness”. And when it comes to content which is part of the DW brand but wasn’t intended to flow with continuity, there is going to be a somewhat fluid understanding of its role on the wiki. That is good and natural.

To the average TW reader, valid and non-valid is a completely arbitrary system. They’re separated by a tiny box. Often when we’ve described this concept to Spongebob, one of our contacts with FANDOM, they have reacted with total confusion about what we are talking about. At the end of the day a lot of this doesn’t matter as much as we act like it does.

But the separation between these sections of the site creates a major annoyance when it comes to content which once existed ambiguously with the DWU - but later was pulled back into continuity. There is no good reason to have a NOT-DWU page covering the Doctor featured in Scream of the Shalka only to have a separate page about the “pale aristocrat” seen in the novels.

R4BP is simply a way to make the site better by actually covering what we’re supposed to - continuity in the DWU.

To respond to the few of your specific notes about stories effected by R4BP:

1. The Peter Cushing films are currently covered exactly as they would be if they were valid from the get-go. Any indication that we’re covering them “Wrong” because of exactly HOW we validated them is silly - if we validated the Cushing films tomorrow for just never violating Rule 4, the pages would all look exactly the same.
2. Dimensions of Time should have been validated, it just should have had its own forum. The story does pass Rule 2 and 3 and the narrative that the story wasn’t originally invalidated for “canon” is simply not true. We will have a forum about this I presume soon and it will end with the story staying valid. The simply truth is that previous forums where some argued the story failed Rules 2 and 3 refused the community to respond and made arguments which would be extremely disastrous if applied to any other stories.
3. Friend from the Future is an example of a story that should never have been invalidated. We had an official quote from the author saying it fit into continuity and he specifically planned this. That should have been the end of it, and any argument otherwise simply stemmed from people not understanding the story.

I also want to bring up that any belief that our core interest as a website is always authorial intent is simply not true. Furthermore, if it is, then why The Daft Dimension and Earth-33 1/3 are brought up is beyond me, as those stories are covered as alternate dimensions because that was the authorial intent. There are not grounds to redebate this because T:BOUND is a rule we must follow in these forums.

But I should point out that any idea that authorial intent from the perspective of the writer was the ONLY thing is considered in the past is simply not true. Paul Cornell did not consider the Richard E Grant Doctor “Non-DWU” when the story was released. And I’ve seen no evidence of Dan Freedman feeling that way about Death Comes to Time - in fact he’s written numerous sequels to the story since then. And, again, the creators of the 1992 Shada recon did not consider it “non-DWU”.

Instead, it was the quotes of other people, often later than the release, which was used to pass judgement here. So any idea that Rule 4 is in reference to a golden standard of authorial intent is simply not true.

I am, I must admit, continually disturbed by the ongoing subtext of discussions like these that the work we are all currently doing and have been doing is not real. As if the Temporary forums were a sham, or victories in the New forums are not corporeal. I again insist, the discussions we have on this site as a community THIS DECADE have more importance than anything else. The Temporary forums were real, the New forums are real, and we have established policy. The present matters more than the past, community overrules context.

At the end of the day, this is how I feel - Rule 4 By Proxy is not a new concept. It has history and precedent going back over a decade. And we had a very legitimate and very real forum about the topic barely six months ago. R4BP is policy, we’ve established precedent through several forums since and before January. Unraveling the policy, and making Fixing a Hole, Unbound, Scream of the Shalka, P.S. and more DWU sources non-valid serves no purpose and we do not have the energy or manpower to do it in the first place.

R4BP exists. It’s done. I won’t have much else to say - we are bound by policy and furthermore I’ll be on vacation until the 8th of August. When the 30th day comes, I say nothing in this forum should pass and we should all agree to finally let this end. OS25🤙☎️ 15:32, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

This is a wonderful response OS25, and one I agree with wholeheartedly. I am not as skilled with words or debate, but I have to say I am more than a little rattled at how often decades old comments and thread are used to block discussions or arguments (and I think this is even worse when it comes from former admins who are no longer a part of our community.) Community change, and thus we should update our rules and standards accordingly. It is clear that R4BP is not only supported by plenty of active editors, but, as a policy, has done a lot of good for the wiki and its coverage of sources. It exists, after a lengthy discussion and debate that included both our admins and quite a few active editors, and it shouldn't be undone. I mean, as OS25 proves so skillfully in his post, the concept of the policy has been around for a long time!

I don't think I have much more to add, but I would also agree that I think this thread verges on breaking T:BOUND. I for one am really glad that we had both the temporary forums and the policy changes that came from it. Liria10 ☎ 15:51, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Seconding Liria's response. I am equally annoyed about very old threads being mentioned so often, especially to create such a long post, and additionally do think this thread violates T:BOUND by bringing up so-recent discussions, especially with the implications of them being less "valid" than older discussions. I'd even say this may be breaking T:POINT, although that's, y'know, reasonably similar. I'm also sympathetic to OS25's claim of "personal attack" (although it's of course not personal to one person...) but not entirely convinced, as I'd like to believe in your - Najawin's - good faith. But yeah, I fully agree with OS25, basically. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 16:03, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

(In response to OS25, I'll structure my thoughts on Najawin's proposal once I've done my homework, which ought to have been completed a while ago):

Just because Aristotle believed that the sun revolved around the earth it does not mean that his views are worthless. If an argument for something is good, then it is good whether made yesterday or two thousand years ago. Just because someone first proposed everyone being nice to each other for once thousands of years ago, it does not mean that there is no virtue on the concept. If new arguments have been brought to light, then we should hear them, and consider how they reflect on our (well, yours, I wasn't on the wiki back then) policy changes.

Furthermore, Najawin's OP is not just a look at 4bp, but suggesting where we can go from it, and looking at how we can build on it in a manner that wouldn't have been possible in the original thread. What you have interpreted as an argument against 4bp is a suggestion. Najawin is suggesting 1-3bp, to make our rules more consistent. Therefore, I maintain that this is not a T:POINT/T:BOUND situation (I always get them mixed up). Aquanafrahudy 📢 17:12, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

I will be back soon enough with a longer post addressing the object of the thread itself, as a user arguing my case; but let me quickly step in with my administrator hat on to say that I personally assured User:Najawin before he started this thread, that it would not be held to be in breach of T:BOUND, given that he was revisiting the question based specifically on novel arguments and perspectives. This is not to say that users can’t personally opine that the perspectives weren’t worth starting the thread; nor that *every* part of the OP is necessarily in accordance with the spirit of T:BOUND; but when it comes to whether Najawin had a right to start this thread at all, let’s not get bogged down in attacks of that nature. He started it in good faith because I explicitly assured him it wouldn’t, based on what he had shared with me about his intentions for it. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:53, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

To take the points in turn in OS25's post.

The fact that much of Najawin’s opening post here relates to him simply quoting a forum post from the last six months and disagreeing with the conclusions

This is a wildly uncharitable read of my post. Insofar as I quote text from the thread I do so to highlight what the policy is, before explaining how it fails to meet several criteria that it likely should. I very much try to keep my personal distaste for its conclusions to a minimum.

one of Najawin’s biggest arguments here revolves around him attempting to find some ambiguity in the difference between references and continuity on story pages, partially through citing former historical forums. This is disturbing as we have already had a recent debate where he did this, which had a closing post that resolved the issue.

This is not true, Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes fundamentally does not address the criticisms leveled in Thread:117229 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I. Perhaps my citing of the other threads confused the issue, since those were somewhat touched on? The one I based most of my criticism on was never addressed though.

But this opening post, in my opinion, is meandering, incorrect, and in violation of T:BOUND.

Being thorough is no crime. As to the accusation of a T:BOUND (well, really, T:POINT) violation, that others have echoed, it only impresses upon me that nobody actually takes the time to read the things I cite. Scrooge and I had an explicit discussion over whether the arguments brought up in this thread would be a T:POINT violation.

At the start of this forum, Najawin begins things by stating one simple opinion: Validity is not canon.

Site policy, in fact.

But the important thing is that, long ago, validity was canon. In the olden days of the site, we attempted to decipher what was canon, as can clearly be identified by taking any sort of glance at T:CANON. However, as the official stance of the BBC became “there is no canon” or even “everything is canon,” the site pivoted.

This is ahistorical nonsense. Look at posts from 2005. Our site founder, User:Mantrid, explicitly says the opposite. Forum:The original inclusion debates#Excluded

In fact I personally don't think we should be making any decisions about canon at all. Unlike, for example, Star Wars where there is more-or-less a consensus on what is and isn't canon, Doctor Who canon is very much open to personal interpretation. As archivists here I feel our 'duty' (for want of a better word) is to record and make available information about the fictional world of Doctor Who in all its forms. As long as we clearly indicate the source of each bit of information then we can leave it up to the user to decide what they include in their own personal canon.

As you can see from that discussion, the original editors of the wiki were very aware that "canon" in terms of what the wiki meant was not some set of texts given to them by The BBC. Insofar as they used the term it was to refer to texts that they covered in a specific way.

This is made even worse by the fact that, before the start of this decade, we consistently considered the “DWU” to actually mean the “BBC Wales DWU.”

Again, this is just not true. There was a significant amount of work in the early days of the wiki on the VNAs and EDAs, as well as the Benny Summerfield books. (So much so that Tangerine was actually considered the expert on the wilderness years era!) If you'd like me to find historical quotes or edits I can, as they're in large supply.

In his post, Najawin argues that this is NOT what was said here. Instead, he thinks that the agreed upon concept of Unbound being retconned into an alternate universe was actually clarification of authorial intent.

Well, yes, and if you look closer at what you quoted you'll see it supports my analysis.

Forum:References to BFDWU as alternate or diverging timeline also discusses this separation and CzechOut stated in that discussion "they're meant to be outside the DWU. That's why they're called unbound — as in "not bound by continuity"."

But now brining in this extra reference of the Doctor going there, that means it is a place that can be visited by the Doctor and it, by its reference in 100 Days makes it linked to the main DWU. (Emphasis yours OS25, I can't imagine how you didn't think this was the obvious response) -User:Tangerineduel

Unbound is a fringe case because they were explicitly reading authorial intent as saying it wasn't linked by continuity, and when it turned out it was, that's when they had to re-evaluate.

In fact, what you can see here AND in the forum about Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon? is that the concept of R4BP was never disputed.

Flatly untrue. It's disputed by Czech in the opening post.

I think something about this forum which I find kind of insulting is A) that we’re all having our motivations brought into question (which is against the rules by the way) and B) that Najawin has continued his favored passion of implying that his opinions are backed up by logic, reasoning and philosophy while we’re all just kind of acting out carnal impulses without thought. I think I’m allowed to be insulted, and frankly I am insulted.

Hmm? I've rather tried quite hard not to do this. Indeed, I took a multiple day break agonizing over how to quote people best so as to not misrepresent their views - or to do so as little as I could. I wrote this in clear view of everyone else, as your response here illustrates, when I could have written this in private. Nate and Scrooge both left comments on my talk page clarifying points and suggesting notes and I've taken them into consideration. I even asked you for a citation for a claim you made since I tried to incorporate it into this post! I think I've acted in abundantly good faith here. If you truly had an issue with the contents of my post, you could have left a talk page message and suggested edits. I've tried very hard to represent everyone's views as charitably as I can.

It’s not my job to debate spirits - and I dislike the implication that the opinion of someone a decade ago is more important than the people who show up here every day.

I'm rather concerned why you keep focusing on the people involved here. I hold no allegiance to people from any time period. I hold to the strength of an argument. If an argument from 10, 20, 100, 1000 years ago is stronger than what people today are saying, it wins out. No matter what people today think. People today can gnash their teeth and insist that the community really wants to do something one way. But my allegiance is always to the strength of the argument.

Hell, one of the big quotes given in this forum is from the original forum about Vienna, with the admin in question arguing why we shouldn’t cover it. The stance represented in this post, if you read the full thing, has absolutely no relevance to how we judge tangential validity today. And yet, it’s quoted here as if it is a completely relevant approximation of how policy works in 2023

This is, again, flatly untrue. I literally say after quoting it "Obviously a controversial thread, but, to note what the interpretation was at the time." It's explicitly in the section about whether this decision was in continuity with past decisions. Dear lord.

Another person cited, Amorkuz, is not an admin today because they were unceremoniously stripped of the title. And yet, when an old quote of theirs is found, we often see that presented as being more important than the words of our current, active admin team.

I don't know how you got this reading from my thread, I'm really quite interested, but let's just again stress that this too is untrue. Amorkuz resigned.

My response to this is that I believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Aristotle believed in the Geocentric model - that the sun revolved the Earth. If I am giving a presentation on why the Earth revolves the sun, I am speaking of our current understanding of the world and how it operates. If someone said “Well, Aristotle said the sun goes around the Earth, and he’s as important as current experts” I think that’s stupid. Aristotle died 2,355 years ago, he can get dunked on.

You could not have picked a worse example. First of all, the issue is one of arguments, not mere assertions. Would this hypothetical interlocutor be presenting Aristotle's arguments for geocentrism? Second of all, Aristotle had much better reasons for believing in geocentrism than you do for believing in heliocentrism, so I'd rather hope you had a much better response for the argument than that. Thirdly, general relativity + mach's principle + L + ratio.

I, personally, believe that an editor who joins this month can figure out what continuity is. It’s the connections a story has to other stories and the connections caused by a story.

It's good you believe this. It's also false, as demonstrated by the forum threads linked. Perhaps most will. Maybe. But there will be a not insignificant number who simply never will.

The big reason I feel so strongly about Rule 4 By Proxy is not only that it makes sense, but also that it’s essentially only made our site better in every case that it’s been used.

I disagree on one of them at least, but even if this were true, you need to show something stronger, that without R4bp the site would be worse. And I don't think you can do that. Because the cases it's been used on are, by and large, cases that already should pass R4.

Najawin’s primary new argument - that “Rule 4 By Proxy” might lead to a threat of “Rule 1 by Proxy” or “Rule 2 by Proxy” is... Well, hardly moving.

Given that the conclusion of my post is not "R4bp must go!" but that "we need to reexamine it and make changes or it has to go", I'm not sure why it would be?

The horrid threat of us POTENTIALLY COVERING STORIES WHICH BREAK COPYRIGHT IN ORDER TO DISCUSS THEIR CONNECTIONS TO LICENSED WORKS... Feels forced when we currently allow that?

Again, this would be validity. (And, again, Amorkuz resigned.)

Dimensions of Time should have been validated, it just should have had its own forum.

Subtle communication error. I disagree with the (specific) act of validation, I don't (inherently) disagree with its validity.

I am, I must admit, continually disturbed by the ongoing subtext of discussions like these that the work we are all currently doing and have been doing is not real. As if the Temporary forums were a sham, or victories in the New forums are not corporeal. I again insist, the discussions we have on this site as a community THIS DECADE have more importance than anything else.

I'm shocked that anyone could read this subtext, but I again insist that arguments trump all.

At the end of the day, this is how I feel - Rule 4 By Proxy is not a new concept. It has history and precedent going back over a decade.

Your quotes establish the precise opposite. But have fun on vacation. Najawin ☎ 18:15, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Alright, this still isn't the big object-level reply, but if I may defuse what I think is a crucial misunderstanding-in-progress:

Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes fundamentally does not address the criticisms leveled in Thread:117229 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I

I think Ottsel was speaking procedurally moreso than epistemologically, such that this reply falls flat. It needn’t be the case that you deem your criticisms to have failed to be “fundamentally addressed”, in the sense of resolved to a degree that *you* find satisfactory; rather, the point is that those concerns have been *aired* in a thread, and a closing post has found consensus against giving them weight in Wiki policy.

It does not matter, goes the argument, if you still think of these concerns are problematic, or even terminal, for the Wiki notion of “Continuity”. You have aired out your grievances, and for one reason or another we have decided that we do not care. You complain that your questions weren’t answered to your satisfaction, but the thread found that those questions weren’t compelling questions to the rest of the community in the first place, and at some point a conscientious editor has to step back and accept that nobody else agrees that their supposed problems are in fact problems, and they can’t keep shouting them out into the void.

I don’t know if I’d fully endorse this myself — as demonstrated by my agreeing to waive T:BOUND issues and continue to argue the object-level point at Forum:References into Worldbuilding — but this does not strike me as an unreasonable meta-discussion of the scope of T:POINT and T:BOUND. If a question has been aired out and consensus dismissed it, you can’t simply restart the thread on the basis that by your logic the question hasn’t been "fundamentally addressed"! And that’s the scenario Ottsel is seeing here, and understandably recoiling from.

(As for User:Amorkuz, yes, as a historical point it is true that he resigned rather than being stripped of his rank, but without wading too deeply into semi-private matters, I think it’s fair to describe the situation as him having resigned in disgrace, or some other phrase demonstrating that his prior opinions on matters relating to coverage or validity should be held as generally suspect, not as the wisdom of a respected forefather.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:31, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

No, I mean I literally didn't bring up the arguments made in that Thread in Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes. They're distinct from the arguments made in prior Forum threads I cited. I only skimmed that one because we just had the forum archives up and it was so long and it dived off into territory that wasn't quite relevant to the overall point needed for that particular forum discussion we were having. We just fundamentally didn't discuss it. All I said concerning that bit was

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 thread simply hasn't been discussed until this one and Forum:References into Worldbuilding.

(I'd certainly say he resigned under fraught circumstances. But my understanding is that they were the result of a particular thread. Regardless, I'm not appealing to anyone like a respected forefather here as far as I know. I'm just trying to show how views evolved. As a one time admin he's inherently relevant to that conversation.) Najawin ☎ 18:43, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

(Your understanding, then, is somewhat lacking. His specific transgressions relating to that one thread were when things reached a boiling point, and were what caused him to be blocked for a few months as a first punitive measure — but his resignation wasn’t about that thread per se, and, more to the point, the final message wherein which he resigned was also in and of itself a paranoid, irrational attack on, well, the entire editing body of the Wiki, which, if he had posted it *without* also explicitly resigning, would itself certainly have been grounds for punitive demotion.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:01, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

(Fair enough! I certainly read a lot of... controversial discussions with him, but I figured that things were just deeply frustrating, as they can sometimes be, until said thread and the comment in question.) Najawin ☎ 19:06, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Thoughts on the suggestion of creating 1-3 by proxies for the overall coherence of T:VS

I'm probably going to go through this thread by individual point, addressing various points when I feel ready. The one that has been gestating in my mind for the longest time has probably been this, and therefore it's what I feel most comfortable with discussing.

Rule 1 by proxy - To me, this doesn't really make much sense: how can something be retroactively a work of fiction? But then, I don't understand the conclusion of Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy (something on which I keep meaning to ask for clarification, but never seem to get round to) to be sure of this. From my understanding of the closing post, I feel this might be possible, but I'm not sure.

Rule 3 by proxy - Ditto

Rule 2 by proxy - Now, this to me is the most interesting. I prefer the "Cyberon" type to the "Audio Visuals" type, as with the latter we are actively allowing essentially fan fiction to be covered, which quite literally is what T:VS was created to prevent. But "Cyberon" certainly has something to be said for it. The question we have to ask is why do we cover only the licenced descendance of the DWU? Why can't we go backwards? Something which has always been intended to be set in the Doctor Who Universe and features a concept or character which has or will later appear in the DWU seems like a perfectly reasonable direction to go in. (Ultimately, this is about personal preference; it's all about which direction the community wants the four little rules to go, not really about evidence, unless anybody has some good arguments against such a theoretical rule) However, this would be a massive and radical leap forward. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is anybody's guess. I personally think that this is a perfectly reasonable criteria for what is set in the Doctor Who universe. Other people, feel free to disagree. (I will adress the other points in this thread at some point, I promise!) :) Aquanafrahudy 📢 19:38, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Firstly, I'd like to say I know understand Najawin's desire for this thread more, and retract my total support of OS25's rebuttal. (Although I personally see no need for this thread and so will probally not participate in it further). Secondly, re: "rule 2 by proxy", or rather, the proposed "Cyberon" precedent - too big a topic for this thread, and as its not indicated in the title, I don't think we should change policy in such a way here. But I do look forward to such a thread existing separately in the future! Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 19:53, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

I agree that R3bp is really weird and hard to do just on a technical level. It might be possible in some very fringe cases, but this one needs to be really thought about if we go down this path of the three I've presented. R1bp I think is still difficult, but a little easier. Scripts, script extracts, deleted scenes, we say these aren't complete works of fiction, not that they're not works of fiction. The idea is, perhaps, that by later works referring to them they treat them as discrete stories onto themselves and validate a reading where they are complete works of fiction.

I disagree with Ettolrahc that this isn't the place for the RXbps- they're one of the alleged ramifications of R4bp if we elect to take that route, but I thank her for her retraction, insofar as it extends. :P Najawin ☎ 21:16, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Also, and this was likely due to me not fully reading the mega-OP, and also due to a slightly uncharitable readkngy, I thought you were throwing out rule 1-3 by proxy as a strawman against rule 4 by proxy - as I now see that wasn't the case, I understand this thread more, and appreciate it. And as for a r3bp, the only reason I see this thread as inadequate is that someone will probally want to write an OP. But perhaps this thread can address some parts of "r3bp". Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 05:57, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Right! I've been working on my reply for a while, and as it required the use of structuring section-headers and suchlike, I thought it best to give it a separator-frame. But let's be clear that the following is not any kind of admin-hat-on closing post, just my (lengthy) participation in the debate. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:04, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

The Web and the SOWOFWOC: A principled riposte

Introduction

"What does it mean for our validity rules to be good or bad?"A good question

This is the question on which User:Najawin chose to open his attempted take-down of the Rule 4 By Proxy concept. It is a very good question. In fact, in its answer lies, I think, the fundamental crux of the misunderstanding which exists between us regarding the value of the R4BP idea. I find it somewhat unfortunate, then, that his introduction elides actually answering the question, and retreats to the question of what makes a policy good or bad, in general.

This “is obviously a truly massive topic for discussion and not really something that I think anyone is prepared to discuss in full here”, he says, but you thought wrong, my friend! I am prepared to discuss it! And I will. Because that's what this is about.

And let me say one more thing: Tardis:Valid sources, as a policy page, is strange and kludgy. It used to be much worse than it is now; but it's still a mess, even though that's meant to be my best shot at a streamlined version. If the outcome of this thread is the basic overhaul of how we structure our validity policies that User:NateBumber longs for, I would be happy with that. Like a physicist glimpsing a theory-of-everything in the distance, I can almost taste a better, more elegant way of phrasing our criteria for coverage and validity than even the four little rules; something intuitive, flowing directly from the Wiki's core mission. And I think R4BP, or something very like it, would be a natural, intuitive byproduct of those ideal rules; so yes. I bite that particular bullet (though not, as we'll see, in a way that implies R1BP, R2BP and R3BP, exactly). The relative kludginess of the way in which it is affixed to the current T:VS is a sign that we need to update the rest of the damn page, not the other way around.

"So, like, what even is validity?"

To answer that question, I believe we must ask an even broader question: what is it we do here? What's this Wiki for?

Well, what we seem to do is this:

1. We select a subset of all the fiction ever written by Homo sapiens, based on the criterion "does this have a legal relationship, direct or otherwise, to the 1963 episode of BBC television An Unearthly Child?".
2. We create pages about individual works of fiction contained within that set. These pages summarise the plot and list out the cast and crew, the featured characters, the miscellaneous worldbuilding elements.
3. We create pages with an in-universe perspective on the characters and misc. worldbuilding elements contained in these works of fiction, using our pages on these works of fiction as "sources".

Validity, indeed the entire idea of "the Doctor Who universe", is a philosophy for how to implement #3. The vast majority of the works of fiction selected at Stage #1 are going to have fictional elements in common with one another, they're going to have intentional narrative connections to one another; they're going to have continuity with one another. We would not be well-served to create The Doctor (An Unearthly Child), The Doctor (The Daleks) and The Doctor (The Edge of Destruction) to fulfill our duty of in-universe coverage of each of these individual works we cover. When The Daleks says stuff about "the Doctor", it's building onto what past 'DWU stories', all one (1) of them, had already established about that fictional character. To put it another way, if a viewer of The Daleks was already watching three weeks ago, then they're fully encouraged to bring that knowledge with them as implicit in the new text; when William Hartnell walks on-screen, it is as if the expected-memory of AUC has itself been brought into the text of The Daleks as one enormous footnote — complete with anything it says about non-Doctor elements like Earth or humans.

Repeat this process enough times, and you have a huge, sprawling "shared fictional universe", a web of narrative connections from story to story, where it makes more sense than not to merge our in-universe coverage of Source A and Source B. In a sense the choice is arbitrary, but it's more informative to Wikify them as though they described the same underlying set of in-universe concepts, as opposed to introducing their own characters who might resemble or echo the casts of stories past.

Naturally, there are contradictions; at a certain point in the web's history, it ceases to be a reasonable assumption that the writer of a new story is even aware of every prior node in the web, let alone actively intends for all of them to exist as potential background to their new stuff. And before you know it, you get contradictions. You get a Doctor who's human on Page 10 and definitely not human on Page 30. But even when they contradict parts of the web, these works remained more tethered to the web than not; it remained sensible to cover it all on a single First Doctor page. Continuity trumps discontinuity when it comes to deciding whether something is best covered as part of the broader gestalt of in-universe pages, or carved out into its own standalone space.

So yes, it's a web — it's not a perfect circle with a solid boundary that you can be on the right or wrong side of. By and large, 99% of the works of fiction defined in Stage #1 are part of that web. As a result, it made sense to decide that the default in-universe perspective defined at Tardis:In-universe perspective described "stuff that's part of the web". Those rare covered works which don't truly connect to the web, we set apart from their fellows. They come in two varieties:

• at “best” they're “unproductive dead-ends” — they might incorporate some context from the web, but are not intended to reflect back onto it — not "intended to count": they add further information to their particular spun-off version of a valid concept like the First Doctor, but with no intent that further works connecting to the broader web should incorporate these data as context for their own depiction of the First Doctor. The [[/Non-valid sources]] subpages are the solution e have found to efficiently cover such sources' transformative uses of preexisting elements.
• At worst they're lone nodes, with a legal but not narrative connection to the web. Think The Corridor Sketch. In-universe elements from things like that are best covered "in a vacuum", on their own pages entirely; as are any original elements of the first type.

And that's invalidity vs. validity.

T:VS, the beast with two heads

In light of what I've just outlined, T:VS is kind of a strange policy page, isn't it? It's two different things smashed together. Whether we cover something is a Stage #1 question; whether a covered source is valid for the main bulk of in-universe page is a Stage #3 question. As currently written, the explanatory tables of special cases at T:VS even have to use separate columns for "Covered?" and "Valid?", because things can be one without being the other, like a two-factor authentification process from Hell. Increasingly we see Board:Inclusion debates thread preface themselves with "Validity:", "Coverage:", or "Validity/coverage:", because those are different questions.

It's taken me all those years to realise: we can and should have Tardis:Covered sources and Tardis:Valid sources as completely different policy pages.

T:CS would essentially absorb Rules 1-2-3, while T:VS would be solely dedicated to the "how" instead of the "whether" of coverage, meaning Rule 4 and all its complexities.

Once you realise this, then User:Najawin's so-called "obvious question" of why there isn't a R1BP or a R2BP or a R3BP evaporates. It's because Rule 4 is different from the other three rules. It's a Stage #3/"T:VS" question instead of a Stage #1/"T:CS" question. Altering the way we carve out the Set Of Works Of Fiction We Officially Cover itself is a very, very different proposition from altering how we group or separate in-universe coverage of the elements contained on works of fiction that are already in the SOWOFWOC. I don't see how there's any logical necessity for the rules whigh govern T:CS to govern T:VS. They're different rules about different things; about different kinds of things altogether, in fact.

(All this notwithstanding, I am, as I mentioned in the past, in favour of a limited form of the so-called "R2BP", to account for the Iris/Phoenix Court situation more cleanly than our current weird one-of-a-kind exception; see also Talk:Bibliophage (short story). But I wouldn't call it Rule 2 By Proxy, nor consider it a natural logical extension of R4BP. And R1BP and R3BP seem like complete red herrings. Pro tip, if it's not clear what concepts by those names would even look like, then consider the possibility that maybe they're not quite so logically necessary at all.)

Validity by proxy: still a very good idea

So then: let us grant, if only for the sake of clear argument, that R1-2-3 become T:CS and Rule 4 alone stands as T:VS, thus allowing us to dispense with the "but what about RXBP" red herring. Let's discard, then, the name "Rule 4 By Proxy" and speak simply of "validity by proxy", because validity in and of itself is necessarily a "Rule 4" matter in old money.

Is "validity by proxy" still a good idea?

I say yes. The whole reason we have a concept of "validity" is that for 99% of the SOWOFWOC, it makes more sense to merge rather than separate our in-universe coverage of their contents. "Whether the author intends their story to be set in 'the DWU'" is an abstraction which serves as a proxy/predictor for this base practical question.

That is: a story that passes Rule 4 is a story which its author intended to be read in light of at least some of the existing contents of the Web, which eliminates the "lone node" possibility; and it is a story which this author would ostensibly anticipate later works in the Web to connect back to, at least in theory, which eliminates the "dead-end which no later node is ever meant to connect back to" possibility. Thus the argument for merging in-universe coverage into the great big gestalt applies.

All Validity By Proxy needs to justify itself as an addendum to this new T:VS — a different situation than "authorial intent is to be set in the DWU" which would also carry an implication of "validity" — is to pass that same standard. User:Najawin said it himself at the start:

We don't smash atoms together to find out what validity is, it's not a platonic form floating out there in the ether. It's not really a natural kind and probably not a social kind. [What it is,] is socially constructed.User:Najawin

Validity By Proxy and the "Intended to be set in the DWU at time of release" criteria do not need to have any other common underlying factor. It suffices that they both describe cases in which we expect it'll be more informative than confounding for our in-universe coverage to be merged into the greater whole.

So it comes back to this: Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) and Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka) coexisting on the same Wiki is not a healthy situation. It's precisely the same problem as The Doctor (An Unearthly Child) vs. The Doctor (The Edge of Destruction). What's going on is that being subsequently referenced "against its will" by later parts of the web nullifies intent-to-be-a-dead-end and returns us to a state of affair where the considered story is just one more node in the Great Big Web, which means that it's more useful to fold its in-universe content into the gestalt of the general in-universe sections of the Wiki.

Why no invalidity by proxy?

For the same reason that there's no linear-time invalidity-for-contradiction!

It took me a little while to put my finger on the true underlying reason why this objection failed to whelm me even a little bit, but that's because it's really a straightforward application of a wider "continuity trumps discontinuity" concept.

For example: Genesis of the Daleks is intended to be in continuity with ("in the same universe as") The Daleks, but not with Genesis of Evil, although the latter is also in continuity with ("in the same universe as") The Daleks. Continuity Trumps Discontinuity, so Genesis of the Daleks is held to pass Rule 4: it's valid via its connection with The Daleks (a past DWU story) even though it contradicts other past DWU stories (like Genesis of Evil).

No-invalidity-by-proxy is just looking at the same graph while removing the "time" element. Genesis of the Daleks is intended to be in continuity with ("in the same universe as") The Daleks, but not with Genesis of Evil, although the latter is also in continuity with ("in the same universe as") The Daleks. Continuity Trumps Discontinuity, so Genesis of Evil is still valid via its connection with The Daleks (a past DWU story) even though it is contradicted by other, later DWU stories (like Genesis of the Daleks).

No time-symmetry problems exist with validity by proxy: they just become a special case of "A is intended to be in continuity with [B, a story that is already DWU]" where we cease to care about whether B already existed when A was released, and who precisely did the "intending".

On the subjectivity of Continuity

I believe him when he says that he has other qualms. But above all else, User:Najawin seems to dislike this entire framework because he thinks notions like whether a story is "in continuity with" or "referencing" another one are too darn subjective. Instead of being content with "Continuity Trumps Discontinuity" as the takeaway from the early rulings on what validity is to make of stories that contradict each other, he wishes we could define "the DWU" of Rule 4 fame as being completely divorced from any notion of "Continuity". He writes:

Cards on the table, I straightforwardly reject this. I think the "arbitrary tag" formulation is largely correct, in that there's a "DWU" as the wiki understands the term, and then a "DWU" as every individual author understands the term and for R4 statements we do some translation between the two. (…) I rather assume that no author understands the term quite like the wiki does (…). For the wiki I think it's simply a label and doesn't refer to continuity in the slightest. As I think you'll see later, I'm far from the only user to have said similar sentiments in the past.User:Najawin

Some parts of this are trivially true. But a lot is being handwaved with that "we do some translation between the two". What does the Wiki meaning of "DWU" entail, and how might it differ from how authors employ it? As I have outlined: I think that by "intended to be set in the DWU", we mean "intended to be part of the Web": we mean "intended both to have narrative connections to preexisting node-points in the Web, and to be suitable for later node-points to connect back to". Intent to be in the DWU is intent to reference and be referenced, to build upon and to be built upon, by other works in the big web of fiction stretching backwards to 23 November 1963. We care about authors' notion of the DWU (which need not quite quite match 'our' DWU) insofar as their personal DWU reflects ‘the portion of the Web they call home’.

Asking if something is set in the DWU is asking if it is substantially part of that web or not. It can't mean asking if something is inside a hypothetical bounded circle or out of it: plenty of valid sources would fail that standard. I don't know what Lawrence Burton would say if you asked whether Against Nature was set in "the" Doctor Who universe, in those words; it all depends on whether he interprets it as "somewhere in the Web" or as "inside a bounded circle", I think. Certainly I'm fairly sure he would not agree with such a statement if he took it to mean that it was set in a universe which necessarily included The Eleventh Hour. But it is indubitably intended to be set "in the same universe as" Alien Bodies which "is in the same universe as" The Dalek Invasion of Earth which is "in the same universe as" An Unearthly Child. It's part of the Web. It passes Rule 4 in that sense, and that's the sense we actually care about.

But — my mental model of User:Najawin now objects — is ‘continuity’ not substantially in the eye of the beholder? "Arbitrary! Slippery slope! Android boyfriend!" he cries out.

To which I say: we've made it this far. And I don't mean the dratted #Continuity sections: looking back, I think my response at Forum:Temporary forums/Trailers#Conclusion, gesturing at "the continuity sections we have on all our pages", was too narrow. No, the precedent, I now see with greater clarity, is, like, the entire main in-universe name-space of the whole blasted website. Making judgement calls about when a newer story is talking about the same thing as a newer one is what we do, all the time. It's the entire basis of our Wiki; it's what allows us to put The Doctor (The Daleks) on the same page as The Doctor (An Unearthly Child).

The question of whether the Doctor's line in Time of the Doctor is referencing the Shalka Master or not… already exists. It would exist, just as irresolvable, even if we decided to throw up our hands and delete the #Continuity sections. Heck, let's also delete #References while we're at it. The question is still there, laughing at us, because — I cannot believe I did not spell this out sooner — we still have to decide whether we put that line on The Master (Scream of the Shalka) or create a separate the Doctor's boyfriend (The Time of the Doctor) page. Case in point, whether Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) really was the Shalka Doctor was never, actually, the real point of contention. Our page freely stated as much.

To say that such matters are just too darn subjective to be worth structuring validity around, we'd have to say that they're also too ambiguous to structure coverage around (surely coverage is more important, still, than validity? surely it's worse if we get coverage itself wrong?). And that would be tantamount to saying the Wiki itself cannot feasibly exist.

"But these things could be validated anyway…"

Yes. Sure. I understand and agree with User:Najawin's frustration that for lack of a pressing need, we have failed to revisit e.g. the Cushing movies individually, and validate them "in their own right". But look, the original R4BP closure specifically permitted and couraged this, it's not the policy's fault that no one's actually done the work. Furthermore I think the matter could be more innocent than he makes it appear: i.e. 'there are still urgent issues so no one will get round to the "proper validations" until those have been dealt with; once the backlog finishes clearing up we'll get around to them'. Let's have faith in the community.

Moreover, even if each individual purported R4BP case so far turns out to be a misidentified special snowflake which needn't have been invalid in the first place, the principle would still remain. It's perfectly possible to imagine a counterfactual universe where the Cushing movies really were intended to be Completely Outside The DWU by David Whitaker and Milton Subotsky. In that reality, if the plethora of references to the Cushingverse in valid media still existed, I would still bang the drum for their proxy validation, rather than be stuck with another Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) situation. So the principled thing to do for me in this universe is to argue that R4BP needs to be on the books, just in case, even if it were to surface that we didn't currently have any actual live cases of it at present.

Moreover, the argument about hammer and nail cuts both ways. I am sympathetic to all the validity cases he lists, but equally, I'm not sure I entirely trust myself there. I think there's a lot of motivated reasoning. I respectfully submit it might be so with Najawin himself on a subconscious level. What if, say, Dan Freedman really did — on balance — think of DCtT as set outside the DWU despite appearances? What if there were a prominent oft-referenced invalid story that could only be validated through something like R4BP, with no wiggle room in the quotes? Wouldn't that have been dreadfully inconvenient?

This is more of a provocative hypothetical than a real accusation of motivated reasoning in this instance. But it's a dangerous precedent to set. "In case of an invalid story that's often referenced in valid sources, look really hard for a rationale to validate it under conventional Rule 4"? At best that's just enshrining a backdoor-R4BP by another name while keeping up appearances. At worst it's an invitation for a free-for-all of biased validity debates in years to come.

A principled alternative: a simpler Rule 4

In his opening post, User:Najawin didn't present his conclusion as all-or-nothing: in addition to his preferred proposal, he proposed alternative solutions that he finds more acceptable than "status quo with no changes". This is sound. Both our posts have lots of moving parts. So I'll do the same.

If you accept my framing for what the current Rule 4 is doing "under the hood" (Web, dead-ends, all that jazz), then I think there is another thing to do that would allow us to jettison "proxy" stuff. It is unfortunately a lot more radical than validity-by-proxy, but it's also certainly more streamlined and easily-implemented. It is simply this: simplify the Wiki concept of "intended to set from the DWU" to remove the intended-to-be-a-dead-end aspect altogether.

That is: from now on, "passing Rule 4" (slash "passing T:VS" if we do the T:CS/T:VS split) would simply mean that you are setting yourself in continuity with at least one previously-valid story. It would only matter that a story wants to be read in the DWU's context; not whether it hopes that further DWU stories will be read in its context.

This describes most R4BP cancidates. It's never been in doubt that Scream of the Shalka or even Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? take place in "a universe where all of Doctor Who thus far had ‘happened’"; but we had a higher standard for "set in the DWU", requiring that the authors somehow "intend for their story to be acknowledged by new stories going forward".

And another strong argument is that, frankly, it could also describe a lot of currently-valid apocrypha. I'm not sure the writer of a short story in Doctor Who The Official Annual 2009 has any expectation that anybody, going forward, is going to remember it, let alone reference it as A Real Part Of Lore. Not even the writer themself. (As Najawin mentioned in the OP, Steven Moffat once forgot one of his own DW prose stories; can we really assume that when he wrote it, he intended to add an indelible Piece Of Lore™ to Wider Continuity™? Hm.) It's very Wiki-brained of us to assume otherwise.

The reason it's radical is that Doctor Whoah! (DWM 371 comic story) is ostensibly set in a universe where at least one Doctor Who TV story, and probably all of them so far, have "happened". It's hard to come up with a standard that would allow Scream of the Shalka but not a hundred goofy things like this. I think they're the very reason we have the "intentional-dead-end clause" in the first place: to avoid drowning in endless frivolous "according to one account"s (or "in one version of reality"s, depending on what parameters we might decide to set for mass coverage of these things).

But, you know — maybe that's okay. I've certainly been suspicious of "but it sounds like work"-type objections in the past. Maybe that's the way forward the community will prefer.

Would there still be such a thing as an invalid story in this brave new world? Yes, I think so. Hallo My Dalek takes place in a world of its own, a true "reboot" with Doctor Why instead of the Fourth Doctor and so on. Oh Mummy! might have a preexisting valid character in it, but isn't actually set in the same universe as any identifiable valid story: this Sutekh clearly hasn't lived through Pyramids of Mars, he starred in it as an actor. And then there's things like The Corridor Sketch, or Tonight's the Night, or The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. It wouldn't mean the End of Invalidity Itself. We would just be validating… a lot of things.

…But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the opening post?

Well, I have mixed feelings, obviously. While I don't endorse User:OttselSpy25's reply in full, I do, for example, think it cares too much about the opinions of admins in the Wiki's formative years. We mustn’t forget the past, sure, but I tend to think that we are more and more fundamentally confused about basic concepts the further back in the Wiki’s history we go; the older they are, the less usable quotes are, because they’re using much rougher, less thought-through versions of any of the concepts they mention, even as they use the same words still in use today. That’s dangerous, to my mind, and often outweighs the value in trying to see “what people were thinking at the time they originally wrote [Important Policy XYZ]”, even though that’s a praiseworthy instinct.

But all this said, those quibbles are largely incidental. And I don't want bad blood, here; I do not even want an atmosphere of sportsmanlike hostility. By now User:Najawin is at least a friendly acquaintance, though perhaps I'd want to reserve the term friend until we'd spoken of non-Wiki matters off-Wiki. So let me say straight ahead that my respect for Najawin and his intellectual scrupulousness remains very high indeed. I think he's deeply wrong in many ways about this particular topic, but I more than believe he did his best to wrap his head around the issues; and in some areas perhaps we will find irresolvable differences of opinion, where we each acknowledge that the other's logic is sound, but disagree on certain fundamental premises/"values". We shall see.

But either way — and especially considering that I explicitly encouraged him to finish and post this, assuring him he would not be held to be in breach of T:POINT — I stand behind his right to have started this thread. More than that, I'm glad he did. Refuting what I see as his mistakes has helped me to crystallise and formalise my thinking on what T:VS is for and what's wrong with its current wording. No matter the outcome on validity-by-proxy itself, if I can but get consensus behind me to split the current T:VS into Tardis:Valid sources and Tardis:Covered sources, I will count that as a great improvement to the Wiki in its own right, more than justifying the thread which will have precipitated it.

I usually reserve this for closing posts, but thanks to anyone who reads through this, and preemptive thanks to anyone who tries and answer it in as much depth as it was written! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:04, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Don't mind me just a page break

Done my first read through, thinking about my response. I will say, as a preliminary thought, the T:VS, T:COVERED split is touching on a similar idea to something I've been thinking about recently, but from a radically different direction. (And someday I'll overcome my privacy concerns. Someday.) Najawin ☎ 17:22, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Scrooge, you decided what the DWU means extraordinarily well, I really enjoyed reading that part. That idea should definitely be ingrained into the new T:VS, if we make it. And yes, I strongly support splitting T:VS into T:CS and T:VS. One, singular qualm I have with this is that there are some sources which we could give some coverage to, but at least fail rule 2 in the non-total majority - namely, {{NCmaterial}}-types. I think we should make it clear, in T:CS, that these sources should not be fully called "not covered", as they do have some coverage, but perhaps should be called something like "semi-covered"? I'm unsure of the terminology, but please we don't go for non-covered, as that, on the surface, appears to include standard ao3-fanfic, which we don't cover in any capacity. Saying that, T:NO FANFIC probably needs an update due to {{fan work}}. And again, amazing essay-reply!Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 17:36, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

I fully support the proposed T:VS/T:CS split, as they really ought to be two seperate entities. As for the proposed change to what may or may not become T:CS, I've actually been thinking about something similar since Najawin began this post, if from a completely different perspective. I think that this would make a lot of sense than what we are currently doing, and state my position that we should not hinder coverage of something just because it is "silly". The DWU has always been silly, and we certainly shouldn't avoid changing our policies to something more sensible/radical just because it would mean "silly" sources being valid. Aquanafrahudy 📢 17:54, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Well fucking done. One of the best put together arguments (dare I describe it as a treatise?) I've seen around here. I am bombastically in support of the proposal to split things into T:CS and T:VS. I think this construction is more easily understood than our current way. I'm in absolute support of this. That said, I am very opposed to "the simpler Rule 4" and I want to voice that now. My objection isn't because "that's too much work" but because "it would make the Wiki more tedious and ultimately less helpful for readers." The Wiki isn't a creative writing project for the editors, it's a resource for the readers. While the interests of the editors should never be lost, we should not let those interests override the operating goal of a Wiki: to provide relevant information to the reader. NoNotTheMemes ☎ 17:57, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

@NoNotTheMemes Why do you think that Scrooge's proposal is less helpful to readers? Aquanafrahudy 📢 18:01, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

I've just said that Scrooge's proposal is VERY helpful for readers. I was merely maintaining that the position he devil's advocated for was not a good alternative and ensuring that if somebody looks back on this closing statement and misreads it, that the devil's advocacy position is a step too far and not something we should do. NoNotTheMemes ☎ 19:03, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh yes, Memes, thanks for bringing that up. I am also agaisnt the "simpler rule 4", although I wasn't under the impression Scrooge was actually advocating for it, more devilling. Although I misinterpreted Najawin's OP in that regard, so 🤷‍♀️. And as for the point Aqua brought up about us not covering sources because they're "silly" - that's not why, or at least it shouldn't be. The idea, as far as I'm aware, is simply that parodies should be presumed to fail R4/NuVS unless proven otherwise. Subtly different, but I feel importantly so. Now, I also think we should keep it that way, because, wel.... perhaps someone else can explain this better, I'm not sure how to. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 18:08, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the simplified-Rule-4, I was neither actively advocating it, nor merely devil’s-advocating it: I meant precisely what I said. To wit, “personally I think it’d be a step too far and Validity By Proxy is preferable, but if people are opposed to Validity By Proxy, I think Simplified Rule 4 becomes the (distant-)second-best option in epistemological terms, still well ahead of repealing R4BP and going back to the original status-quo”. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:59, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Dammit Scrooge, I'm looking for how to do Commutation Diagrams in MediaWiki because you can't \usepackage TikZ. Probably this evening (for me) or tomorrow, so tomorrow GMT either way. Najawin ☎ 19:09, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm probably going to be closing this thread so I'm not going to get involved in any of the actual debate, but you could produce and render the LaTeX in an external program and then upload them as images? In fact, this is what the official documentation suggests at w:meta:Help:Displaying a formula#Commutative diagrams. As a side note, I've been reading a book on category theory and was wondering when/if it was going to come up in one of these discussions. It seemed inevitable. Bongo50 ☎ 19:59, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

${\begin{array}{lcl}&X&{\overset {f}{\rightarrow }}&Z&\\&g\downarrow &&\downarrow g'\\&Y&{\underset {f'}{\rightarrow }}&W&\\\end{array}}$ Is what wikipedia gives as an example, and it seems to work. Just remember, all epis split if you try hard enough! Najawin ☎ 21:38, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

I also support the T:VS/T:CS split. It actually addresses something that's bugged me for a while, because yeah, under the 4 little rules, three of the rules are about one thing while the other rule is about something else. Time God Eon ☎ 23:30, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

God I feel bad for anyone reading this at this point

The Web or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deflationism

Ah, The Web. I'm sure we've all thought about it. I know I have. Indeed, I thought about it for quite some time after the R4bp thread, in order to think about whether or not it might actually work for a satisfactory account of validity. I don't think it does, but there are some subtle issues here that we should discuss.

Firstly, is The Web Validity, or is it merely a tool we construct to help us talk about Validity? I think it's clear that The Web of Narrative Connections is clearly a useful tool - if it can be constructed - for any discussion of Validity, since individual authors should have their own views of the DWU in which a subset of their view of the DWU is roughly analogous to a subset of The Web. So it's useful even to someone who thinks that continuity shouldn't touch our validity rules at all, if only for how it impacts the views of others. Scrooge suggests it's the former.

I think that by "intended to be set in the DWU", we mean "intended to be part of the Web"

I think this position is... difficult to hold. First and foremost, what about a writer who simply doesn't want anyone to reference their work? A writer that is notoriously disagreeable? They actively discourage people from building off of their storylines whenever possible and try to insist that their work shouldn't loop back around to the rest of what other people are doing, but still write using DWU characters? It sounds almost familiar, if a bit too extreme, no? Is this hypothetical "Angry Harry" still writing for the DWU? Seems to be to me, even if they don't consider their work suitable for others to reference. How about a series that uses some DWU concepts in a completely disjoint way from how they've been used before, (maybe even says that it's "its own universe") perhaps there's some crossovers later on down the line, but there's no backwards narrative connections? (Okay, I'm teasing a bit there, it's not that extreme. But the basic principle applies. What if we take some DWU concepts, rip them free of their original context - you've even suggested that we could do this with an image, a design, to some extent - and then have them run forward in their original series, while they might in the future be fine referencing The Web.) Even if we accept something like The Web, what you're suggesting is too restrictive. But it needs to be this restrictive, because if not, if you allow these dead ends and false starts, then the way you've defined R4 doesn't quite work here.

Alright, now, next, and is it just me, or is this getting really dodgy? Like. Sure. We're dealing with natural language, not formal ones. But when we start trying to define a categorization scheme using the things we're supposed to be categorizing, I get very suspicious. This has historically been a losing play. The insistence of Czech, Tangerine and others to base validity on solely OOU considerations is very well thought out in this regard.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think the issue here is that this is just obviously wrong. The DWU as we mean it on this site is defined by our validity policies. Our article on Doctor Who universe says as much. And these validity policies change over time. It's simply not the case that "Valid" = "part of The Web (not a dead end or false start)". Perhaps, perhaps, this is what it should come to mean, in that we should use The Web as a guide to T:VS. But it doesn't mean that. The two terms are not synonymous, and I don't think it's clear that they even line up at the present time.

Now, nobody is saying The Web isn't important, just that it isn't synonymous with validity. Validity is merely what we make of it. Think of it like the legal/moral distinction. Perhaps we should base our laws off of morality. But legal positivists don't think there's any inherent correlation between them, whereas natural law theorists insist the opposite - "an unjust law is no law at all". I think even if our validity rules didn't correspond to The Web at all, they would still reflect The DWU as this wiki understood it, since we've defined the term to refer to what we construct using T:VS. And I don't think this is a radical position, I think it's the most reasonable one given the plain fact that most people here have lived under a time where certain things we all wanted valid were ostensibly invalid.

Now enough of that, let me explain why The Web isn't important.

Oh, I kid I kid, I jest I jape. It's useful. It's very useful. But I'd be wary to use it so closely as a guide to validity, even aside from the definitional concerns. It's a useful tool, but it should be something we temper with other factors. Why? Well, the same reasons that User:NoNotTheMemes alludes to. And, indeed, this is one of the reasons why I didn't try to offer a Grand Theory of Validity in my opening post. As someone with a copy of Sakurai and Napolitano on my bookshelf not six feet away from me I feel it's my duty to warn Scrooge away from this path with such scant provisions and scant preparation. Avoid its siren song!

At least in addition to this massive web of continuity concerns, we need to think about how our readers will benefit from what we deem valid and invalid, rather than how our editors will. I know some people IRL who are massive Doctor Who fans, just massive. And they despise the wiki and consider it near unusable because it mixes together EU content and show content. I keep telling them that this will never change, that it's a foundational principle of our wiki that all sources are equal, but it really puts them off. And our decision validate all of these R4bp works, well... Some of them frustrated them more than others, but to them it just wasn't helpful, it obscured things more than made it clear. And I don't want to suggest that every reader is like this, but my suspicion is that a lot of them are. One of the earliest conversations on how to deal with validity, which I linked above, Forum:The original inclusion debates#Excluded, suggested to use italics to demarcate EU vs tv content. And this clearly didn't happen in the long term, though it actually did happen here and there in the early days, people just didn't do it consistently and it fell out of favor. And people have suggested more updated versions since then, see Thread:129501 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon II. I think there are multiple concerns we need to balance when it comes to validity, these are just the two most obvious. I'm sure, given time, that we can come up with more. Reducing it to one concern is... Misguided in the extreme in my mind. And I certainly wouldn't wish to beg the question against those who feel the need to weigh the scales more heavily towards curating content towards our readers than I do.

Does T:CS work?

Probably not as Scrooge has alluded to it.

Firstly, I want to rebut the idea that R1bp is incoherent or unclear as I've expressed it. I think this is untrue. I think R1bp is relatively coherent and clear, if a bit messy and in need of some tune-up. R3bp is definitely difficult to envision, but this is due to the lack of R3 jurisprudence in particular. Which, well, you contributed to Scrooge, so nyeh. (As I'm writing up the last section, I had a thought. Are Stage Plays generally thought to violate R3 alone? I think there's maybe a chance that one works out there then? But really it seems to me to be usually seen as an R1 issue.)

But can we so easily extricate R4 from the prior work done? Probably not. Certainly we couldn't this time last year - non-narrative fiction was invalid for failing R1 but still covered. We technically still haven't fully relitigated video games and that's an R1 issue. And I think this alone should give us pause. If this 3 step procedure Scrooge is talking about only holds when we've already reformed T:VS to be in line with (what he thinks T:VS would look like after following this same 3 step procedure :P) a version of it that reflects our preferences more heavily than those of past editors, and it simply fails to apply prior to that, well, doesn't that suggest that perhaps this analysis is perhaps too idealistic? It's describing what we wish to happen rather than what actually is happening? If there's no possible way to separate out R1 considerations from past versions of T:VS, then I don't think it's the case than this is what covered and validity mean, and that R4 is a separate stage in the procedure than the other rules. At least, not as of yet! (And, by logical consequence, this means that the various RXbps still come tumbling down like rainfall. If it's all one policy, they're all there.)

And it's worse still, because I'm pretty sure we'll find something floating around that's not a "complete work of fiction" but is covered as invalid even after we fix video games and whatever else we're thinking of. Indeed, Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy seems to suggest this outcome as a possibility.

when we consider this, it starts to make a lot more sense that a bunch of deleted scenes lack pages altogether. Stuff which breaks Rule 1 goes un-covered all the time.

I mean, surely this comment in Scrooge's closing post only makes sense if R1 breakers can be covered. (And note that this was after the narrative->fiction shift.)

It's at the very least non-trivial that we can easily divorce R1 from validity in this proposal, and I think probably straightforwardly false that we've meaningfully done so already in a way that R4 truly constitutes a separate stage. (Note, as I'm writing up the last section, I figured out the obvious examples. Stage Plays and Escape Rooms. Arguably they violate R3, but this is still a problem, as they're covered as invalid. I believe it's generally a R1 issue too.) And sometimes failing R1 means not covered, sometimes it means invalid, and it's messy and the entire thing really is one policy, stage three is a substage of stage 1, we assign validity when we create these OOU pages and then create IU pages referencing the labels the equipped sources on wiki use. But I do think there's something wrong with our account of coverage. It's just different from what Scrooge suggests.

Namely. Boy, "not covered" can sure mean a few different things, can't it? And there's not always a clear rhyme or reason as to why something that "isn't covered" is in one category and not the other. Like, sure, validity, invalidity, they pass R2 and R3, and are vaguely speaking works of fiction. To be valid it must pass R1 and R4, to be invalid it has to pass at least part of R1. There are ways in which it can fail R1 and be not covered. These types of stories have pages, plot summaries, and in-universe pages for their characters and plot elements. Sure, the invalid ones don't "talk" to the valid ones, but they're largely the same.

But, like, there are some "not covered" things that we just don't discuss here, for a variety of reasons, failing R2, R3, etc etc. But you can be "not covered" and still have a page here. Or have a page here and even have a plot summary. Or not have your own page, but be a part of a collection page dedicated to a specific type of thing or specific series. I'm really skeptical that we can offload our problems we've found here onto a split between T:VS and T:CS, but dear lord there's a whole hierarchy of how things can "fail to have in universe pages for plot elements" and still be on this wiki that we just have no terminology for and no clear unifying standards. It's very much a case by case basis.

Should we actually split T:VS and T:CS? I don't think so. I think if we want to go down this route, which we may! This seems to be where everyone is headed! If we go down this route, the issues are much deeper engrained, and I don't think that a split this simple will change things. Moreover, I think even this split is so radical that I'd suggest asking every admin we know to be semi-active to weigh in. (And, yes, it's both simple and radical. It's too simple for what it needs to be, and radical for how it changes how the wiki has been operating for a decade.)

If we really want to go down the "reform T:VS" route, my suggestion instead would be that we, again, ask all the semi-active admins to weigh in, just to start. Then the next strategy is that we prepare for quite some time to basically do a full rewrite. We let people know in GB, reddit, twitter, etc, that we're doing a large policy overhaul and want feedback, (I know, I know, I love asking the community. But this in particular is a really big change.) as well as having at least one other person do something like my archaeology project, so that multiple perspectives on the history of the wiki and what's important can be seen as editors read up on this in preparation. I think it's something that we should approach with a lot of care. But this is a suggestion. Once again, people can feel free to disregard it.

Category Theory is a Lie and Alexander Grothendieck Set Mathematics Back 100 Years

So perhaps I'm just too set in my ways, but I don't fully understand Scrooge's response about linear time invalidity for contradiction. His argument doesn't seem even slightly analogous to me. Let me explain why using some handy dandy commutative continuity diagrams. Here's the terminology you need to understand these diagrams, okay? "VN", where N is a number means that this is the Nth "Valid" story we're considering for the diagram, "IN" means this is the Nth "Invalid" story, "V1->V2" means something like "V1 informs the continuity of V2", or "V2 is trying to be in continuity with V1". "V1-/->V2" means the negation of that, and "V1<->V2" and "V1<-/->V2" means that we erase the time dependence of our previous relations.

So back in the days of yore, we had the following two stories, ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1,&I1\\\end{array}}$. You might ask why I'm not including an arrow here. Because, frankly, my argument has no need for it. V1 and I1 might have related continuities, they might not. (EG: It's hard to deny that Shalka is continuous from the classic series.) My argument does not assume that invalid stories and valid stories are intentionally discontinuous. Indeed, it considers the entire issue a red herring. Now, given these two stories, we can consider another story that references the two of them. ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\rightarrow I2&\leftarrow &I1\\\end{array}}$. Now, I2 was made invalid, and this, crucially, was because of the connected arrows, because of a pattern present in this diagram, namely, ${\begin{array}{lcl}&I1&\rightarrow &?&\Rightarrow &I1&\rightarrow &I2\\\end{array}}$. The sequels/prequels to invalid stories thread changed this. Now, depending on factors other than patterns in these diagrams, both ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\rightarrow I2&\leftarrow &I1\\\end{array}}$ and ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\rightarrow V2&\leftarrow &I1\\\end{array}}$ can exist.
The R4bp thread concluded with the idea that considering diagrams of the form, ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\rightarrow V2&\leftarrow &I1\\\end{array}}$ we can replace them with ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\rightarrow V2&\leftarrow &V3\\\end{array}}$. This is asymmetric. Scrooge suggests the issue is one of looking at the same graph while removing the time element. I wish to submit that this is clearly false. If we're considering diagrams of the form ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\rightarrow \quad ?&\leftarrow &I1\\\end{array}}$ and simply deciding whether "?" is to be valid or invalid, I don't see how changing this diagram to ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\leftrightarrow \quad ?&\leftrightarrow &I1\\\end{array}}$ changes the calculation one whit. (Indeed, it's arguably because of this change that my argument works! We need there to be a symmetry between going from ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\leftarrow &I1&\Rightarrow &V1&\leftarrow &V2\\\end{array}}$ to ${\begin{array}{lcl}&?&\leftarrow &I1&\Rightarrow &I2&\leftarrow &I1\\\end{array}}$ and there just isn't without assuming time invariance. My argument really was that using these arrows at all was circular reasoning, given how our diagrams were populated, but time invariance actually makes it stronger. Otherwise this second form of the argument only works on diagrams of the form ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\rightarrow I2&\leftarrow &I1\\\end{array}}$ which is a rather different issue.)

Perhaps the difference will become more apparent if we chart out his proposed counter example and why I don't think they're similar?

Scrooge suggests we consider the following diagram instead:
${\begin{array}{lcl}&V2&\nrightarrow &V3\\&\uparrow &\nearrow \\&V1\\\end{array}}$, or, if you prefer, ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V2&\nrightarrow &?\\&\uparrow &\nearrow \\&V1\\\end{array}}$.
And this is clearly non analogous, right? I mean, even if you insist that my hypothetical has to populate the continuity relationship between V1 and I1, a view I straightforwardly reject, even if you apply time invariance to this graph as well (bear with me, this is actually the one issue here, diagonal arrows can't do this on mediawiki, so I'm going to turn it into a box diagram)
${\begin{array}{lcl}&V2&\nleftrightarrow &?\\&\updownarrow &&\updownarrow \\&V1&=&V1\\\end{array}}$,
in this analogy, there's still a giant hole - that both stories already propagating the diagram are already valid, and the "non continuous" arrow is a relationship between one of them and the new story we're considering, not between the previous stories that already are present in the diagram.

Now, one might argue, perhaps we shouldn't privilege past states of the diagram over future ones. That if we fill in those continuity arrows between I1 and V1 from my example we get
${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\nrightarrow &I1\\&\downarrow &\swarrow \\&?\\\end{array}}$
and then adding time invariance to this diagram gives us
${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\nleftrightarrow &I1\\&\updownarrow &&\updownarrow \\&?&=&?\\\end{array}}$
and then when we realize that in his example we clearly agree with validity for the question mark, so we do so here as well, and then this back propagates to I1. So
${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\nleftrightarrow &V3\\&\updownarrow &&\updownarrow \\&V2&=&V2\\\end{array}}$.
Potentially then all structures of the form
${\begin{array}{lcl}&X&\nleftrightarrow &X\\&\updownarrow &&\updownarrow \\&X&=&X\\\end{array}}$
are either all valid or invalid?

Perhaps this is what Scrooge is suggesting all along? It's not time invariance wrt media, it's time invariance wrt the decisions we make about these pieces of media. I don't really think he is? I'm just trying to steelman this argument. I don't really see a reading in which the two are analogous otherwise. Like - it's got some weird implications for how we conduct validity debates at the very least. At this point, not being a category theorist, and that's probably the best way to think about this, I think I have to beg off discussion ever so slightly, but my intuition is that this is precisely the reductive version of R4 Scrooge has suggested and people have not largely been fans of. It's that instead of springboarding off of Unearthly Child our web springboards off of every piece of DWU media. That's my guess. (I think this is the first time I've ever wished Amorkuz was here - I think he was an algebraist?)

Regardless, perhaps Scrooge can clarify what he means? I really don't see any similarities - I don't see how this is in principle a rebuttal.

Continuity, References, Android Boyfriends, oh my!

And so we come to this. Perhaps the heart of Scrooge and my disagreement, and perhaps the thing we'll simply never see eye to eye on. I think I can convince him on much of the rest that's gone before, or perhaps that we'll come close to mutual understanding. But this, no, I think we're just speaking fundamentally different languages here. Case in point

The question of whether the Doctor's line in Time of the Doctor is referencing the Shalka Master or not… already exists. It would exist, just as irresolvable, even if we decided to throw up our hands and delete the #Continuity sections. Heck, let's also delete #References while we're at it. The question is still there, laughing at us, because — I cannot believe I did not spell this out sooner — we still have to decide whether we put that line on The Master (Scream of the Shalka) or create a separate the Doctor's boyfriend (The Time of the Doctor) page.

We do the second. It's site policy. We do the second. This has been upheld time and time again. We do not go further than what the source tells us. Indeed, I state something very similar to the inverse of this argument in my OP.

We all agree that for various events in the DWU competing events are relatively common, yes? And it's important to report neutrally on these accounts, stating what each source tells us, and not to speculate further. So if in one source we see precisely X and in another Y, we say that in one account X was held to have happened and in another Y was held to have happened, refusing to speculate further, refusing to say further than what X tells us, and refusing to say further than what Y tells us. And previously there was some symmetry between how we handled these cases and invalid sources and valid sources referencing invalid ones. An invalid source says X, but it also, implicitly, says that it cannot be trusted and we can't use it to write articles, so we ignore it, and then a valid source says precisely Y, so we say Y. But now we've decided to break this symmetry.

And this is where I feel our intuitions just differ fundamentally. Mine, vs yours and Nate's and probably many other's. For me it's less than ideal to have these pages for the things we all clearly know are The Master, etc, on pages other than theirs. But I'd rather make sure that we don't speculate over having a flawed rule in order to merge them. (And lest someone suggest that any rule we create to merge them will be fine because "we'll only apply it to pages we know concretely should be merged", first of all, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, second of all, you can imagine how little this is going to convince the mathematician. "Oh, we have this cool machinery that's proving all these theorems we're pretty sure are true. P!=NP, Collatz, Navier Stokes, Golbach, Twin Primes..." "Okay, but I've seen the machinery, it's pretty suspicious and it looks like it can be used to imply basically anything." "Yeah, but that's okay, we're only using it on stuff we already know is true.")

Now, I'd like to rebut the idea that I'm against "continuity" or "referencing" at all. This isn't true. I just don't think that we, the wiki editors, have access to that knowledge. (Because, again, actual intentionalist. Well, partially. I just think that textual evidence is a very poor guide for what precisely we're looking for here and it's going to lead to incredibly messy differences of opinion. We are epistemically limited in this matter to a truly remarkable degree.) And so if we decide to use it for validity it must be based on authorial statements. As I said in the original R4bp thread. I do think it's occasionally possible for there to be relatively unambiguous and universally understood statements of the type of authorial intent we're looking for in a text. I just believe they're incredibly rare. And this is what the Android Boyfriend example shows to me - not the impossibility of communication between individuals, but that we fundamentally cannot be trusted as to what "clear" actually means when we're reading a text. One person sees a particular reading as obvious, another sees another reading as obvious. It might still be the case that in a different section of the book everyone, or near everyone, reads the text in the same way. But we should be very skeptical that our readings of texts are the sorts of things that we need for this policy to work without authorial statements. We're just so epistemically limited here. (I also note that I don't wish to define the DWU as R4 intends it as completely divorced from continuity. It is defined that way, well, modulo R4bp. It's constructed by T:VS.)

But no, I don't think this line of attack is particularly compelling. It's explicitly site policy to not speculate, to only say what the source tells you, nothing more. I'm quite comfortable declining to do so, or at least trying my best not to, (because I know I've done so in the past, forgive me Scrooge, for I have sinned) and being deeply skeptical of those things that I accuse of subjectivity. I note as well that this criticism rests on trying to dissolve the distinction between the language and the metalanguage, as it were, how we add things to and categorize them within the DWU, and how the DWU resolves itself once things have been added. I am, of course, deeply skeptical of this.

And so we end on the sky not falling

So fair warning, it's like after midnight as I wrote this, and if it starts to get a little bit less coherent and tends towards hysteria, that's probably why. (Don't hold me too hard to the stuff I wrote in this section tomorrow or, to a lesser extent, the last section. Subject to change. I think the last section is prettttttty solid, but there might be changes in my views after a night's sleep. The previous stuff is good, or, well, as good as you can get in a day. Not super thrilled with the first section, I think there's more to be said there. But it's workable and it would take me like a week to actually do the good version, and I think that's a bit rude, given it's my thread.)

I think I'm rather more cynical than Scrooge on the subject of whether people will revisit prior subjects that have been validated using R4bp, but I look forward to being proved incorrect. In a way this section of his neatly reflects on a comment OS25 made a week ago.

The big reason I feel so strongly about Rule 4 By Proxy is not only that it makes sense, but also that it’s essentially only made our site better in every case that it’s been used.

Well, I don't think it makes sense, and I think this confidence is misplaced, given the closing of one recent validity debate (there but for the grace of Rassilon...) and the opening of another. R4bp can make the site change in ways that I think many of us are not necessarily fans of. So I'm not certain that we should be appealing to consequences here. I think they're very much open ended. For me, as I said above, the reasoning comes first. I can live with Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows). It's irritating, but not ideal. I can live with a prominent, often referenced invalid story. I can live with weird implications of well thought out rules consistently applied. Poorly thought out rules, or well thought out rules inconsistently applied? That's when I have real frustrations. And R4bp is the last category of the three. (Well, it's well thought out in its own right. I don't think how it jives with the rest of T:VS was quite as thorough.) By its very nature, as it's currently written it's arbitrary in application. Arbitrary in terms of whether we decide to use it or something else? I can live with that - that has to happen to some extent. But in how we apply it? Not so much. And what's more, we don't have to. We're biting a massive bullet here for no reason at all that I can see. Quite a few.

I've sat here trying to write about my frustrations of us, all of us, perhaps just not communicating and not quite having the same ranking of where things fit in our priorities for about 20 minutes now. And I'm just not seeing it. Everything I write borders on hysterical, far too verbose, or cruel. Mainly hysterical. Maybe we'll just never bridge that gap. But I hope we can. I truly hope that we can come to an understanding on why things being arbitrary in terms of application in particular is such an issue. Najawin ☎ 07:42, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Another page break

Didn't totally understand all of that, but one thing I'd like to say is that I think we as a wiki should not be intentionalist about sources. Even if the "android boyfriend" in Time of the Doctor isn't intending to reference Scream of the Shalka, the similarity is still there. We simply phrase it in a way to ensure its not definitive, such as "The Eleventh Doctor once mentioned having an android boyfriend (TV: The Time of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"]). Indeed, One possible Ninth Doctor travelled with an android version of the Master (WC: Scream of the Shalka ^[+]Loading...["Scream of the Shalka (webcast)"]) Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 12:06, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

The android boyfriend is a bad example in any case, because the reference doesn’t actually fit the facts. The Eleventh Doctor states quite plainly that he “invented” the boyfriend, and “accidentally”; the Shalka Doctor built the Master a body, he didn’t invent the Master, and he certainly didn’t do it by accident. Nor try frantically to “get rid of” him as Eleven says he did the android boyfriend. All intentionalism aside the scenario described in “Time” just *does not* textually match the Shalka Master.

Anyway, read the reply, will work on a counter-riposte. We’ll get somewhere yet. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:52, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Well the obvious response is just how Moffat forgot he wrote an entire episode he clearly forgot some of the circumstances of the scenario. But I don't think this.

As for the idea that we shouldn't be intentionalist with sources, well, we're not. As much as we should be - because it's correct - we're not. We don't care that the Man with the rosette is intended to be The Master. What I'm saying is that we should be intentionalist on the higher order concern about whether something is intended to connect with other DWU stories. And not even fully intentionalist! If we were fully intentionalist it just wouldn't matter if someone tried to later connect with an invalid source, we'd ignore them. But there's a real difference between the first order concern about continuity and the higher order concern of validity and people are really keen on blurring this line, and this is very much not a good idea. Najawin ☎ 17:17, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

To clarify, other (specific) DWU stories. Najawin ☎ 17:38, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Still working on my second big reply, this is not that. But unrelated to that (the following is not a load-bearing point in my current line of argument), I just want to push back against “if we were fully intentionalist it just wouldn’t matter if someone tried to later connect with an invalid source, we’d ignore them”. Because I think it is a coherent ultra-intentionalist position to say that in a R4BP case, the whole of the narrative contents of the invalid story becomes implicit-but-intended information in the new source.

That is, if Invalid Story A says “The Doctor once owned a pet emu, and also had a nephew called Bradford Who”, and then Valid Story B features Bradford Who and presents itself as a continuation of Invalid Story A from his point of view — then Valid Story *B* is *itself* asserting, implicitly, that the Doctor of the valid DWU owned a pet emu. See the stuff in my First Riposte about the text of AUC being incorporated into the text of The Daleks as “one enormous footnote” by the carried-over presence of the First Doctor, Ian Chesterton, & Co. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:24, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

If you erase the language / metalanguage distinction, sure! And I've seen that. And I never want to see it again. (And note that I did say "on the higher order concern". I sort of state here that there are multiple levels.) Najawin ☎ 20:37, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm a bit behind here. What's the language/metalanguage distinction? Aquanafrahudy 📢 20:55, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

"the language and the metalanguage, as it were, how we add things to and categorize them within the DWU, and how the DWU resolves itself once things have been added". Technically those are backwards, as befits something I wrote at midnight. (I did warn you all!) The "language" is, well, statements about the DWU, entities within it, etc etc. The "metalanguage" is statements about those statements, how we classify and categorize things on a higher level. It's not a common distinction to use in natural conversation, but it's one that allows for clearer analysis. Eliminating it, or using a system that is strong enough to eliminate it on its own, tends to lead to... problems. Najawin ☎ 21:22, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Are we making progress? I think we might be making progress. Well, once more unto the breach… Note that the following is somewhat more off-the-cuff than the earlier reply, and is addressed to Najawin in the second person, as a direct reply to his points in the order in which he made them — instead of a structured argument of my own. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:28, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Second reply from Scrooge: Timeless Web Theory

The Web and the DWU

On the topic of the Web and the DWU, I think you have misunderstood me.

First and foremost, what about a writer who simply doesn't want anyone to reference their work? A writer that is notoriously disagreeable? They actively discourage people from building off of their storylines whenever possible and try to insist that their work shouldn't loop back around to the rest of what other people are doing, but still write using DWU characters? It sounds almost familiar, if a bit too extreme, no? Is this hypothetical "Angry Harry" still writing for the DWU?User:Najawin

Why, yes, of course he is — so long as Harry is open to the possibility that he himself will pick up on his own plot threads in further works! Our hypothetical writer is being very possessive of a branch of the Web, but he's not severing the Web at all.

What if we take some DWU concepts, rip them free of their original context - you've even suggested that we could do this with an image, a design, to some extent - and then have them run forward in their original series, while they might in the future be fine referencing The Web.User:Najawin

………good job on rederiving Validity By Proxy from first principles?? This is so thoroughly the kind of case I'm talking about that I don't entirely comprehend why you're presenting it back to me as though it supported your position.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think the issue here is that this is just obviously wrong. The DWU as we mean it on this site is defined by our validity policies. Our article on Doctor Who universe says as much. And these validity policies change over time. It's simply not the case that "Valid" [means] "part of The Web (not a dead end or false start)". Perhaps, perhaps, this is what it should come to mean, in that we should use The Web as a guide to T:VS. But it doesn't mean that. The two terms are not synonymous, and I don't think it's clear that they even line up at the present time.User:Najawin

This is just the kind of tiresome T:BOUND debate I mentioned I wanted to avoid at Forum:References into Worldbuilding, and I wish we wouldn't get bogged down in it now. Yes, in a sense I'm taking about what it "should come to mean" more than what it is. My position is that "part of the Web (not a dead end or false start)" is the most parsimonious and accurate formalisation of what a coherent definition of the "intended to be in the DWU" part of Rule 4 is talking about. Obviously it's not in and of itself live policy yet; that's what the present thread-tangent is trying to promulgate. But that is because we don't currently have a formal definition of what we mean by "intent to be DWU", just a lot of slightly-contradictory precedent. I think it's past time we did put together a formal explanation; and I think Web-talk is the closest to a definition that satisfactorily matches current, and even historical, practice.

I've shown why the "finite circle with a firm boundary that you're in or out of" way of thinking about "being in the DWU" simply doesn't work, because e.g. Against Nature fails it. "It's in continuity with prior stories that set themselves in the world of An Unearthly Child, therefore it's indirectly in the same universe as Doctor Who" is the only sense I can think of in which a lot — though not all — of Faction Paradox could be said to pass Rule 4, and that goes for a lot of spin-offs past and present.

As for the "no intentional-dead-ends" clause, it's taken straight from the old debates on Death Comes to Time, where the deciding factor for it failing Rule 4 was not that it messed about with the lore of the Time Lords, or even that it ignored the TV Movie, but, above all else, that Freedman said that by the time he finished it, he himself had decided he would ignore it if he was allowed to do further Who stories.

What else does "passing Rule 4" mean, if not a somewhat-hazy concept that is best crystallised in those terms? What's your pitch for a formalisation? Or do you simply think we shouldn't try, and keep it hazy? That seems hard to square with your approach elsewhere.

Usefulness to readers

I know some people IRL who are massive Doctor Who fans, just massive. And they despise the wiki and consider it near unusable because it mixes together EU content and show content. (…) And our decision validate all of these R4bp works, well... Some of them frustrated them more than others, but to them it just wasn't helpful, it obscured things more than made it clear.User:Najawin

Skill issue.

…Okay, okay, I know. But listen. Do these people's frustrations have anything to do with the arcana of why we have historicall considered these sources invalid? I think not. You alluded to this yourself in your opening post, many, many words ago. There are canon-purists in the Doctor Who fandom, but not many, I think, who would deem the validation of Search Out Space unthinkable, while being totally fine with Party Fears Two. We're talking about a rather small number of stories here, and not the most unthinkable to treat as "real"; a few drops of restrictiveness in an ocean of permissiveness. People who want us to be a BBC-TV-trumps-all Wiki will never be happy, and that's unfortunate, but throwing them a few scraps of invalidity won't satisfy them while harming the experience of readers who are otherwise in tune with how we roll.

Besides:

One of the earliest conversations on how to deal with validity, which I linked above, Forum:The original inclusion debates#Excluded, suggested to use italics to demarcate EU vs tv content.User:Najawin

That's a very last-month concern! {{Cite source}} is here now, for all the "canon-sorting" needs of readers who actually care. It finally allows us to fulfill our original principled ambition of "present the maximum of info, and let people pick for themselves". People who object to the reality of Search Out Space on the grounds that it is not an Episode Of Doctor Who have fewer legs to stand on than they ever did, because a citation to "TV: Search Out Space" is no longer identical to a citation for "TV: An Unearthly Child": checking whether it's a proper episode or a special crossover skit is now just one citation-expanding click away.

If people don't want to do that — again I say — skill issue. It's one click. So long as people who can be bothered are able to find what they want and separate it from what they don't care about, no encyclopedia should limit the scope of the information it contains for reasons like that.

T:CS

I won't dissect your words in this section sentence by sentence again, because I think I would just end up repeating myself from the first section re: T:BOUND. I am proposing a formalisation of a more consistent, more streamlined T:VS (slash T:CS); not a complete break from prior policy, but certainly an evolution, not just a reformulation. I accept as much. The whole point is that trying to cover both concepts in one policy has in fact led to weird conceptual bleed between the two, in ways that actually affected the end-result of validities and invalidities, compared to what what I think a more logically consistent approach would have yielded.

I hold that T:VS as it currently exists (all one policy) is in fact bad. Better than what came before, but still much worse than it “ought” to be. As the man said, “the worst possible coverage/validity policy except for everything else that's ever been tried”. I have an idea for something better; reform by reform, our community, in recent years, has been shifting closer to that better way; I think we should continue with that full-bodied regeneration, and speed it up if possible. The T:CS/T:VS overhaul would be a great step forward in that reform.

Perhaps that's a difference between us; you seem to start from the perspective that the Wiki's way of doing things for the past fifteen years has been basically acceptable, albeit not necessarily perfect. I do not grant this. I love Tardis Wiki very much and I think it is better than the vast majority of Wikis, but — have you seen the vast majority of Wiki? If we think that's good enough, we're damning ourselves with faint praise. Tardis Wiki's coverage policies, while being leaps and bounds ahead of those of other Wikis of its age and size, have historically been quite bad in absolute terms. There's a dozen ways in which they simply don't make coherent sense except through a lot of kludgy patches and precedent; or, relatedly, in which an ill-conceived — but plain — original intent has been neutered by a similar mass of kludges and adjustment, but remains on the books anyway. (User:OttselSpy25's perennial complaints about the hollow "no what-ifs" rule come to mind.)

Forgive the melodrama, but we are shamed. We are shamed by the fact that T:VS is such a daunting mess. We are shamed that we banished non-narrative fiction for so long, that we spent years parroting the word "canon" (albeit in gradually more intelligent ways), that there was ever a time when Faction Paradox not being covered was remotely on the table. We need to do better, in a very deep sense; to cut mercilessly through what is left of the bad in our policies. And also to nurture the good — yes — because there's a lot of good buried in there, already. A lot of worthy principles, fragments of a better whole that's waiting to be unearthed. But there is, too, plentiful cause for radicalism.

In short: I am a reformist rather than a revolutionary, because I do believe we can and should operate, in earnest, transparently, through the established institutions of the Wiki. (The established institutions are pretty good.) But what I am not is a moderate.

(How's that for grandiose and hysterical? Really, Najawin, I assure you, you're good.)

So can we please discuss the proposed update on the merits, now, without endlessly quibbling over quite how much the proposed new policy strays from the past? As for asking other people to weigh in — I am not against keeping this thread open for double the length, if we find ourselves still uncertain in twenty-odd days. And I am not against issuing batch-notifications on talk pages, a site-wide announcement (like we did for the Master thread or {{cite source}}), and, sure, even cross-promoting the thread on other Who fan platforms. You have my blessing to do so if you want.

But as you often say, it's the arguments that really matter, not the number of "aye"s. If my arguments make sense — if by the final deadline, the community and the closing admin agree that they make sense — then this thread will rule as much, and replace prior jurisprudence as the standing policy, and that is how these things work. That is how this community functions. I'm all for inviting more voices to weigh in within the framework of how a policy-change thread is meant to work — but I deny that such things are procedurally necessary in their own right, as I think you believe. They're not. They're just good ways to get a better, more in-depth discussion within the thread, which is what actually matters. We admins are custodians, not oligarchs.

…Anyway.

But, like, there are some "not covered" things that we just don't discuss here, for a variety of reasons, failing R2, R3, etc etc. But you can be "not covered" and still have a page here. (…) dear lord there's a whole hierarchy of how things can "fail to have in universe pages for plot elements" and still be on this wiki that we just have no terminology for and no clear unifying standards. It's very much a case by case basis.User:Najawin

Sounds to me like a very good reason to have a clear Tardis:Coverage policy that formalises and describes the ins and outs of coverage-policy, without also trying to talk about validity policy! I apologise if I've implied as much, but I'm not saying T:CS would literally just be Rules 1-2-3 and nothing else. The whole point is that we'd do away with the misleading Four Little Rules division of these concepts. T:CS would strive to explicate the various levels of coverage from "full plot summary and in-universe pages" to unproduced story-pages to the merry denizens of Category:Real world media with DWU connections.

Unrelatedly, I do not understand how you read my post as "only making sense if R1 breakers can be covered" when the quoted sentence is specifically saying that "stuff which breaks Rule 1 goes un-covered all the time"?…

"Oh look. Maths."

I saved this section for last in writing this reply, and was honestly not sure whether to bother fully refuting it in its own right because I think the crux of our disagreement is a higher-level matter that renders the whole thing moot. Your entire analysis — unless I've missed something — overlooks, perhaps willfully, a foundational stone of mine, which is that we accept the Web Theory of Rule 4: i.e. "Genesis of the Daleks sets itself in continuity with The Daleks" is synonymous with "Genesis of the Daleks sets itself in the universe of The Daleks" is synonymous with "Genesis of the Daleks sets itself in the DWU". As such it is the justification for Genesis of the Daleks being valid in the first place (R1-2-3 being equal) — it and a hundred overlapping statements of the same form e.g. "Genesis of the Daleks sets itself in the universe of The Sontaran Experiment", all of which ultimately reduce back to "in the same universe as [X1] which is in the same universe as [X2] which is (…) in the same universe as An Unearthly Child".

If you won't grant that to start with, then sure, nothing else follows. And I feel like you don't?

But if you do grant it, then "removing the time element" means disregarding the difference between "[Story A] references [Story B]" ("[Story A] sets itself in the universe of [Story B]") and "[Story A] is referenced by [Story B]" ("[Story A] is treated as part of its universe by [Story B]"): to reduce both propositions to, ultimately, "[Story A] ⇔ [Story B]".

So — Case One. Suppose that we have three stories A1, B1 and C1, which came out in that order, chronologically. Both B1 and C1 reference ("set themselves in the universe of") A1. However, C1 is pointedly discontinuous with B1. We have, in other words, “B1 -> A1 <- C1”. In current practice, if A1 is already part of the DWU (part of the Web), then both B1 and C1 individually pass Rule 4. Another way to judge C would be to say "C sets itself outside the universe of B which sets itself in the universe of A1, therefore C1 sets itself outside the universe of A1". But we don't do that. This is what I mean by Continuity Trumps Discontinuity.

For Validity By Proxy, let's consider Case Two. Let's look at A2, B2 and C2. A2 is still starts off DWU. B2, however, fails Rule 4 to a first approximation: it does not set itself in the universe of A2, nor of any arbitrary already-DWU A[N]. But C2 is continuous with both. With Validity By Proxy, Continuity Trumps Discontinuity so we now care that B2 is now, from a timeless bird's eye view, in continuity with at least one DWU source (C2) even if it isn't in-continuity with A2 (nor with any other individual DWU work predating C2).

For the purported Invalidity By proxy, let's consider Case Three. Let's look at A3, B3 and C3. They have the same relationship to one another as A1, B1 and C1, but now we're wondering if C3, which is in continuity with A3, setting itself as discontinuous with B3, means that B3 is now retroactively outside the DWU. From everything we've learned, the answer is clearly "no": Continuity Trumps Discontinuity. B3 is continuous with at least one DWU story (A3) and nothing can take that away, not even it being discontinuous with a zillion other DWU stories like C3 (whether they postdate or predate B3!).

Supposing that a blue arrow represents "has continuity with [in either direction]", and a red arrow represents intentional discontinuity — then all three graphs look the same once you abstract away the chronological release order, the question of whether a blue arrow means "references" or "is referenced by". That is what I meant.

• 

Does this help?

Also:

(…) my intuition is that this is precisely the reductive version of R4 Scrooge has suggested and people have not largely been fans of. It's that instead of springboarding off of Unearthly Child our web springboards off of every piece of DWU media. That's my guess.User:Najawin

No, this is wrong on several levels. The Simplified R4 (which people, including me, indeed aren't fans of) has nothing to do with where the Web springs from: it has to do with snipping away the "intentional dead-end" exception pioneered by the old DCtTT thread. With DCtT the question is not whether it ultimately goes back to AUC or not; there is every reason to think it does. It fails Rule 4 not for lack of going back to AUC (it does), nor because it ignors the TVM (that's no different from Genesis of the Daleks ignoring Genesis of Evil), but because Dan Freedman stated that he himself would have ignored it if he'd written further Doctor Who stories in that period. It was an intentional dead-end. That, and not anything else, is the way in which it fails Rule 4. Simplified Rule 4 would get rid of this notion.

Continuity references

We do the second. It's site policy. We do the second. This has been upheld time and time again. We do not go further than what the source tells us. Indeed, I state something very similar to the inverse of this argument in my OP.User:Najawin

No we don't. Not all the time. Absolutely not. Stop right there.

I mean, just look at Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) again! Nothing in Tomorrow Windows actually says the tall aristocratic gentleman is the Doctor. Not in so many words. He could be some random guy the Doctor is destined to meet! After all, he also sees the Daleks in those windows, doesn't mean the Doctor is someday going to regenerate into "the Daleks (plural)". If the true objection to Validity By Proxy were that we can't be sure the pale aristocrat is the Shalka Doctor, then our page should be Pale aristocrat (The Tomorrow Windows), and it wouldn't discuss "this was presumably intended to be the Shalka Doctor" any more than "The Woman (The End of Time)" would discuss "some fans think this is a regenerated Ulysses".

If you want precedent, then God help us, this is Talk:Totem (short story) territory. But put simply, when we're not getting our knickers in a twist about the validity of the sources involved, we acknowledge non-spelled-out connections all the time based on presumed intent. Especially for identifying preexisting recurring characters making cameos.

Maybe you think we shouldn't, but we do, and it's hard to imagine how the Wiki would operate it we didn't; again, at the extreme, that way lies The Doctor (An Unearthly Child), The Doctor (The Daleks), The Doctor (The Edge of Destruction), etc. A line has to be drawn somewhere, but for many years now, it's been drawn well beyond "erring on the side of acknowledging a description of a particular Doctor as being that Doctor even if the literal text could theoretically match any number of people".

And besides, I don't think even you would go as far as that reducio ad absurdum of wondering whether Hartnell's Doctor character in Story B character really is the same as the character with the same name and the same face in Story A. Assuming, then, that your argument only applies to """ambiguous"""" continuity-references like the "pale-faced aristocrat", it fails as a defeater to the basic principle. Picture a continuity reference of the form "…and in one timeline the Doctor travelled with Alison Cheney", or indeed of Alison appearing in person; surely you agree with stating confidently that this is a reference to the actual preexisting character of that name? So unless you bite a bullet that I think goes well beyond sanity, then at best this entire line of argument should reduce the scope of potential Proxy cases, but it wouldn't actually be a defeater to the concept. I think we agree there are such things as uncontroversial continuity-references, we're just haggling about boundaries.

Falling skies, or, why I will not give in

Well, I don't think it makes sense, and I think this confidence is misplaced, given the closing of one recent validity debate (there but for the grace of Rassilon...) and the opening of another.User:Najawin

There, I suppose, we just diverge. Ironic license issue notwithstanding I would see nothing harmful about covering Do You Have A License… as valid in the abstract — if there were a solid R4BP case for it. Which The Bloodletters probably was in its lowkey way. Certainly all my ambivalence in the case had to do with my doubts regarding Fogarty's intent, or otherwise with the specifics of The Bloodletters; had we a clearer case — the Chiropodist showing up in the flesh as a supporting character in something-or-other — I would say in a heartbeat that validating it was clearly the right thing to do.

For me, as I said above, the reasoning comes first. (…) I can live with a prominent, often referenced invalid story. I can live with weird implications of well thought out rules consistently applied. Poorly thought out rules, or well thought out rules inconsistently applied? That's when I have real frustrations.User:Najawin

Well, the whole tragedy is that I quite agree with you there. I want consistent, well-thought-out, straightforwardly-applicable rules! I like nothing better!

But I am an optimist. I do not believe in the policy uncertainty-principle, I do not believe there is a necessary trade-off.

Granting that Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)/Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka) is suboptimal, I will always believe that we can do better. An overall site policy that is both well-reasoned and avoids situations like this must exist, surely — and I cannot accept, lying down, the idea that it is beyond this community's brainpower to devise. The original R4BP proposal, and its reincarnation as Validity By Proxy in the more ambitious T:VS/T:CS framework, are my best guesses thus far about what that policy may look like. Perhaps I haven't got it right yet; perhaps the correct justification eludes us. But even if it should turn out to be the case, I refuse to stop looking. There must exist a logical policy that permits this, and so help me, we are going to find it and put it on the books if it kills me.

Accuse me of motivated reasoning if you must — I do realise how it sounds. But I look at it as a sanity-check situation. Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)/Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka)… cannot be the best we can do. Come on. If the legal analysis seems to imply otherwise, the obvious hypothesis is that the legal analysis isn't good enough and we must keep looking. The idea that no such policy can exist is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence you have not remotely provided.

More provocative perhaps, but (to my mind) equally principled, is my contention that it's okay to keep Rule 4 By Proxy in vigour even in an "imperfect" form, should you manage to build consensus that my current policy justification is imperfect. You can still act as though murder is a priori wrong even if you haven't yet cracked a unifying theory of moral philosophy; in fact, by most accounts, you should. Ditto: we are pretty sure, at a meta-level, that something R4BP-shaped is closer to correct than Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)/Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka), and we should keep using R4BP as a "model" even if we keep looking for the "correct" underlying principle.

I stress that all of this is sort of a hypothetical, to me. I do think the Web Theory is in fact reasonably correct and reasonably robust. But I also believe, with even greater certainty, that R4BP gives the right results even if it should turn out to do so in a suboptimal way; and consequently, that it'd be harmful to repeal it and return to the prior status quo which might make more sense on its own (wrong-headed) internal terms, but strays further, in its output, from what the conjectured Perfect Validity Policy would yield. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:28, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Pag3 Br3ak

Read, thinking about, will respond ideally tomorrow, perhaps the next day. In the short term as an immediate response, I'll say that the distinction between The Web being a good guide to an ideal system of validity and actually being validity really does matter - if it's the former the RXbps really are issues, (potentially temporarily, potentially not, but it's certainly not trivial that they're red herrings) if it's the latter they can be easily dismissed. As for the issue of the graphs, that's actually identical to what I suggested as the steelman argument in terms of graph structure. Woah boy. That's... I'm gonna have to take some time to unpack that. That's got some weird implications. I'm pretty sure it's identical to the strong version of R4 that, well, I suggested, even if you didn't mean it to be. Najawin ☎ 00:01, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

If you mean that idea “that instead of springboarding off of Unearthly Child our web springboards off of every piece of DWU media”, then yes, sort of? But I wouldn't phrase it like that. The point is that it is the nature of the Web that any individual node-point links back to AUC eventually, albeit indirectly. That, plus timelessness, plus intentional-dead-end-nodes-exlusionism, and you get the proposed Timeless Web Theory of validity.

I was just clarifying that this had nothing to do with the Simplified R4 option which I outlined (and which people don't like), contra your apparent belief. Simplified R4 is a proposed alternative to TWT, which removes dead-end-exclusionism instead of removing the temporal aspect.

(And again, "weird" or not — I genuinely dare you to devise another formalisation of Rule 4 that doesn't invalidate Against Nature and its ilk. I've tried! Nothing else makes sense! That's actually why I don't care that much about the good guide to an ideal system…/actually validity distinction: I don't think there's anything else "intended to be in the DWU" can feasibly mean that wouldn't imply the invalidation of a bunch of currently-uncontroversially-valid things. And we need a formal definition of what "intended to be in the DWU" mean, if we're to talk about inevitable logical implications of Rule 4 By Proxy at all, surely…) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 00:26, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

No, not quite, I mean that instead of merely Unearthly Child being the center of The Web, it treats every node as the center of The Web. It's a weird one. (The basic intuition here translated to a non mathematical notion is that if you can't privilege the past in terms of our reasoning you can't privilege TUC as the center of The Web and being the thing where the relevant IPs start from.) I'm gonna actually have to unpack this to make sure, it's intuition at this point, and, again, I'm very much not a category theorist, so it will largely just be diagram chasing. I might have to crack open the category theory book I have. >.>

Again, I hope to get it done late Wednesday-Early Friday GMT, but this bit is weird enough that I actually don't make promises. I actually have to do math instead of just draw diagrams. Najawin ☎ 01:00, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Is it maybe possible to make your arguments without the diagrams? Your commitment to formal logic is admirable, but I think it's just conceivable that objections whose entire substance requires a mathematics textbook to hand might not have supreme relevance to a forum discussion about what, in practice, is or is not Doctor Who. Starkidsoph ☎ 01:09, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

The diagrams in question are just making visible the continuity relations that we're going to be talking about anyhow. It's that or saying "well some story is in continuity with another story, but it's also in continuity with a third story, but those second two stories aren't in continuity with each other", but doing different variations of that like 10 different times. I feel like that would get more confusing, not less. (Indeed, that's why diagrams like this were invented, because it actually gets really really confusing if you write it out without a picture.) Najawin ☎ 01:34, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Don't call it a comeback

So where have I been for the past few days?

Mainly trying to do some diagram chasing. After a certain point I realized that category theory has some useful insights and there's some stuff to care about (and I'm still working on that, hopefully I can formalize that intuition I mentioned above. I still make no promises. It's an intuition.), but that graph theory is probably the better field for some other related issues. (One obvious pair of questions is "given a configuration of a subset of The Web, how does adding a vertex with incident edges - thus, our earlier configuration is a subgraph of our new configuration - impact validity? What are sufficient and necessary conditions, for instance, of everything in this latter graph to be either all valid or invalid?" For those who care about the formulation, the technical question has to do with walks on 2-colored graphs, your first graph is a subset of the second.)

And it turns out that when you look at these things from the perspective of graph theory, it's equivalent to considering that the "intentionally discontinuous" relationships simply don't exist. There's simply no reason to discuss them. Which makes sense, as my initial argument never did. Which ties in nicely to the next section.

Into the Spiderverse

Scrooge suggests that the hypothetical Angry Harry is not actually trying to sever their work from the web. This is less than clear by his own standards. What I described is almost an archetypal "Dead-End" situation. There's no intent for the work done within these plotlines to reflect back on the rest of the DWU. Nobody has ever suggested, to my knowledge, that these Dead-Ends must be a single work. They often are. But that isn't a necessary condition. Perhaps Scrooge is reading me as saying that the hypothetical author would pick back up his works within the rest of the DWU? No, this is expressly not my intent with the hypothetical. It's a dead end branch. Do we trim it? It seems a bit extreme in this particular example to me.

As for the idea that I've "rediscovered validity by proxy", this is in response to me attempting to point out the other obvious flaw with the definition - taking DWU concepts, divorcing them from their previous context (hint, this means that they do not refer back to things in the web, so by your definition they are not intended to be in the DWU at time of release), but are perfectly fine with later DWU works referencing them, or later works in the same series referencing the DWU. A "false start", rather than a dead end. Arguably these authors intend for this to be DWU the entire time, but it's solely because they're anticipating latter "narrative" connections rather than writing them at the present time.

Scrooge specifically says that things in these two categories don't connect to the web - you can fail to connect in multiple ways. That's why this issue emerges. Indeed, he cuts off the second one explicitly - saying it wasn't intended to be in the DWU. (I'm not asking if it later becomes in the DWU, just if it was intended to be so originally.)

And, indeed, this is where Scrooge's analysis - under his own view of validity - of the similarities between the two scenarios breaks down beyond all recognition. Because we do not have simply ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V2&&V3\\&\uparrow &\nearrow \\&V1\\\end{array}}$ and ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&&I1\\&\downarrow &\swarrow \\&?\\\end{array}}$.
For the latter situation, both ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&&I1\\&\downarrow &\swarrow \\&?\\\end{array}}$ and ${\begin{array}{lcl}&V1&\rightarrow &I1\\&\downarrow &\swarrow \\&?\\\end{array}}$ describe it equally well.

All things equal, we do not know whether I1 is invalid because it fails to reference valid stories or because it wishes to be intentionally disjoint from further valid stories under Scrooge's formula. The question mark in the second graph could just as easily be a story that wishes to borrow from the mainline DWU but not reflect back on it, per his own criteria.

Which brings us to the question that needs to be addressed yet again. Does validity trump invalidity? Not how Scrooge is suggesting it here in any other area of our policies. It's fantastic rhetoric, don't get me wrong. R4 certainly asks us to make sure that we don't make things invalid without just cause. And I think we're all in favor of more things being valid than invalid. But if we truly believe that once something is invalid the smallest hints of validity should turn us the other way, well, we need to massively change how we conduct validity debates for already invalid works. We just don't proceed like that. We need to be consistent.

Is Validity The Web? Does it matter?

So I'm very concerned with the idea that

[Scrooge's] position is that "part of the Web (not a dead end or false start)" is the most parsimonious and accurate formalisation of what a coherent definition of the "intended to be in the DWU" part of Rule 4 is talking about.

This is obviously false. And I don't just mean this rhetorically. It's like, really really obviously false. Perhaps it's more parsimonious than what we have written elsewhere - I don't think so, but w/e - but it's just factually not what we currently talk about. It's wildly different. And this isn't even a new-T:BOUND issue. This is actual written policy. Rule-4-DWU is defined by T:VS. That's how the term is used for wiki policies. Is this helpful? Less than obvious. But let's be very clear that this has no relation to R4-DWU as it currently stands. And, indeed, contra

But that is because we don't currently have a formal definition of what we mean by "intent to be DWU"

This is formalized! We've defined what DWU means! (I mean, I guess we haven't defined what intent means, but, like, good luck with that. Have fun.)

So, again, The Web does not even begin to correspond to R4-DWU. It is, at best, an idealized replacement. Why does this matter? Because it was touted as a solution to a few different problems. Firstly, the RXbps. If the 3 step process is not real, if it's merely idealized, they still exist as problems, and have to be reckoned with. Secondly, and more importantly, invalidity by proxy! If one agrees that The Web isn't how we're currently treating validity, then they seem to agree that as R4bp currently exists there's a whopping great logical hole in its derivation. Or, at the very least, there's an argument for one they simply haven't addressed except to say "well in my ideal system of validity it isn't present". Well, to Scrooge, I have to say, in my ideal system of running the wiki a lot of things would be different. But I can't use that as an excuse to dodge out of issues in my arguments concerning here and now problems in any other thread. If The Web isn't currently validity and is merely an idealized system, these are still very real problems that must be tackled head on.

Covered work

I don't think there's that much disagreement here, I do think we need to clean up our system of coverage, but I'm deeply skeptical that we can easily extricate the four rules from each other. And, well, you brought up the idea of separating them as part of this "three step process" (which, again, does not exist in its current form), so certainly it's relevant that you can't separate R1 from T:VS.

Unrelatedly, I do not understand how you read my post as "only making sense if R1 breakers can be covered" when the quoted sentence is specifically saying that "stuff which breaks Rule 1 goes un-covered all the time"?…

If it was phrased as "isn't supposed to be covered", or "doesn't merit coverage", etc etc, that would work. But as written it rather clearly says that some R1 breakers can be covered.

As for the idea that I think this wiki's rules are largely good enough, I'm borderline tempted to call this libel. My concern here is more that much like in the past there was a very hard line taken by a certain group of users and the wiki was very, very difficult to use for anyone that didn't share their viewpoint it seems that we're trending the precise same direction for other viewpoints. We should be reasonably pluralist in how we edit things and allow others to edit. (And let me very much challenge the idea that you're a reformist, as a friendly aside. If the idea of using The Web as well as the T:CS/T:VS goes through, there will be nothing left of the original T:VS - no voting off the island, no R2/R3, no narrative, no authors able to wall off works from the DWU. Perhaps vive la revolution, but let's be very clear. These two changes in concert would kill whatever is left of the original T:VS in its entirety.)

Continuity

Whether or not people follow the rules is different from what the rules are.

Oh, you want me to continue? Look. Obviously putting aside the issue of naming the page, which is its own can of worms, simply saying "oh, it was an incarnation of the Doctor" rather than "it was someone the Doctor saw" is technically against our non-T:BOUND rules. It's one everyone ignores from time to time, because we absolutely understand basic context, but, you know, it is. And that's why this choice isn't a choice. We have a policy in place. If it's unclear to us, even slightly, there's a standard to fall back on. We shouldn't be speculating. Now, do we need to still understand things like object permanence? Of course. But the argument just assumes that it's solely up to user discretion. And it's just not.

Picture a continuity reference of the form "…and in one timeline the Doctor travelled with Alison Cheney", or indeed of Alison appearing in person; surely you agree with stating confidently that this is a reference to the actual preexisting character of that name?

To be honest with you I haven't read Kripke. Joking aside, I quote myself here:

I do think it's occasionally possible for there to be relatively unambiguous and universally understood statements of the type of authorial intent we're looking for in a text. I just believe they're incredibly rare. And this is what the Android Boyfriend example shows to me - not the impossibility of communication between individuals, but that we fundamentally cannot be trusted as to what "clear" actually means when we're reading a text. One person sees a particular reading as obvious, another sees another reading as obvious. It might still be the case that in a different section of the book everyone, or near everyone, reads the text in the same way. But we should be very skeptical that our readings of texts are the sorts of things that we need for this policy to work without authorial statements. We're just so epistemically limited here.

We agree on the possibility. But to bring up an example this contrived I think you're showing just how difficult it truly is.

Minor notes

What do I think R4 means? As I said -

individual authors should have their own views of the DWU in which a subset of their view of the DWU is roughly analogous to a subset of The Web

But there are some crucial issues here. One, I don't think that authors' views on the DWU necessarily correspond to our view on the DWU, which is, again, constructed by T:VS. Immediate problems I see here are something like an author that thinks of a variety of works of fiction as living in one shared world, built up not just with explicit narrative connections, but with headcanons as well - their "mental web" contains far more than Doctor Who. This isn't inherently an issue, a lot of authors do this. A lot of fans do this. But if you write a book that you insert into your mental web, and its actual connections, usually narrative, but sometimes thematic or other types, are far stronger to other series than they are to what we understand as the DWU, even if fully licensed, we might just cut the cord. If it's just really weird but not caught up in something else's gravity, as it were? I'm not sure we'd cut the cord. We might. But probably not. (You suggest Against Nature here, but, imo, that's not that weird or non-DWU, once you get the premise. I suspect Golden Age is weirder.) Another question is whether an author could ever be so intentionally discontinuous with the rest of the DWU sans, say, one node that they get booted out. I don't think so. But it's not too difficult to understand why Cushing was declared invalid, or why we might say that if someone wrote a sequel to the TV movie based solely on it + The Leekley Bible it might be invalid. I wouldn't endorse that, let me stress, I'd strongly disagree. But it wouldn't shock me. Also, given our definition of DWU, even if an author doesn't say "well, I don't want it to be in the DWU", if they express disinterest in it being in the DWU as defined by T:VS through other comments, we can take that as evidence. Again, lack of continuity is not itself evidence, so you need to do more. But if they say something like "oh, it's not in the same universe as ..." and just keep going, eventually we've got to start considering it. There's a limit here.

So I think the issue is a little more nuanced than just narrative connections. (And, of course, I'd let people just opt out. As our rules say they can - sans R4bp.) They have a mental model, we have a set of policies, there's some translation.

{{Cite source}} Does not resolve the problem I discussed, they want a way to filter out the extraneous information. Again, I don't agree with them. At all. And I would never support removing T:NPOV. But this focus on The Web as opposed to thinking "does this information really benefit our readers on this page or does it mislead them" I think will end up pushing out editors who have slightly different styles in editing. I know Nate, and I'm not entirely sure if he wants me to mention this, given he hasn't commented in this thread yet, briefly mentioned to me his thoughts on a three-tiered model of validity. I'm not sure this works, but it gets at some of the concerns here. It's at least an option. But I'll be honest, I get suspicious around tiers of coverage / validity as it sounds like wookiepedia.

I am an optimist. I do not believe in the policy uncertainty-principle, I do not believe there is a necessary trade-off.

Neither do I! People have chosen my least preferred route of the three offered. R4bp as it stands is broken, and it seems people's solution, to my mind, is to break T:VS to be in greater accordance with it. (Yes, T:VS could stand to be changed. But the solutions here are... less than ideal.) If you all truly wish to do that... I mean...

But to my mind it's far better to kill R4bp and return to the drawing board for a better solution to the problem we know exists that I don't think it solves well, or to fix the fundamental flaws it has and keep it around.

You can still act as though murder is a priori wrong even if you haven't yet cracked a unifying theory of moral philosophy; in fact, by most accounts, you should.

A: I'm not a moral intuitionist, no I shouldn't. B: I absolutely have cracked a unifying theory of moral philosophy.

But I also believe, with even greater certainty, that R4BP gives the right results even if it should turn out to do so in a suboptimal way; and consequently, that it'd be harmful to repeal it and return to the prior status quo which might make more sense on its own (wrong-headed) internal terms, but strays further, in its output, from what the conjectured Perfect Validity Policy would yield.

And you've yet to give a concrete example of where this failure state might occur. We agree on most if not all the cases listed in this thread, no? Perhaps not Daft Dimension. But if this is the sole point of defense for why R4bp can't be repealed for fear of the consequences, I think very little of this argument. Perhaps others disagree. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Najawin (talk • contribs) .

P4ge bre4k

Read, will reply soon. (Though I think you have a sentence that cuts off at the end of the first paragraph of ‘Into the Spiderverse’?) But first, brief, off-the-cuff thoughts, some of which may prompt short replies from you that’ll hopefully make my letter reply more efficient…

Important disclaimer: think we’ve been talking at cross purposes re: what a “false start” is and the trouble with Harry; will have to sit down and rephrase there.

Regarding: “the Web isn’t currently validity and is merely an idealized system, these are still very real problems that must be tackled head on”… I am tackling them! By saying we should officialise Web Theory (or something very like it)! What’s your “ideal system of running the wiki” anyhow? That’s a genuine question.

Curious why/how you feel the three-step process falls short of reality. It’s more of an ethnographical observation than a policy (proposed or otherwise), and seems to be perfectly satisfactory as a description of What It Is We Do On The Wiki — boiling it down into one sentence, “giving full Wiki pages to a certain body of fiction, then giving in-universe valid coverage to the fictional contents of a certain subset of that body of fiction”.

Finally: I consider myself to be a reformist insofar as I am pushing the Wiki towards what I hold to be its ideal self in a gradual, thread-by-thread manner, respecting the established way for a user to argue for policy to be altered. There’s a difference between the Ship of Theseus, and burning the old boat completely then building a new one in its place. If I’d been a revolutionary I would have, I dunno, just up and deleted all the bad policies overnight. (And engaged in I don’t know what bad-faith shenanigans to get any admins who disagreed with me booted from adminship.) But that’s not who I am. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 11:36, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Entirely possible with Harry! I'm trying to show by how your own lights and views your definition of The Web is a little too simplistic. But it needs that simplicity, imo, to adequately define R4 in your view.(If you switch the "and" to an "or" bad things happen.)

No, trying to institute an idealized system isn't tackling them. If there are problems here and now, you have to address them here and now. Once again, I can say that in my preferred system of running the wiki all of the arguments against [whatever position I hold in a thread] vanish. But that doesn't mean I don't have to defend that position against those arguments in that thread. If you cede that they're problems for R4bp as it currently stands, and so we have to reform T:VS in order to fix them, so be it! But you've not done so! You've called them red herrings, or uncompelling, and to justify this you've referred back to The Web. This is where the issue lies.

As to why the three step situation falls short of reality, I've addressed it before briefly. I don't think you can extricate the steps from each other as cleanly as you do. In making our stage 1 determinations, we often bare in mine our validity rules, and you can't just separate those cleanly from our "covered" rules, as we've talked about. When something is covered, even before we write up IU pages for it, it's usually covered as "valid" or "invalid", which means that the third stage can't solely be what validity is - our ability to write IU pages based on it comes from, in a sense, how we've labeled our OOU page. Maybe this still isn't enough to move you, if it's in stage 2 rather than 3, well, it's still not stage 1. But, again, I do emphasize the entanglement of coverage and validity. But more than that, I want to emphasize that stage 1 is sort of broadly written with the "or otherwise" clause, and I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that? There's a maximalist interpretation of this - which is how we justify pages like Cultural references to the Doctor Who universe, or a more reasonable one, which is still just an attempted construction of the DWU (and I think this is what you're suggesting), and those pages are just fun side projects. If it's the latter, I don't think you can disentangle stage 1 and stage 2 either, precisely due to this entanglement of validity and coverage. We usually kick R2 breakers off, but we do have a few R3 breakers around, iirc. I think they'd count? Now, I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just saying I don't think this is an accurate description of affairs as it currently stands. And because of this you actually need to address the issue head on. Najawin ☎ 16:00, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

I'll get into it more in the real reply, but my view is that there isn't a coherent standing policy on what Rule 4 means. You keep saying there is, but the current "what do we mean by DWU" jurisprudence strikes me as exactly the kind of incoherent, subjective-by-design, imprecise policy you profess to hate. I hope we can get to a crux on this after I make my case in the upcoming reply, but granting that premise for the time being, then my view is that any apparent logical implications that arise from "Rule 4 as written, without any creative formalisations like the Web" are angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin sorts of discussions. There is no fact of the matter, no 'correct' answers that can be reached, because there's no true there there. Calls to fix perceived problematic implications are thus red herrings in the sense that trying to fix them would be missing the forest for the trees; problems like them will keep arising at the joints for as long as the source problem is not addressed, and the source problem can only be addressed by Web Theory or some other reform akin to it. That's my view. So I cede that "R4BP + Old-school T:VS" is imperfect, but not that going back to "Old-school T:VS" would constitute an improvement; that would strike me as a step backwards.

Re: the three stages, "indirectly or otherwise" was merely referring to our equal coverage of spin-offs relative to BBC-licensed stuff. Fan works and cultural references are neither here nor there in this sense — they're not covered in the sense of full story pages. But I do think, and obviously certain old threads felt differently, but there have been many rulings from the opposite side in recent years, that true covered-as-invalid story pages are as important as covered-as-valid story pages; they're very substantially the same thing. The Pitch of Fear is part of the SOWOFWOC just as much as An Unearthly Child; Time Rift isn't. That invalid story pages have an {{invalid}} tag on them seems scarcely relevant, it's not really part of the OOU coverage, just a "don't go citing this on non-invalid-tagged in-universe pages" for editors' benefit. In all other respects they are identical. I don't think this reduces the project to "an attempted construction of the DWU"; I think the main duty of the Wiki is to give complete and accurate coverage of the SOWOFWOC, including the invalid stuff, and the "attempted construction of the DWU" that underpins the main in-universe namespace is (for reasons I discussed) a practical decision downstream of that duty.

If it helps you grasp what I mean, our coverage of {{invalid}} stuff is supposed to be thorough enough that it obviates the need for any other Wiki to cover that stuff; an effort to create a specific Wiki for Doctor Whoah! would be redundant. We are become the Doctor Whoah! Wiki as much as we are the Iris Wildthyme Wiki; and the fact that the former is covered as invalid doesn't change that fact. By contrast, fan works and the like are only covered to the extent that they inform our coverage of true members of the SOWOFWOC, but someone trying to fully Wikify Time Rift couldn't do it here. We're not the Time Rift Wiki. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:33, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Right, that's what I thought your interpretation was. But, again, I believe all of these steps are happening in parallel. We really can't disentangle them as the wiki currently stands. Is this a good thing? I mean, no comment. I'm unconvinced that your proposed procedure is ideal, but I think there's definitely reform to be done. But as far as current operating procedure is, I just don't think your characterization of it is accurate. And this isn't a T:BOUND issue, it's an actual distinction that matters for our discussion.

I'm just not sure how you're trying to argue that "DWU" isn't fully defined by T:VS. Look at the edits by User:Tangerineduel to Doctor Who universe where he did a cleanup and actually added the language related to "canon policy" (as it actually predated T:VS by a few days and people just forgot to change it for about a year and a half)

The Doctor Who universe exists as two concepts one on this wiki (see our canon policy for more information) and a second more theoretical concept that can, much like canon be what you as a consumer of Doctor Who related media choose to include.

This was rewritten by Czech to be broader in scope - there aren't just two uses of the term, but it's clearly the intent of this clause that our policies for what is valid is what the DWU is on this wiki. Najawin ☎ 18:08, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

“We really can’t disentangle them as the wiki currently stands”

Can’t we? Why not? Again I stress that I don’t mean this as a statement that in terms of policy, we always *chronologically* begin by examining whether something ought to be covered, *then* whether it should be valid. We often do both at the same time, and in very rare cases the Rule 4 status of something affects whether we make it part of the SOWOFWOC in the first place. The three-stage breakdown is a logical one, not a chronological one.

As for the ‘DWU’ issue, well, you’ll see. As I said, it’s a major point of my next big reply. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:31, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Because of the responses I gave above - how our decisions about validity often rely on the things you want to say are part of coverage? And I'm suggesting logically as well re: the part 2 and 3 entanglement. We cite IU statements to OOU pages, and we can only do this given these pages first being deemed valid or invalid. So validity is not, in itself, merely part of part 3. It's all much blurrier than you seem to be suggesting. A closer model would be something like:

1. We determine what things to cover on this wiki and in what way, in line with T:VS.

2. We write pages, both IU and OOU, based on the decisions made in the previous step. (note that it's this part, along with keeping T:VS together that avoids things running in parallel, to my mind.)

Ignoring things like charity anthologies, unproduced stories and the like. This model seems to cleanly separate validity from the act of writing pages, at least to me. But it has no ability to do what you need it to do. I'm not even sure how you'd attempt to change it into something like your model - the decision on how to cover works as distinct from the actual writing of those in-universe pages is a key feature of how we actually proceed as a wiki currently. We, implicitly, make these decisions all the time in a way that's logically separate from actually writing IU pages for elements of the work. So in trying to say that this was part of your part 3, you've actually entangled your part 3 with the other parts. (And I again emphasize that under current practice I don't think we can easily separate my part 1 here.) Najawin ☎ 19:56, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

In reply to Najawin's most recent essay-post, specifically "rule 4; we've defined DWU, exept intention, but good luck defining intent"::In reply to Najawin's most recent essay-post, specifically "rule 4; we've defined DWU, exept intention, but good luck defining intent" It was my understanding that Scrooge's Web Theory is defining intent. That is, references to previous stories in the Web, with a lack of intent to not be referenced, is "intention" to contribute to the DWU. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 20:00, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

This is not the case. See Scrooge's original object-level response:

I think that by "intended to be set in the DWU", we mean "intended to be part of the Web": we mean "intended both to have narrative connections to preexisting node-points in the Web, and to be suitable for later node-points to connect back to".

He specifically uses the term "intended" in his definition. He's writing precisely the same check here that I am - that there's a theory of mind that can satisfactorily explain what "intent" even means. Scrooge believes, or so he has said repeatedly, that these references are prima facie evidence of intent, which I'm skeptical of, for the reasons I've given. But they are not themselves the intent. I don't believe that Scrooge is a behaviorist, and the idea contradicts his statements. Of course, he's more than willing to correct me! I would then immediately laugh this entire view out of the room, as behaviorism is ridiculous - and I say this as someone who is reasonably sympathetic to eliminative materialism!

But I don't think Scrooge is saying this - his view is an account of an idealized (perhaps slightly so, if we wish to be maximally and perhaps ever so slightly unreasonably charitable :P) view of what it means to intend something to be in the DWU, but that second part is the part he has gone at lengths to try to define, not the first. Najawin ☎ 07:50, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Okay yeah fair. Thanks for the clarification. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 18:17, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Ok, to give my thoughts, I find myself more convinced by Scrooge's arguments than Najawin's. As I said before I think splitting Coverage and Validity into separate policies makes sense. I think web theory, even if it is idealized, is a solid step towards improving. And since Perfection is probably impossible to achieve, continual improvement is probably the best we can do. If in a few months or years we come back because we've found an even better theory or system that utterly trumps web theory, well then that's good because we will have improved. Beyond that I'm probably going to stay quiet for the most part, both because I am too inexperienced in this field to be able to provide any particularly insightful arguments I think, and also because I get tired just trying to read through this whole discussion at this point. Time God Eon ☎ 21:14, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

So, to clarify, you think Web Theory should be what we mean when we talk about "the DWU" yes? But do you agree that it's not what we currently mean? This is what my "idealized" criticism is. We've largely been focused on whether or not it's actually, factually, the DWU as we currently mean it, and if this matters or not. It's a separate issue on whether or not it's a better account of the DWU than what we currently have, and it's not one we've really discussed - a few gestures here and there. I assume we'll get to it eventually. Najawin ☎ 23:43, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Riposte the Third: Web Theory Rising

What is Rule 4 even

What does Rule 4 mean under current policy? This is probably question we had best ask ourselves before we replace it with something better i.e. the new-and-improved T:VS/T:CS dyad, or otherwise begin to debate what it ought to mean.

The text of the policy is short enough:

4	If a work of fiction 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.

But everything rides on what we mean, exactly, by "intended to be set outside the DWU". User:Najawin believes that the policy meaing of "the DWU" is defined by our Doctor Who universe page as of this edit. This seems… strange to me for several reasons. I don't doubt that the feeling was at times that this is how it worked, but it doesn't work.

First, to state the obvious, Doctor Who universe is not a policy page. It's not admin-locked, it's not within the purview of Tardis:Who writes policy. Anybody could edit it! It's an essay page in the main namespace, which aims to be an informative, descriptive resource on the idea of the DWU through the years. It's not normative. It doesn't set a standard. If anyone skimming this discussion thought that the problem was nonexistent because the page "Doctor Who universe" provided a usable definition of "DWU" in and of itself, you thought wrong.

But it seems what User:Najawin means to highlight is merely this bit:

The Doctor Who universe exists as two concepts one on this wiki (see our canon policy for more information) and a second more theoretical concept that can, much like canon be what you as a consumer of Doctor Who related media choose to include.Doctor Who universe

He claims it's "clearly the intent of this clause that our policies for what is valid is what the DWU is on this wiki".

I. Uhm. What?

Seriously, what? What does that even mean? ntent to be set in "the DWU" boils down to intent to pass T:VS, and you only pass T:VS if you intend to be set in the DWU, which means that you… bwuh? Taken literally it's either an endless regress or a flat truism. Things which pass Rule 4 are things which pass Rule 4. Thanks. Not helpful.

Nor can you rely on the extent to which the Wiki's in-universe sections, using the sources defined by T:VS, arguably "constructs the DWU". In the first place, the idea that our validity policies construct a particular, singular DWU is an antiquated framing of the Wiki's mission in the first place, distinctly at odds with the idea that we're simply presenting all accounts neutrally and letting readers pick and choose. But insofar as we can be interpreted as constructing an overarching notion of "the DWU", that can't be the one to which we're asking whether stories are intended to belong, can it? A Good Man Goes to War was not, we have explicit sources of that, intended to take place in a DWU where Lungbarrow is a real thing that happened. It may take place in some version of the DWU, but not the "everything licensed goes except for a few exceptions" DWU defined by T:VS.

Besides, as I said previously, a vast majority of valid sources still predate the creation of the Wiki, let alone of the modern T:VS. You can't mean "intended to be set in the universe defined by T:VS" by "intended to be set in the DWU" or it is literally impossible for any stories from the 20th century to pass Rule 4.

Way way back in the opening post User:Najawin suggested that…

(…) there's a "DWU" as the wiki understands the term, and then a "DWU" as every individual author understands the term and for R4 statements we do some translation between the two.User:Najawin

Insofar as something like this is true, "we do some translation" is doing, like, 90% of the work. Translation how? According to what rules? Whatever those translation rules are, they're the real standing policy as to what Rule 4 means, and if we haven't formalised them yet… well, we need to get on that, but in the meantime, we must turn to precedent.

And that's what I've attempted to do: tried to figure out what we mean by "intended to be in the DWU" via a process of elimination.

• It can't mean "intended to be set in the hypothetical universe defined by the totality of already-valid sources", because if it did, then e.g. A Good Man Goes to War and Genesis of the Daleks wouldn't pass that standard.
• It can't mean "intended to be set in whatever the author themself would call 'the Doctor Who universe', regardless of whether they define it somewhat differently than we do", because if it, then Against Nature wouldn't pass that standard.
• It can't mean "intended to be set in the same universe as at least one preexisting already-valid story", because if it did, then Death Comes to Time and Doctor Whoah! 371 never would have been invalid.

I've thought about the problem very hard for a very long time. I do believe I've read every inclusion debate we've ever held (although I can't guarantee I remember them all perfectly at this point). And after all that, Web Theory is my best shot at a formalisation of the rules which emerge from our pas decisions both explicit (specific thread rulings) and implicit (e.g. the fact that no one's ever proposed invalidating A Good Man Goes to War in the first place).

As best I can riddle it, the current jurisprudence makes out "intent to be in the DWU" shakes out such that the proposed source must do at least one of these two:

1. be intended to be set in a fictional universe to which the events of at least one preexisting valid source are applicable.
2. be intended to be something whose events future valid sources are habilitated to incorporate into their own universe in the same way.

where 1 without 2 is always exclusionary (cf. DCtT), 2 without 1 sometimes not but it's a bit controversial and untested (cf. Dr. Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks), and the golden case for uncontroversial validity is something which provably fulfills both prongs.

And if you try to graph it out, that pretty much becomes (Non-Timeless) Web Theory. Web Theory itself has not historically been the explicit policy, but it's just the only coherent way to describe the way Rule 4 has been used in thread conclusions! There's no other there there, or if there is, I haven't cracked it. The text at Doctor Who universe that Najawin was gesturing at is, at any rate, wholly insufficient to explain why Genesis of the Daleks passes Rule 4 but Death Comes to Time doesn't but Against Nature does but Doctor Whoah! doesn't but Dr. Who in an Exciting Adventure With The Daleks does.

The Trouble With Harry

Quoting Najawin's latest:

What I described is almost an archetypal "Dead-End" situation. There's no intent for the work done within these plotlines to reflect back on the rest of the DWU. Nobody has ever suggested, to my knowledge, that these Dead-Ends must be a single work. They often are. But that isn't a necessary condition.User:Najawin

A crux! A crux! Calloo, callay, a crux!

I believe that we have too suggested this. Consider the original invalidation of Death Comes to Time at Forum:Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time. For User:CzechOut, the "clincher" that put DCtT out of bounds was (what he interpreted as) Dan Freedman and Nev Fountain's declarations that they themselves would ignore its events if they became custodians of a further Doctor Who continuation.

Fountain is more declarative later in the piece when he says: "I think Death Comes to Time is very much a one-off project as far as I'm concerned, but perhaps this online thing will prove to be a stepping stone." To me, this is a bit of a clincher. It proves that they weren't in any way attempting to carry out a legitimate continuation with these narrative elements.

But if that's not proof enough, here's Freedman again, talking about what he would do with if his bid to produce televised DW were accepted: "No regeneration scene, no continuity references, no nothing. You've got to get to know this character and his companions again."

Freedman also says he already had someone cast "theoretically" as the "next Doctor" for his proposal of a new series. This means, as far as I can make out, that the death in DCTT simply wouldn't have been narratively respected. Had his proposal, instead of RTD's, been the one that carried the day, he wouldn't have even used DCTT as a part of the backstory.User:CzechOut

The question of whether Freedman and Fountain expect other people to reference DCtT in unrelated DWU projects is not the point. The "clincher" was that they would have ignored it in their own continuation. Putting that on its head, it seems to me that the decision might have been very different if Freedman and Fountain's quotes had been a firm "that's the canon we are going with. Maybe everybody else will ignore it, and hey, we ignored a lot of things in DCtT; but if we're put in charge of Season 27, we're going to be picking up right where DCtT left off, so there". This is not a dead-end situation as far as I'm concerned.

False starts are more interesting. If Harry creates a standalone starting point that holds DWU licenses but doesn't connect to anything on the Web, and then spins that forward, with no initial intent for any of the spun-off sequels to connect back to other parts of the Web, …that whole branch is just sort of floating there. It's not in the Web. It's its own thing. I struggle to think of an actual example of such a thing anywhere in the annals of the Wiki. But if it existed, I frankly don't understand why Najawin would be baffled at the thought of my excluding it from the Web and thus from current theories of validity. Seems precisely the sort of thing we would generally deem invalid!

Current policy or not, is excluding such things "unfair"? I don't think so. I think it only starts to look like a bad idea when one of the sequels winds up connecting back to the Web. But I don't know of any precedent or policy framework relating to the existing form of Rule 4 (the one best described by Non-Timeless Web Theory) by which such a thing could be validated, except for R4BP, i.e. the proposal to replace the current system (which implicitly runs on what is more or less Non-Timeless Web Theory) with an explicit and more all-encompassing Timeless Web Theory.

A few direct replies

Finally, a few replies to specific points which don't really fit into the wider DWU/Timeless crux:

Well, to Scrooge, I have to say, in my ideal system of running the wiki a lot of things would be different. But I can't use that as an excuse to dodge out of issues in my arguments concerning here and now problems in any other thread.User:Najawin

I partially answered this in Page Break the Fourth, but… can't you? Why not? If you have an explicit policy-change proposal that resolves the issue at hand in "any other thread", what's stopping you from proposing it?

The opening post of this thread sought to identify a problem in the rules, and suggest several ways out of it, one of which was a wider reform of T:VS. Here I am, suggesting the resolution of the perceived problem via a wider reform of T:VS. Not, granted, the same wider reform of T:VS as the one Najawin threw at the wall (i.e. the other RXBPs), but the principle is the same. I object most strenuously to the idea that there's anything wrong with suggesting a policy change as the resolution to an issue; that I should somehow be forced to find other, temporary answers to the questions that retains more of the assumptions of the current legislation.

Such behaviour would be inappropriate if I were saying "in a hypothetical ideal world this wouldn't be a problem, so I don't have to answer that", but Timeless Web Theory and the T:CS/T:VS split aren't hypotheticals. They are proposed solutions. There are things I want and hope that the closing post of this thread will officialise as the new policy moving forward.

Immediate problems I see here are something like an author that thinks of a variety of works of fiction as living in one shared world, built up not just with explicit narrative connections, but with headcanons as well - their "mental web" contains far more than Doctor Who. This isn't inherently an issue, a lot of authors do this. A lot of fans do this. But if you write a book that you insert into your mental web, and its actual connections, usually narrative, but sometimes thematic or other types, are far stronger to other series than they are to what we understand as the DWU, even if fully licensed, we might just cut the cord.User:Najawin

…Nah?

I struggle to say anything other than "nah" here. If Doctor Who (Doctor Who as a whole! begads, you didn't even specify some weirdo who accepts The Time Meddler Part 2 and nothing else — just Doctor Who, in full, as a minor part of the whole) is part of their mental web and the book has a licensed connection, we should cover it as valid. This seems trivial and obvious and honestly non-negotiable to me.

Perhaps such thinking was once part of the atmosphere — but that's the sort of thinking that excluded Faction Paradox (the original, Miles-era stuff whose in-continuity-with-Who-ness was not, in fact, in doubt; not later Burtonian efforts where it's sometimes a little more ambiguous) on the basis that Miles wanted to market it as its own thing. The Book of the War is set in just such an expansive web that includes Doctor Who but also Dune and Clive Barker and The Falls and I don't know what else (I wouldn't go so far as to say its connection to them are stronger than its connections to Who, in gestalt, but they might be for some entries if we covered it as an anthology and tried to judge the entries individually; which is in the end arbitrary). It doesn't bother us. Maybe it did once, but not any more, and a very good thing too.

A: I'm not a moral intuitionist, no I shouldn't.User:Najawin

Yes you should. I'm not telling you that you should feel epistemologically certain that murder is wrong until you've seen a convincing holistic moral theory that accounts for this. Accepting for the sake of argument that Kantian moral theory is the required correct theory (it won't surprise you, I expect, to learn that I do not actually grant this, but let's pretend), are you really saying that a legislator in 1723 should have been totally helpless to decide whether, provisionally, murder should be legalised or not? Really now. Lack of perfect certainty ≠ absolute helplessness.

We agree on most if not all the cases listed in this thread, no?User:Najawin

Truthfully I'm not so sure about Death Comes to Time, so long as the jurisprudence established in its thread (about intent-to-not-be-followed-upon) is upheld; and if it is not upheld (which, again, is basically the "Simplified Rule 4" proposal), then I'm not sure how we'd possibly ground the continued invalidity of Doctor Whoah!, which seems less than desirable, or popular. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:23, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Pa5e brea5

Read, thinking about a response. As a preliminary note, I'm not sure why you're confused that the definition of DWU I'm suggesting is deflationary ("a flat truism"). I said it was multiple times! But I think it's the correct reading of what we've actually established on this wiki. (In this regard you could almost read the very first sentence you encounter on T:VS as being a definition of "DWU" rather than of "valid" - as the entire rest of the page is defining valid. This isn't the intent, I'm well aware, and don't mistake this as me arguing that we should interpret the page that way. But it gets across the basic idea of what I'm suggesting as a metaphor.) Najawin ☎ 17:43, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

‘I'm not sure why you're confused that the definition of DWU I'm suggesting is deflationary ("a flat truism")’

…Well, because it would render the question of whether a source pass Rule 4 unanswerable. If things that pass Rule 4 are things that pass Rule 4, how do we determine if something hitherto invalid should instead be validated? Either it doesn't pass Rule 4 so it doesn't pass Rule 4, or we decide by fiat to cover it after all, and now it passes Rule 4 because it passes Rule 4. And no authorial quotes enter into it at all. Perhaps you interpreted me to be saying something weaker? Because that simply cannot be right. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:54, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

That is kind of what we do mind, with parodies and fourth wall breaks and the like; there's no actual justification for outlawing parodies and fwbs as r4 breaks, it goes against the original motivation behind rule 4, yet we do it anyway. Aquanafrahudy 📢 18:02, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Not anymore. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:04, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh, no, of course authorial quotes enter into it. There's still the intent part, after all. Does it make it more difficult to talk about validity in some respects than the Web Theory? Sure. But that doesn't bother me - it happens to be true. (Not directly analogous, but compare, say, Correspondence Theory to Deflationism. You think it needs to correspond to a linkage in The Web, I think it just is. I note that I'm not a deflationist about truth, but I think the reasons for rejecting it don't hold to validity.) Najawin ☎ 18:18, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

They're still invalid by default though, is my point. Aquanafrahudy 📢 18:21, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

@Aquanafrahudy: Not always, but when they are, it's only as a proxy for something else.

@Najawin: Either there is still something you have failed to put into plain English, or this still doesn't make sense. If "passing rule 4" truly has no other meaning than itself, how can authors with no knowledge of the Wiki ever provide quotes about that question? I maintain that this bizarre recursive interpretation cannot be, and has not been, the actual policy used in actual inclusion debates. It only makes sense if you allow yourself to define what we mean by "intent to be DWU" in a way that means, you know, something. Otherwise, Rule 4 may as well be "do the authors intend to glubuh glubuh c'narrgh jabberwock?". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:39, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

But this would just entail that everything prior to the advent of the wiki is valid, so I don't think this is a defeater for the idea, it's just a bit weird, no? And as of when this was written, R4 also explicitly allowed for people to vote things off the island. There just isn't a paradox here, just some weird ideas for the present day that all make sense in the historical context. Najawin ☎ 19:01, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I mean, I think it's a defeater to the historical claim that this is what was meant in the early days. Again I direct you to the old DCtT thread (as just one example). That's people looking for and analysing Rule 4 quotes, about a story predating the Wiki, and excluding it on the basis of a fine-grained analysis of the quotes, not out of an arbitrary community judgement-call distinct from the "intended to be DWU" thing.

But assuming that had been true, the continued invalidity now under an explicitly Rule-4-based rationale of some of those aforementioned pre-2000s parodies and fourth-wall-breaker would surely establish that even if R4 had ever meant that, it is no longer the standing policy for it to mean that.

And even if one somehow wished that hurlde away, there would still remain the fact that it'd be a ruddy silly policy, phrased in a ruddy counterintuitive way, and Web Theory is better. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:08, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I agree that Scrooge's description makes sense and is accurate to historical implicit interpretation. And as or Najawin's quoting that rule 4 currently technically allows for a community discussion to outlaw something for any reason, sure, technically, but that's nonsensical and, frankly, if nothing else I'd like that part to be rewritten to allow wiki intervention. Also yeah, web Theory is ruddy better than what we (don't) have now. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 19:10, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

In what way is it better? What is the fundamental underlying reasoning behind it? What is the point of it, for that matter? I do not see in Web Theory any advantages to our current outlook. Aquanafrahudy 📢 19:14, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

If you'd like Scrooge, we can ask Tangerine. I'd suggest Czech, but, well, we'd just never wrap up this thread. As for Ettolrahc's comment that R4 "technically" allows this - let me note that this was the explicit intent of User:CzechOut that it could be used this way. There are threads where he says this. I believe it was, uh, the Titan Backup Comics thread, that I'm thinking of. Najawin ☎ 19:21, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I don't deny that it used to be the case that you could also arbitrarily Vote Things Off The Farm(TM). What I deny is that the "intended to be outside the DWU" clause was ever widely understood as something which literally could not apply to DWU stories written before c. 2012. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:29, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Sure, and I'm not even sure they'd realized that Scrooge - though it ultimately wasn't a real problem given the other clause. I'm saying that we could ask Tangerine about whether the minimalist interpretation of R4/DWU I'm suggesting is correct or not in the historical context. Since there's a real dispute here. Up to you.

But to note for others, yeah, see Thread:177099 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1.

Interestingly, consensus can indeed vote a story "off the island" because Rule 4 specifically says it can, stating that "a community discussion will likely be needed to make a final determination".

Guys, lemme clarify our four little rules here. Rule 4 allows us to simply say — about any story — that we don't think it's valid.

Very much Czech's intent. Najawin ☎ 19:34, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

"But when they are, it's always a proxy for something else"

Like what? Aquanafrahudy 📢 19:39, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

@Najawin: I'm still reeling from this crystallisation of what I think was one of our underlying misunderstanding. I never once suspected that the interpretation of Rule 4 you were genuinely defending might be this thing, which I struggle to take seriously as anything more than a reducio ad absurdum. Perhaps that was a failure of imagination on my part. (I guess I now know how you felt re: the diagrams.) But seriously — even assuming that you were right about this having been Current Policy till circa 2022, how can you possibly defend sticking with this system for one day more? With the voting-off-the-farm clause it was functional, but only because most of the work was being done by a big red "we do what we feel like" button. Seems wildly antithetical to our shared dislike of rules whose implementation is explicitly left to arbitrary editorial whim! But once you remove the clause it's sheer lunacy, calling as it does for the immediate and irreversible validation of Nix View, Hallo My Dalek and the Lenny Henry sketch. If you believe that's what Rule 4 has meant up till now, the promulgation of Web Theory or some other streamlined, rational alternative is not just desirable, it is urgent and vital.

@Aquanafrahudy: Whether they pass regular Rule 4 (i.e. "is this really meant to count", i.e. in Web terms "is this a dead-end"). The idea is "knowing what we know about Russell T Davies's general mind-state, we can reasonably infer that when he wrote the minisode where Eccleston speaks to the viewer and acknowledges his own fictionality, he did not intend for that to then be treated as something which had actually happened to the Ninth Doctor going forward". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:33, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Call me cynical, but I personally think we shouldn't care what Czech intended. As a community, we should measure our community's intentions and the overall execution of the rules we have. It's typically understood that Constitutional law is not simply guessing if James Madison would have said about this or that about a certain topic. Certainly amendments to the Bill of Rights have not been declared illegitimate because it went against the intentions of the founding fathers - if that were the case, slavery would still exist in America. Our readings and rewriting of our rules should be bound by what is best for site policy. OS25🤙☎️ 20:39, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

@ScroogeMacDuck But this makes no sense whatsoever in the light of Czech's original quote as to the reasoning behind rule 4:

Tangerineduel has made the point that we can't believe a writer who says that their work is canonical. That's very true. But, in my opinion, he's incorrect on the reverse. I think we do have to believe a writer who declares, "Look, this isn't a part of the mainstream continuity." After all, we've believed it before. I don't see any rational argument for doing something different in this case. Moreover, it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity will have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you do take it seriously, because they're acting against their self-interest.

Saying parodies don't pass rule 4 is true on the surface, but it just completely contradicts the underlying motive behind it.

@OS25 We have to know what Czech thought because to change a policy we have to first know what the policy is, if you see what I mean. We can't change a policy that we don't know what it means. (sorry that didn't make grammatical sense, but it's fairly late here, and it at least makes sense linguistically, sort of, if that's the right word.) Aquanafrahudy 📢 20:45, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Well certainly clarification is good - but it should be clarification based on currently precedent and policy. As I said earlier - there are three kinds of policy, and I have no commitment to pretending that uninforced implied policy of the past carries as much weight as current thought. OS25🤙☎️ 20:48, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

@Aquafrahudy: Yes, but the original reasoning behind the coining of a rule ten years ago is not necessarily the reason why, after copious review and redrafting, we have elected to retain it under current policy. Rule 4 as it currently exists is not based on this reasoning anymore. The reasoning is only a historical curiosity at best. Only excluding things with an explicit "not set in the DWU" quote was a worthy instinct, but it quickly became apparent that it was not feasible or reasonable to find quotes for everything which common-sense dictated a "we don't count stories that aren't meant to count" principle ought to cover. We could reasonably infer what the writer would say if asked — like the plethora of unserious fourth-wall-breaking ads, or various parodies — and we decided that was enough. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:51, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Well what's the reasoning behind rule 4, then? Aquanafrahudy 📢 20:57, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Again, let me stress, I'm not inherently defending this system. I think the system you've proposed has problems. I think validity is what we say it is, and this is what we currently say it is. Do I think this is a good idea? You know, I'm not thrilled with a fair bit of it. But, again, I'm not convinced that your path forward is the correct one. (As for the things you're referencing, well, I was very against ruling that parodies could be valid, remember? And I believe we still have the voting things off the island clause, we just don't use it. So I'm not convinced this is an issue still. But, well, if not, I would consider them damning refutations of the idea we should validate parodies, rather than of my view! One person's modus ponens is another's modus tollens, after all.)

Yes, but the original reasoning behind the coining of a rule ten years ago is not necessarily the reason why, after copious review and redrafting, we have elected to retain it under current policy. Rule 4 as it currently exists is not based on this reasoning anymore.

Did we discuss changing the reasoning behind R4? Did we explicitly talk about why we would keep R4 around in a way that contrasted with the original reasoning? I mean, put aside the explicit statement stuff, that's not really here nor there. But did we actually have that discussion? We've had a few changes to it recently, but this is the first time I've brought up the original reasoning. Entirely possible there's something in the forum archives though.

OS25's comment here is interesting. Legal interpretation is a deeply contentious field, and I think there are merits in every approach. (I don't think originalism is insane, just that most people who practice it are.) I'm not saying that we must, in all instances, defer to authorial intent. I wouldn't suggest we adopt Czech's definition of parody, for one. But it must inform our analysis of these issues, and for things as basic as what the term "DWU" means, well, I see no other option. If we're textualists it leads to the same result, this is what the actual text of the article referenced in T:VS says! Najawin ☎ 21:04, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

But, again, I'm not convinced that your path forward is the correct one.

Then what do you propose? Please, even if it's incomplete, if you have some outline of a Better T:VS in your mind, explain it for us in brief! But in the meantime, I maintain that Timeless Web Theory clearly comes out ahead of the status-quo, even if it must be as the less-bad situation, because —

And I believe we still *have* the voting things off the island clause, we just don't *use it*

— again, if that were true (and I think it isn't, but let's put that to one side), again I ask you on a personal level: how can you possibly be okay with this? How do you, the great accuser of that which is "arbitrary in application", square that very reasonable dislike with a policy that literally says "sometimes we decide to invalidate something on vibes"? How does the weight you give to consistency with precedents fare against a whole class of invalidations which ostentatiously fail to have an actual rationale from which conclusions could be drawn?

But it isn't a live rule anymore, of course. As you yourself have commented upon and acknowledged, there's been a shift in recent years towards legibility and consistency in T:VS, and all the prior one-of-a-kind exceptions were reinterpreted as failing one rule or another — typically Rule 4. By that time at the latest — by the time R4 began to be cited in the text of T:VS itself as the rationale for the invalidity of works predating 2012 and about which there had been no explicit discounting quote — then both the Czech quote above and the unutterable "voting off the island" mentality had been left behind. See also Forum:The Daft Dimension and Doctor Who? as parallel universes#Part 1: On the validity of parodies for a closing post affirming as the current standing policy the idea that…

…it really should all reduce to the 4LR: to the extent that any given side-policy regarding validity fails to decompose into the interpretation and disambiguation of the Four Little Rules, we should give that side-policy a long look and if necessary a whack of the old wrench until it does.Forum:The Daft Dimension and Doctor Who? as parallel universes#Part 1: On the validity of parodies

Your objections to the conclusion of that thread are well-known, but, you know, you are bound by current policy.

— Oh, and:

If we're textualists it leads to the same result, this is what the actual text of the article referenced in T:VS says!

No, I should have been clearer earlier but I don't grant that. I don't think the "see our validity policies" implies that the validity policies themselves are the sole and official definition of what is meant by "the DWU" in Rule 4. If anything I would sooner believe that they somewhat-thoughtlessly meant to solidify the "the DWU in Rule 4 is the universe 'constructed' by our Wikia via the sum of all valid sources" thing, but mostly I don't think the passage was meant to define the usage of "DWU" in Rule 4, but rather the usage of DWU in the "non-DWU" nomenclature. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:34, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

A: I don't have to give a different account in order to say yours is flawed. B: I actually have begun to sketch ideas in this direction? See my comments above about subsets of the web, etc etc.

Similarly, I can simultaneously believe that a rule is bad and that the rule and its conclusions should (and in some respects do!) remain in place until we actually have a discussion about the rule and figure out a better path forward. (And that the discussion about the rule should correspond in depth, detail, and well thought out input as to the amount of precedent the rule itself has engendered.) I don't see a contradiction here.

I'm well aware you don't grant that this is the plain text reading of Doctor Who universe. You're wrong, of course. At best you can argue that the textualist reading is ambiguous, but I just don't grant this. When it literally says "This wiki has established rules about what is and is not part of the Doctor Who universe for its own purposes (see our valid source policy for more information)", the plain text reading of this is that T:VS is what's defining DWU as the term is used on this wiki, and the plain text reading of R4 is that it's citing that article in an attempt to define the term. This is the textualist perspective. If you want to refer to intent, you may. But the text is pretty cut and dry. Najawin ☎ 21:54, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I don't have to give a different account in order to say yours is flawed.

Naturally. But I wasn't trying to catch you out or ask a rhetorical question here — I'd genuinely be thrilled to have a competing proposed new theory of validity other than Web Theory! What I am saying is that we need one. That we cannot hardly hope to close this thread without agreeing on one.

This would be doubly true if I believed as you do (did?) that the Voting-off-the-farm Clause was still live, or that the live interpretation of Rule 4 was still such that bringing back the Clause would be the only immediate way to not break the Wiki beyond repair. I can scarcely find the words to express how unconscionable and repellent the Clause is to me both on a practical and ethical level as a policy proposal. Even putting myself in the shoes of someone who thinks Web Theory has very serious issues, WT still looks common-sensically far preferable to the Clause as the lesser of two evils.

Indeed, if it came to it, better, still, an official, precisely-defined Rule 5 that said "no parodies" (or better yet "no parodies unless counterbalanced by explicit Rule 4 intent") and a Rule 6 that said the same for fourth-wall-breakers, and so on, than the Clause. The Clause is terrible on all possible levels and bringing it back would set us back years. Indeed it might do us in as a Wiki with any hope of reaching a better theory of validity in the future. If you're afraid of hammers that make everything look like nails, my, but I'm afraid of the Clause.

I could keep arguing about the textualist interpretation, but ultimately there would be little purpose. It does not, ultimately, matter if the "DWU intent only works for post-2012 stories, otherwise it's the Clause" thing was once the intended policy. If that were the intended policy it would be necessary, indeed it would be paramount, to abolish it, so either way we need Web Theory or a third thing. That third thing could be your theory-of-validity, if you would please exposit it so that (should it convince the community as a more viable way forward than Web Theory) we could workshop it together in time for the thread's conclusion. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:10, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

We'll get to that in my large response! I just fundamentally don't agree that this is the order in which things must progress. Surely these things must be done. But the procedure you're suggesting is mistaken. And we'll get to that. Najawin ☎ 22:22, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Well, what is the fundamental underlying reasoning behind rule 4, then? Because if there isn't any we should probably just get rid of it; a rule without a reason is no rule at all. Also, it's incredibly arbitrary in application, and is actually fairly close to asking "Is this canon?" Much better to just get rid of it, and then we can use the term "invalid" for what we currently call "not covered", because we do cover NCmaterial to some extent. That's my proposal. :) Aquanafrahudy 📢 07:03, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Alright, I finally got around to reading all this. I cannot even hope to remember all of what I just read, but in any case I will be giving more of a comment, my thoughts on the discussion, rather than any actual argument.

I must say I admire the dedication both Najawin and Scrooge MacDuck have given to this discussion. Personally, I find myself nearly wholly agreeing with Scrooge, and partially agreeing with Najawin. (Don't ask me which parts. I can't remember. And I love your math implementation, but this is why I was only a math major for one semester.) If anyone remembers, at the beginning of the year when the temporary forums finally came to be, I made a proposal described as: "Re-examining and discussing how the wiki understands "valid sources" and a potential proposed major change to T:VS to eliminate bias and arbitrary restrictions, hopefully preceding any validity inclusion debates. (Note: this itself does not intend to change the validity status of any sources, but is for when they are discussed.)" In other words, I was overzealously hoping to have the discussion of what this thread is be among the first we discussed. I had been considering it before the forums even went up, but I constantly failed to be able to adequately explain what I was going for. Then other validity debates that happened basically rendered it pointless, though this seems to be the culmination. In general, I had some idea of a system that would kind of "boil down" T:VS into what would ideally serve the wiki. I shan't get into it here or I might suffer a migraine again, but all I can say is that while quite different, Scrooge's explanation of "The Web" and associated proposals are pretty much in agreement with the results I had in mind.

There is another thing I would like to bring up. In October of last year, I proposed on the T:VS talk page a summary of the page, hoping to help new or confused readers of the wiki. I worry I either made things worse, or maybe I made them better by helping expose the problem here. For the summary I proposed, that now lies on the top of Tardis:Valid sources, is not accurate. It is not inaccurate either. The issue is that the summary describes what a "valid source" is in theory, but, as Najawin duly pointed out on that talk page, is not what it is in practice. Validity was already in a sort of limbo where it is essentially a reformed canon policy that rejects being one, but this ascended it into a second limbo where it also rejects being that without actually changing anything. Of course, the implementation of the summary I wrote is not itself responsible for this, but I think it represents the ideas at hand here.

Nonetheless, all of this has reminded me of a quote I am fond of and I would like to remind everyone here of. I would have shared it anyways, but this appropriately comes from the Second Doctor, even if it made no sense for the actual situation he used it in.

Just ignore how Zoe was actually right in this case and consider the meaning of the Doctor's maxim.

Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.Second Doctor, The Wheel in Space

In my opinion this quote just about sums up the current (and past) state of T:VS. We are so tangled in nearly two decades' worth of logic, faulty or not, but it has remained authoritative nonetheless. Chubby Potato ☎ 08:24, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

A Web Unwoven, I'm afraid to say.

Well, let's start at the beginning.

User:Najawin believes that the policy meaing of "the DWU" is defined by our Doctor Who universe page as of this edit. This seems… strange to me for several reasons. I don't doubt that the feeling was at times that this is how it worked, but it doesn't work.

First, to state the obvious, Doctor Who universe is not a policy page. It's not admin-locked, it's not within the purview of Tardis:Who writes policy. Anybody could edit it! It's an essay page in the main namespace, which aims to be an informative, descriptive resource on the idea of the DWU through the years. It's not normative. It doesn't set a standard. If anyone skimming this discussion thought that the problem was nonexistent because the page "Doctor Who universe" provided a usable definition of "DWU" in and of itself, you thought wrong.

Is it a compelling rebuttal that Doctor Who universe is in the main namespace and editable by anyone? Well, only you can make that decision for yourself. But the clause in question, that Scrooge goes on to link, was written by two bureaucrats and then edited by an admin, so satisfies T:WRITE POLICY, and was specifically linked to in something in a T: level page. I note also that occasionally T: level pages are not the only place policy is located, nor are all policy pages locked at all times. And, of course, in one of the threads that keeps on giving, I reference Forum:DWU, Canon, Continuity and References - rename them for a look into the mindset of the people at the time. (Recall, for those reading, that "canon" in this instance was proto-validity as it was right before the creation of T:VS.)

I note, again, that I'm not endorsing the end view of T:VS that this makes us end up having, I'm not saying that I like what comes out of it. I'm saying that it's correct. That the objections Scrooge has to it are wrong and that we have to engage with the policy as it is, rather than suggest that there simply isn't a standard on the books so invent one / try to synthesize what policy exists from rulings rather than what's written down. The policy is there, whether we like it or not. I feel like I've addressed this in large part sufficiently previously. Scrooge's comments here have reversed the direction that intent is required for R4 and it ends up suggesting that incoherencies exist when none are present. Instead we just have a standard that is, I'll admit, wildly arbitrary to an extent that I'm not a fan of.

Now, let's continue onwards. I just want to make a note here - Timeless Web Theory does not exist. Time is a variable in Scrooge's second order Web Theory. It's not Timeless. It simply has Time Reversal Symmetry. It does not have Time Translation Symmetry. This fact is rather important - one would really want it to not have that symmetry.

As for Harry, I'm fairly certain Scrooge is incorrect here?

The question of whether Freedman and Fountain expect other people to reference DCtT in unrelated DWU projects is not the point. The "clincher" was that they would have ignored it in their own continuation. Putting that on its head, it seems to me that the decision might have been very different if Freedman and Fountain's quotes had been a firm "that's the canon we are going with.

This is reading too much into it, I'm quite confident - this situation is sufficient but not necessary. See Forum:BBV and canon policy. Checks all of the boxes. References some elements in the past (but not all, is Czech's thought, which is incorrect, he thought FP was in contradiction to Ancestor Cell which it wasn't), doesn't want to be referenced by the broader web of DW stuff in the future. Nate's later thread didn't try to argue that this standard was fundamentally incorrect, but that it relied on faulty premises. Dead Ends of multiple works, (so, say, "solitary branches", if we'd want to call them that) by precedent, seem to be out. If Scrooge's view of Web Theory is truly that it's just summarizing existing precedent and he's correct, well, I think we have to accept this into Web Theory. And it's radically counterintuitive to me, and I think to many others here.

As for False Starts, well, the analogy was to Vienna, not to Faction Paradox. Not entirely 1 to 1. But certainly closer than I think many would be comfortable with. So, again, might we consider this invalid? Sure? But we all sort of agree that it's a mistake - not something to further enshrine into policy. (Suppose that Vienna wasn't interacting with DW aliens but new ones. Still a Bounty Hunter, as that was a core aspect of her character, but completely divorced from any previous DW continuity, just doesn't talk about it. Yes? No? Up to those reading.)

I actually think the issue of whether a work might go uncovered by us / be invalid because of their mental web fits in with this section, so I'll address it here.

I struggle to say anything other than "nah" here. If Doctor Who (Doctor Who as a whole! begads, you didn't even specify some weirdo who accepts The Time Meddler Part 2 and nothing else — just Doctor Who, in full, as a minor part of the whole) is part of their mental web and the book has a licensed connection, we should cover it as valid. This seems trivial and obvious and honestly non-negotiable to me.

First of all, Scrooge is responding to a section where I said, like two sentences prior:

their view of the DWU is roughly analogous to a subset of The Web

Now, this subset may be the entirety of Doctor Who, but it doesn't have to be. But let's be maximally charitable here. I think we still do this? Like, sure, the explanation we give is R2 - "oh, they don't have licensed DWU elements". But if we're talking about a Web of Stories, just mapping out the DWU, that shouldn't matter, right? "Continuity references" between them should be enough. Death's Head just is an example of where we do this, right? If there isn't an explicit element that originated from the DWU to ground the story as being "sufficiently close" to the DWU it's in another literary web.

Here I am, suggesting the resolution of the perceived problem via a wider reform of T:VS. Not, granted, the same wider reform of T:VS as the one Najawin threw at the wall (i.e. the other RXBPs), but the principle is the same. I object most strenuously to the idea that there's anything wrong with suggesting a policy change as the resolution to an issue; that I should somehow be forced to find other, temporary answers to the questions that retains more of the assumptions of the current legislation.

I think there's been a subtle miscommunication here. I'm not concerned that Scrooge went with option 3 here, modifying T:VS. Well. I don't think his modifications quite work, but it's a perfectly acceptable approach in principle. The issue is saying "well, the RXbps and invalidity by proxy are red herrings because of the three step process and Web Theory". No they're not. Neither of those things are yet policy, they can't make those things red herrings. One either has to accept that as things stand these are decent arguments and then try to advocate for changing T:VS or to say that they fail as things are now, but give reasons for this that don't appeal to policies that aren't yet in place. You can't have it both ways.

And, indeed, I note that in my last post I'm pretty sure I elaborated on how Web Theory still has the problem of invalidity by proxy unless we radically change how we approach validity debates in general! And, I note again, if we're unable to extricate any parts of R1-3 from R4 it's not clear that the RXbps don't re-emerge. These problems aren't as easily solved as it seems, there's a cost. (It also doesn't solve the problem that Aquana and I are alluding to above, about how we've got real issues as to why we even have R4 at this point, the original reasoning for it seems to have been undermined without ever being discussed. This is a real problem where we need to have a Come to Rassilon moment and figure out what to do about that.)

Accepting for the sake of argument that Kantian moral theory is the required correct theory (it won't surprise you, I expect, to learn that I do not actually grant this, but let's pretend), are you really saying that a legislator in 1723 should have been totally helpless to decide whether, provisionally, murder should be legalised or not?

Well so the issue here is that really it depends on our view of metaethics, right? I do happen to think you could, but for reasons that are in direct contradiction to believing that R4bp could ever be implemented in the hypothetical Scrooge gave. The intuitionist comment was about the sorts of people who would agree with the hypothetical. Which was very glib and obviously did not come across properly without being in my head.

Truthfully I'm not so sure about Death Comes to Time, so long as the jurisprudence established in its thread (about intent-to-not-be-followed-upon) is upheld

Well so the problem is that Web Theory is wrong. :P (But yes, the issue is that if you change "and" to "or" bad things happen for Web Theory, and I'm pretty sure that "and" itself has problems. This is why erasing the language/metalanguage distinction is bad!) Najawin ☎ 02:54, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Bride of Page Break

Will begin work on the next Big Reply, but first, an umpteenth restatement of what I meant re: red herrings: as I have said, it is not that I deny that such things may be logical consequences of the current T:VS. (I don't fully grant it, mind you, for unrelated reasons we left behind some thousands of words back… but I would be quite prepared to concede it for the sake of argument.) But I believe them to be red herrings in practice because they arise out of fundamental flaws in T:VS with-or-without R4BP, flaws which need to be addressed, with Web Theory (or hypothetically Something Better). Cutting off R4BP to eliminate such accidental byproducts would be addressing the wrong bit. If our Wiki is a cellar, T:VS is a keg of powder, R4BP is a candle, and the RXBPs are the explosion, then I am saying, "spending valuable time going after the candle is wasting time that we should be using clearing out the gunpowder itself". Sure, at a naive approximation everything was fine until some idiot brought a candle, but in fact, there should be a candle to light a cellar and there should not be an unmarked keg of gunpowder in it.

I'm not sure what DCtT's invalidity has to do with whether Web Theory is "correct" or not. As I see it, current validity jurisprudence invalidates it, and non-timeless Web Theory invalidates it for the same reason. Insofar as Web Theory is trying to reflect current validity policies, it seems to succeed there. DCtT would only be validated by Timeless Web Theory.

But again, whether Web Theory is absolutely "correct" or not is a framing I'd like to get away from. As with the refinement of Rule 2 re: DiT, it suffices that the more elegant theory fits 99% of cases, and the rest should simply be brought in line with the new, more consistent principle. If this means declaring once and for all that, say, the long-deprecated original invalidation of FP was not only incorrect on a factual level, but also wrong-headed in spirit… that seems no great loss to me. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 10:32, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

But 4bp isn't a candle, for candles have a function, a reasoning, a purpose. R4bp has none of these things. It is just... There. What you propose is to structure our entire validity rules so that r4bp makes sense. That to me sounds somewhat illogical.

As for Death Comes to Time (and tMoC by extension), we would definitely be able to validate it under the current rules as I understand them (if 4bp didn't exist), but under Web Theory, we wouldn't. Aquanafrahudy 📢 11:26, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

But R4BP does have a very clear purpose: avoiding situations like Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows/Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka)! Or to phrase the function more generally, to allow us to draw connections in our in-universe coverage between any two already-covered sources whose authors are drawing connections from one to the other. The whole point of having an in-universe Wiki is that when two different licensed works we cover are talking about the same thing, we can connect the dots on that thing’s bespoke in-universe page. If there is a class of covered sources for which we cannot do this, we are, in a narrow but important subsection of cases, failing as a Wiki. I think even Najawin grants that this is in principle a worthy goal, he just thinks it’s an acceptable sacrifice to make if we cannot ground it in a coherent policy.

And as I said, I’m not at all sure DCtT passes current validity policies. Like, I guess we could decide to interpret Fountain and Freedman’s quotes more fluidly than Czech did, and assume that they *didn’t* actually necessarily intend to ignore DCtT’s events in future works… But so long as those quotes mean what they have thus far been taken to mean, then it doesn’t pass. And if we interpreted those quotes otherwise, it would pass Web Theory!T:VS as well, because again, the Web Theory version of this particular standard is just a more formalised version of the same sub-policy. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 11:41, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Well, they quite clearly didn't mean to ignore DCtT in future Doctor Who works. But even if they had, that would be irrelevant, because at the time, I'm fairly sure they intended it to be set in the DWU. Also, we should have the page Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) because to do otherwise would be speculation. We should also have on that page "Notably, an incarnation of the Doctor who claimed that he had used up nine lives had a similar appearance to this individual (WC: Scream of the Shalka ^[+]Loading...["Scream of the Shalka (webcast)"])" and on Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka) note "Once, the Eighth Doctor looked through the Tomorrow Windows and saw in his future an individual who resembled this one. (PROSE: The Tomorrow Windows ^[+]Loading...["The Tomorrow Windows (novel)"])". We can, and should, have both of these pages, as per T:HOMEWORLD (or possibly T:NO RW, which, as Forum:Loosening T:NO RW hasn't yet been resolved, still stands). And you still haven't provided a coherent answer as to why we should keep rule 4 in the first place. Aquanafrahudy 📢 12:47, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

The thing, if you'll look at the quotes analysed at Forum:Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time, is that they didn't actually plan on doing Minister of Chance at the time — nor to otherwise pick up on it. The quotes, at least as presented in the old thread, were Fountain and Freedman talking at the time about what they were going to do if the BBC greenlit them to do a longer Who continuation on the back of DCtT, back when it was still a possibility that their pitch would win out over Russell T. Davies's. The old thread ruled that such a mind-state counted as failing Rule 4 at time of release, even though they revised this opinion later to write actual sequels to DCtT.

As for Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)/Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka), I still think that particular description falls within Talk:Totem (short story) territory and it would not be speculation — but it's only an example. As I said above, surely you agree there can be such a thing as a valid reference to an invalid story that is non-ambiguous, such as citing a companion by name — or, of course, what Storm in a Tikka or Gallifrey: A Rough Guide do, i.e. have a little footnote that says explicitly "see [Title of the invalid story]" in so many words.

With regards to keeping Rule 4 in the first place… I mean, I think it's fairly sensible to say "if authors did not intend for their stuff to become a part of the Web, and no other stories ever treated that stuff as part of the Web, we shouldn't be trying to cover it as though it's connected to the Web". I don't think it would improve the Wiki's accuracy or usefulness to validate Oh Mummy!, and I don't think anybody involved in the making of Oh Mummy! would want us to. The only drift since the original reasoning that you quoted, is that we came round to the view that in certain situations we can often infer that authors presumably don't intend for their thing to count, without requiring an explicit quote. The underlying idea is the same.

It's a sort of lesser-of-two-evils situation — if we must exclude some things, then trying to track authorial intent (even if we have to make assumptions sometimes for lack of explicit evidence) seems more objective and neutral and principled than the old, completely-arbitrary voting-off-the-farms-on-vibes mentality. And it also seems better than a blanket ban on e.g. parodies that returns "false positives" (i.e. would have us invalidate the likes of Daft Dimension or Curse of Fatal Death even when they are substantially intended to "count" as real possible timelines)

But, I dunno. If you genuinely bite that bullet and say the boost in neutral objectivity is worth the hassle of having to talk about Oh Mummy! on plain-old Sutekh, that is, certainly, a respectable case that you can make. I don't mean to squash this line of argument, I'm just not sure much of the community is ever going to like it. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 13:47, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

I'd rather not dredge up specific quotes, but I believe this is the first time you've acknowledged that the R4bps are real problems as things exist. Your comment before was

It's because Rule 4 is different from the other three rules

And there's been this sort of back and forth of whether Web Theory is validity itself and whether this matters, no? This is a distinction I've mentioned three times specifically in reference to the RXbps and to invalidity by proxy and it's just not really been addressed. (Perhaps a better metaphor in my mind that R4bp is itself a firecracker. Liable to go off at any time and cause damage, and a far more immediate threat, but we can agree that T:VS needs some work as well.)

As I see it, current validity jurisprudence invalidates it, and non-timeless Web Theory invalidates it for the same reason.

So it depends on if you mean "current jurisprudence due to that original thread" or "current jurisprudence generally". The former, sure. The latter, not so much. Which you agreed with during the last thread on the issue? I really thought this was noncontroversial. Have your views changed on this? Hey, years later.

But again, whether Web Theory is absolutely "correct" or not is a framing I'd like to get away from.

We both know that "correct" isn't really the right framing here in a broad sense, I don't think validity rules can be correct in a general, non contextual sense. I don't think it's accurate to how we currently do things, either in writing or in spirit. And if you're willing to accept 99% accuracy (it appears somewhat arbitrary, might I add, there's nothing preventing you from just adding on a clause that causes solitary branches to wither and die), it's not clear why you're allowing that 1% error in here rather than elsewhere.

Put it another way, if the motivation was truly to follow our jurisprudence as best we could, couldn't we just add in the clause to let branches die? If we're comfortable allowing 1% deviations, why is Web Theory the best we can do? I think these questions in tandem are going to be difficult to answer, but I really do look forward to your response!

The whole point of having an in-universe Wiki is that when two different licensed works we cover are talking about the same thing, we can connect the dots on that thing’s bespoke in-universe page. If there is a class of covered sources for which we cannot do this, we are, in a narrow but important subsection of cases, failing as a Wiki.

Stream (The Hollows of Time), Man with the rosette, etc. etc.

I think there's a very reasonable case to be made that these cases should be on separate pages, even outside of a lack of coherent policy. The fact that ambiguity exists is part of their appearance and means that they should, perhaps, be documented externally. I don't agree with this. But I think this - and how the wiki should be reasonably pluralist to editing styles, combined with the lack of coherent policy, is more than sufficient to keep them on their own pages.

if authors did not intend for their stuff to become a part of the Web, and no other stories ever treated that stuff as part of the Web, we shouldn't be trying to cover it as though it's connected to the Web

So there are two clashing ideas here. The first is that someone actively says that something is not in the DWU, and the second is that other people fail to say that it's in the DWU. This is the contradiction in reasoning that I'm talking about. You're confusing two types of actions here. R4 concerns the first. In bringing up R4bp, we're suddenly worried about the second, which the original reasoning for R4 explicitly denied that we could use, saying whether or not something is in the DWU.

Curse of Fatal Death

Wasn't supposed to count! :P Najawin ☎ 20:08, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

What's CoFD got to do with it? Aquanafrahudy 📢 21:03, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh, nothing. Just commenting on Scrooge's claim there. While we ruled it valid ages ago I found evidence on ra.dw that Moffat explicitly said multiple times that it wasn't "canon, whatever that means". Probably would have been invalidated if not for R4bp. imo. At least would have been a large and contentious discussion. Najawin ☎ 21:22, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

@Aquanafrahudy: I'm the one who brought it up, as an offhand example of something which an overly-strict "no parodies" rule might (did!) exclude, but which a functional Wiki really, really shouldn't ever have as invalid. It's a weird one in multiple ways and its specifities aren't really relevant.

@Najawin:

I believe this is the first time you’ve acknowledged that the RXbps are real problems as things exist

Well, I haven’t really. I don’t actually think your logic follows. What I have done is momentarily condede it for the sake of argument to make the point that if we accept the premise that the RXBPS are a real concern, then the problem is with T:VS and not with a validity-by-proxy-shaped concept.

The fact that ambiguity exists is part of their appearance and means that they should, perhaps, be documented externally

Whatever. I mean, not whatever, I think you're wrong about this, but our disagreement about how to deal with ambiguous (or "ambiguouse") character identities is orthogonal to the actual basic concept of validity-by-proxy. I am talking, as the archetypal use-case where validity-by-proxy is commom-sensically a good idea, about instances where a valid story talks about a concept which debuted in an invalid one. Disagreement about whether Tomorrow Windows is in fact unambiguously talking about the Shalka Doctor is another red herring, because the question is how we would deal with it if we were agreed that it did (as might, for example, be the case if it were a cartoon rather than the book, and the Shalka Doctor just appeared visually, perhaps even via archive footage from Scream of the Shalka itself).

Before you chide me about far-fetched hypotheticals, well, have a 100%-explicit named concept with a page: let's say the concept shop from Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman?, which is also heard from in Gallifrey: A Rough Guide, by name, with a bracketed "see Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman" note attached.

This is a distinction I've mentioned three times specifically in reference to the RXbps and to invalidity by proxy and it's just not really been addressed.

Egads, I've been trying to do little other than addressing it for the last few volleys. To restate the current battle-lines as I understand them:

• I argue that there is no formalised policy about what we mean by "intent to be in the DWU" anymore, just a lot of messy precedent that seems to more-or-less cohere into, or at least to be most parsimoniously accounted for, by Web Theory.

• You have been arguing — I now realise — that this is not the case, and the official current policy on what "intent to be in the DWU" mean is the bizarre recursive thing that means that "intent to be in the DWU" cannot meaningfully be discussed from any stories predating 2012.

• To this I say, firstly, maybe this was the original intent from 2012, but an ill-defined understanding where it can be applied to stories that predate the Wiki is nevertheless how Rule 4 has been used in countless debates in those ten years. New-T:BOUND applies, and with a vengeance. In particular, you may look at the conclusions of Forum:The Daft Dimension and Doctor Who? as parallel universes and Forum:Temporary forums/Inclusion debates speedround which grounded the continued default-invalidity of some parodies and fourth-wall-breakers in an assumption that those things are circumstantial evidence of authorial intent under Rule 4, rulings which both cemented that the "voting things off the farm" clause died the ignominious death-by-a-thousand-papercuts it deserved, and that Rule 4 could and would be applied to sources predating 2012.

• However I also say "if for the sake of argument I condeded that this 'it can't apply pre-2012' absurdity was the official live policy, this wouldn't change my mind, because I would consider it an emergency to officially strike it down and replace it with something more sensible like Web Theory, and hold it to be a grievous indictment of the Wiki if the conclusion of the present thread failed to enshrine as much in one way or other".

So my answer to "is validity [already, currently} Web Theory and does this matter?" is "probably, but anyway it doesn't matter", i.e. I think Web Theory is as good a formalisation of the current 'folk understanding' of Rule 4 as we're going to get. We disagree on whether this 'folk understanding' is the standing policy or not, but even if it technically weren't it ought to be.

if the motivation was truly to follow our jurisprudence as best we could, couldn't we just add in the clause to let branches die?

I maintain that current policy based on Forum:Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time is that solitary-branches are valid. The Faction thread was the aberration. This is not a case where we could hypothetically write a policy that accounted for all the threads that need to be accounted for, it's a case where one or two threads' precedent contradicts other precedent. You can't get 100% no matter how many clauses you add, you're always going to be trading one thread against another.

(Again, like the Rule 2/Dimensions in Time thing. Nowhere else in the history of the Wiki had commercial licenses to things other than DWU concepts come into it. There simply is no way to account for that decision that wouldn't have clashed with how dozens of other threads were conducted. I mean, short of a clause that just said "in the specific case of DiT non-DWU concepts are important, but nowhere else", which is just the Voting-off-the-farm Clause in a trenchcoat and false beard.)

The first is that someone *actively says* that something is not in the DWU, and the second is that other people *fail to say* that it's in the DWU. This is the contradiction in reasoning that I'm talking about. You're confusing two types of actions here. R4 concerns the first. In bringing up R4bp, we're suddenly worried about the second, which the original reasoning for R4 *explicitly denied* that we could use, saying whether or not something is in the DWU.

Again I tell thee, to T:BOUND with you. Not even new-T:BOUND, just the ordinary old "you are bound by the most up-to-date policy" thing. You don't like it, I know you don't like it, but it's now explicit policy that those works still invalidated for parodical or fourth-wall-breaking nature are invalidated based on a presumption of authorial intent not to be in the DWU. I'm not convinced that this had been so unthinkable in years past — I mean, you saw the original closure to the Sleeze Brothers debate, and the closure to the original The Body in Question inclusion debate! both of these were explicitly "there is insufficient evidence of positive intent to be DWU", to an excessive degree even — but again, whatever was the case in years past, things have changed since then. The original reasoning has been, well, not voided, but importantly nuanced. If you want to roll that back, that's going to take a thread, too.

CoFD wasn't supposed to count

A: I rather think it was, to at least some degree. I don't think 1999-Moff would have answered "no" to the question "even if it's not the prime timeline, is it a real possible future of the Eighth Doctor somewhere out there in the multiverse?", or preemptively disapproved of the references to it as such a possible-future in Tomorrow Windows and whatnot.

B: Forgive the slightly-childish gotcha, but it's gotta to be asked: …is this, perchance, you conceding that we can in fact discuss "intent to count" for pre-2012 stories? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:44, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

(Apologies for higher-than-normal number of typos in the post above. For reasons only partially related to the size of this page, typing text is a pain and editing it even moreso right now.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:52, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Well, I haven’t really.

Then we have the same issue! Once again, I reiterate my above statement, perhaps with a slight clarification, if I'm being told that a policy I proposed generated an inconsistency, I can't dodge out of the way by saying that in a completely different system it doesn't do this. I have to actually address the issue of whether or not it does this head on. Once I've done this I can then say "okay, but I think this is actually a problem with everything else, not with the policy I've suggested". You're trying to have your cake and eat it too, and this is what I'm objecting to so strongly.

Whatever. I mean, not whatever, I think you're wrong about this

Well, you know, I'm not actually agreeing with this. I just think we shouldn't rule it out by policy.

cartoon rather than the book, and the Shalka Doctor just appeared visually

This is actually very controversial, as you know. Talk:Blue Humanoid vs Talk:Antonio Amaral. We should actually have a thread on it. Archival footage is probably a different matter.

Egads, I've been trying to do little other than addressing it for the last few volleys.

Not explicitly as it relates to the things I mentioned there, was the point. As I repeatedly brought them up as issues that re-emerged if Web Theory wasn't validity.

New-T:BOUND applies, and with a vengeance. In particular, you may look at the conclusions of Forum:The Daft Dimension and Doctor Who? as parallel universes and Forum:Temporary forums/Inclusion debates speedround which grounded the continued default-invalidity of some parodies and fourth-wall-breakers in an assumption that those things are circumstantial evidence of authorial intent under Rule 4, rulings which both cemented that the "voting things off the farm" clause died the ignominious death-by-a-thousand-papercuts it deserved, and that Rule 4 could and would be applied to sources predating 2012.

I thought you didn't want to get into T:BOUND issues? Regardless, there's a fundamentally alternative reading to those threads, which is that the voting things off the island clause remains - after all, it's still in the rule, and it's just being applied as a way to divine authorial intent wrt what a hypothetical wiki-DWU would have looked liked in the past. We've just removed the arbitrary, "secretive" nature of it.

I maintain that current policy based on Forum:Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time is that solitary-branches are valid.

The quote you've cited merely establishes that this is a sufficient, not a necessary condition for invalidity. (Obviously it's not necessary.) I really don't see how it suggests that branches like the one I've discussed must be valid.

Again I tell thee, to T:BOUND with you. Not even new-T:BOUND, just the ordinary old "you are bound by the most up-to-date policy" thing. You don't like it, I know you don't like it, but it's now explicit policy that those works still invalidated for parodical or fourth-wall-breaking nature are invalidated based on a presumption of authorial intent not to be in the DWU.

Oh come now. I'm not saying "it contradicts R4, so it must be incorrect by our policies". I'm saying "the two reasonings are in fundamental tension here, so there's probably some deeper problems with this situation that we're missing and a better way to do this". This isn't a T:BOUND issue, there's nothing here about wiki policies as, well, policies, at all, it's about the reasoning that exists for them. It's a step prior.

Forgive the slightly-childish gotcha, but it's gotta to be asked: …is this, perchance, you conceding that we can in fact discuss "intent to count" for pre-2012 stories?

We were just talking about my view on mental webs and subsets of the DWU not one object level response ago, no? I don't like that wiki-DWU means what it does. I also don't think that everyone always and everywhere uses that notion of the DWU. It's just wiki policy that for our policies "DWU" means "wiki-DWU". (But, I note, you said it was "intended to count". This is, under the view of "wiki-DWU" not the case for any story pre 2005, when the first canon policy was enacted. So it's, by definition, not intended to count. :P) Najawin ☎ 22:27, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

The following written before my reply below: I sense tones rising (from both of us) but am feeling too under the weather to repontificate on the various niceties — can we take it as said that blah blah continued mutual respect blah blah blah sad that this is getting heated?…

Then we have the same issue! Once again, I reiterate my above statement, perhaps with a slight clarification, if I'm being told that a policy I proposed generated an inconsistency, I can't dodge out of the way by saying that in a completely different system it doesn't do this. I have to actually address the issue of whether or not it does this head on. Once I've done this I can *then* say "okay, but I think this is actually a problem with everything else, not with the policy I've suggested."

I'm sorry, I really am, I really do see how you get there. But I really don't think I agree with this. Or at least, I don't agree with the strongest version of it. Perhaps I do have some duty to make a good-faith effort to address the issue. But, I maintain, I don't have to spend arbitrarily long trying to address the issue if it's not leading us anywhere. In a case like this where I think the "everything-else" is too fundamentally confused to get anywhere useful, that seems like it could potentially stall the actual useful discussion indefinitely to no practical end.

'cause like, I tried. I did try to debate you on the RXBPs, early on. I think you're wrong about them, insofar as it can be determined. But your error there is, by my reckoning, irrelevant to the deeper issue of T:VS needing to be reformed as a whole. I do not see the practical or indeed epistemological upshot of insisting on debating "whether the current version of the rules generate one particular inconsistency or not" to the full before we're allowed to discuss "yes, but whether or not that particular inconsistency exists, the whole thing needs to be done away with anyway and the inconsistency definitely won't exist within its replacement". Naturally this would be void if you were on team "current T:VS is fine, we must keep it", because if so, in your preferred outcome, the alleged issues would remain, so we do need to get consensus on whether they're real issues. But you seem to have conceded that a T:VS reform is desirable.

…Look, the more feverish I am the more my brain works in metaphor, so apologies for this return to perhaps-grandiloquent analogies so soon after the cellar and powder-keg — but quite sincerely, the reason I feel so strongly about my side of this issue is this: I am increasingly reminded of certain hazily-remembered hagiographical accounts of Galileo's struggles with advocating heliocentrism.

The story went that hagiographical!Galileo, having discovered evidence that the Earth ought to be understood as revolving around the Sun, was assailed with attacks from theologians demanding that he commit to a position on whether or not this discovery contradicted the literal meaning of such-and-such ambiguous reference in the Old Testament. And, well, the moral of the tale was not "and the right thing to do for Galileo was to become an expert on both Biblical Hebrew and theology in order to conclusively decide whether he was contradicting those particular Bible verses or not; only then could he continue his work".

The actual moral was, of course, to say that this entire framing was wrong-headed; that if it was to progress, Science(TM) needed to free itself from the idea that it needed to account for literal readings of the Bible one way or the other. The virtuous, principled thing to do for Galileo was to refuse to answer the theological quibbles. To say "maybe it contradicts your literalist interpretations, maybe it doesn't, that's for you to figure out if you personally care. Personally I do not care and neither should any forward-thinking scientist because the literalist interpretation needs to be discarded altogether". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:54, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Think of my tone there as more exasperated than heated. But if you're under the weather, I've no objection to taking a break. (Also, dear lord don't get me started on Galileo.) Najawin ☎ 23:06, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Well, even so, I would rather neither of us get too exasperated. I prefer us ebulliently productive. But so it goes. Re: break offer, you’re very kind. I don’t think an official *break*-break is necessary but will thank you for your understanding in answers perhaps being a little slower coming in the next week(?) or so. (And yes, I know, I know. But that’s why I specified “hagiographical-Galileo”. The Galileo of baby’s-first-illustrated-history-of-science-book, the Galileo who is to the muddled historical truth as Ian McNeice is to Winston Churchill. I was only gesturing at the myth, regardless of its historical basis.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:11, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

As to the larger issues present.

'cause like, I tried. I did try to debate you on the RXBPs, early on.

This is true, but you did so in the context of Web Theory. And this is the issue I'm having. You can discuss whether these succeed outside of a new framework, or you can propose a new framework and so they become moot. (Or, at least, they might become moot. It will have to be evaluated later on if they re-emerge, they simply aren't directed at this new framework.) You're saying they don't succeed because of properties of a framework that isn't live policy and this is the problem I have. It's the blurring of the lines between the two paths.

Let's just ask this point blank. Your prior arguments related to the RXbps were related to Web Theory. If we accept, for sake of argument, that this isn't what validity currently means, and that the deflationary account of validity I've sketched is correct, or something similar, do you think they actually pose issues to R4bp? That R4bp implies they should exist? If the answer is yes, we're good. If the answer is no, I'd really like to understand your reasoning as to why. Because I've not yet heard it. (And feel free to save this for the large, object level response.)

The actual moral was, of course, to say that this entire framing was wrong-headed; that if it was to progress, Science(TM) needed to free itself from the idea that it needed to account for literal readings of the Bible one way or the other.

I will say that this has gotten a bit too abstracted for me to follow as relevant to our situation. And that I object so strongly to this story as an account of those events that I reject that any message should be taken from it. Najawin ☎ 00:08, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Minor note I forgot about, small amendment to the OP.

Just putting this as its own header here. I actually forgot a third version of R2bp. I thought about it while I was first working on this post but forgot about it when I went to wrote it up. I only just remembered because of the LEGO Batman thing. It's ultimately somewhat moot, as I think people are somewhat skeptical of these in general, but I leave it here anyhow, as it's still an important thing to note, another way in which we could modify our rules. Call it the "Kerides the Thinker" approach. The theoretical stories pass R1,3,4, are fully licensed for what they actually use, (none of which are originally DWU elements) and then use a licensed DWU element in one of their later works. In this instance you're transposing the DWU element into a pre-existing "DWU-adjacent" series, instead of transposing an element from a pre-existing "DWU-adjacent" series into the DWU with the Cyberon precedent. (As with the Audio Visuals approach you might have actually flesh out an adequate account of continuity here, imo.)

Again, probably somewhat moot, not the biggest change to anything and probably ultimately not something that will move any needles, but I include it for completeness' sake. Najawin ☎ 07:06, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

More discussion, because it seems silly to discuss stuff in the above subsection

Just wanted to note here, (though it's irrelevant to the above bit, and I'm mainly doing it now because it's somewhat apparent that I'll never get round to doing a long, definitive post on 4bp, though I may attempt one later) that if we keep r4bp, even if we enact the T:VS/T:CS split and change to Web Theory, rxbp is still a good idea. Why? Because there ought to be symmetry between our validity rules and our coverage rules. They are, in effect, two sides of the same coin. Najawin's point about symmetry will still stand. In fact, if we enact Web Theory, perhaps we should also enact it for rule 2! Although perhaps that's a bad idea. It doesn't matter. The point about symmetry still stands.

Also, with regards to the above addendum to the OP, I had assumed that Kerides' validity came naturally with "Cyberon", and indeed still seems to be an extension of the same. I think it makes sense, mind (although this will become somewhat moot if we do decide to get rid of rule 4. Mind you, I do have an idea for something similar to a 2bp for if we abolish r4... But I think it would probably be best to leave for another thread). Aquanafrahudy 📢 08:00, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

(Let it be knwon that I haven't forgotten about this and have a large reply in-progress.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:40, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Of course. Najawin ☎ 18:44, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Cousin Ettolrhc’s first essay-reply

Well, I’ve been reading every post in this thread as it is posted, and as Najawin (OP) and Scrooge (incidentally an Admin) are the only two people strongly engaging in this discussion, I’ve decided to also write a very long reply, so as to give this thread more merit and hope it reaches a better conclusion. (Or is closed in a better way, even if that doesn’t directly result in policy change)

What is the DWU?

Over the course of this novella-thread, a continuing point of contention and confusion has been what this wiki’s definition of DWU is, with Scrooge believing we have no clear definition, and Najawin believing that as our page on “DWU” references Tardis:Valid sources, and rule 4 therein references our page on DWU, the definition is circular/recursive. It appears to be Najawin’s opinion that this definition is silly, but that we are (morally?) obliged to accept it, and hence when pushing for Web Theory or any alternative, we should emphasise that we are changing policy, rather than clarifying it. Whilst Scrooge’s retort to this is basically “so what? That's so silly it needs to change right now”, I (whilst noting my sympathy for Scrooge’s position), instead find myself ceding the point, not out of need but honesty. Yes, I believe this is currently the way the wiki defines such a term.

Secondly, the page DWU is not within Category:Policies, and hence it is not a policy page. Plain and simple.

Lastly, a recursive definition is simply invalid, at least for policies. If this “isn’t current policy”, let it be (read: I hope the closing admin will declare it so) from here on out. We’re “changing policy” in the same way that the creation of Tardis:Merging policy was “changing policy” - it was simply creating a ‘’new’’ policy. Sure, perhaps this does violate the new T:BOUND (“you are bound by current practice”), but I’d argue it doesn’t, really. The ‘’current’’ practice - perhaps “attitude” would be a better word here? But I feel its close enough in this context to come under the umbrella - of the ‘’current editors’’ is certainly not inline with the idea that we as editors have the “right” push our personal ideas of “what counts” onto others - which new works of fiction needing to be in-line with our current set of valid works would fall under - and rather trying to make a set of consistent rules and regulations attempting to emulate what a reader would want, with the (admittedly large) presumption that maximum coverage is better until proven otherwise. It is not within the spirit of the New T:BOUND to force us to keep our current policies inline with ‘’historical’’ practice.

I agree that the best definition of the DWU, especially for this wiki, is the Web, i.e ‘’all fiction legally connecting back to "An Unearthly Child" ^[+]Part of An Unearthly Child, Loading...{"namedpart":"An Unearthly Child","1":"An Unearthly Child (TV story)"}”. I expand upon this later, in #On the T:CS/T:VS split.

In their currently-latest reply, Scrooge outlined what “intent to be set in the DWU” can mean very well, with the following extract:

1. be intended to be set in a fictional universe to which the events of at least one preexisting valid source are applicable. \2. be intended to be something whose events future valid sources are habilitated to incorporate into their own universe in the same way. \ Where 1 without 2 is always exclusionary (cf. DCtT), 2 without 1 sometimes not but it's a bit controversial and untested (cf. Dr. Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks), and the golden case for uncontroversial validity is something which provably fulfills both prongs.User:Scrooge MacDuck

Additionally, in this same reply, Scrooge points out the same thing I have here, that a recursive definition of the DWU simply makes no sense, and so must be immediately discarded lest we fall into a pit of meaningly procedural qualms. Worded completely differently, of course, I’m mainly reaffirming myself here, using Scrooge as an example of someone else who supports this.

This doesn’t totally fit this section, but I can’t think of anywhere else to put it, and it is rule-4-related, so. Let it be put on record that the clause in T:VS allowing things to be abritarly “voted off the island” is completely inappropriate (may be the wrong word) to the ethos of the current wiki, and I feel should be removed with the closing of this thread, or its sequel.

On continuity

1. We select a subset of all the fiction ever written by Homo sapiens, based on the criterion "does this have a legal relationship, direct or otherwise, to the 1963 episode of BBC television An Unearthly Child?". 2. We create pages about individual works of fiction contained within that set. These pages summarise the plot and list out the cast and crew, the featured characters, the miscellaneous worldbuilding elements.3. We create pages with an in-universe perspective on the characters and misc. worldbuilding elements contained in these works of fiction, using our pages on these works of fiction as "sources".User:Scrooge_MacDuck in the first large reply of this post

This, I feel, outlines the essence of what thus wiki should be perfectly. In fact, it would make more logical sense (although I wouldn’t advocate for it, as it would look so silly) for this wiki to be called “anuneathlychild”.

Secondly, Scrooge’s description of “continuity” in the following paragraph, that is

they're fully encouraged to bring that knowledge with them as implicit in the new textUser:Scrooge MacDuck

, I fully endorse.

Of course, as this “web of fiction” begins sprawling into something massive, accidental similarities will inevitably crop up. For example, take the “android boyfriend” in The Time of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"] (I am in no way certain Moffat didn’t intend the reference, but for argument’s sake). This is still continuity. However, it should not be covered as simply as intentional continuity is. Instead, we should say stuff like “in another account, [thing] appeared which was similar in [way]”, and in “#Continuity” sections we should simply say “[Later source] also showed [element]”, importantly without implying intention or non-intention. This is easier by the fact that Continuity sections are now to be written in an out-of-universe perspective. For the case of rule 4 by proxy, however, I do agree with Najawin on intentionalism. We should only validate previously-invalid sources if the author(s) of another valid work intended them to be read as part of the work’s pretext. Requiring an authorial note is nothing new, however, as it has always been the case with supposed-rule-4-breakers, accept in cases where we presume them to be not intended to be in the DWU if they are a parody, although even then authorial quotes can trump it, as was the case with Doctor Who? and The Daft Dimension So perhaps some of the cases we validated during Forum:Temporary forums/An update to T:VS shouldn't have been let through. I’m willing to admit that that was our - including my - mistake. I would in no way be against Najawin, or anyone else, opening a thread to requisition these source’s validity - to which, I trust, the community will simply give the reasons why many, if not all, of these just pass regular rule 4. We have space for such procedural threads now that we are out of the T:TF phase.

Using the case of the android boyfriend in The Time of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"]’, I believe that without further evidence, we would place the reference at The Master (Scream of the Shalka)#Other references, linking over to The Doctor’s android boyfriend (The Time of the Doctor). Personally, however, I feel that we could, and perhaps should, change this in cases like this, where the potential reference is never expanded upon, and instead leave it just in “Other references”, but carefully phrasing it as “On one occasion, the Eleventh Doctor referred to having an android boyfriend”. However, I can see the issue here, as readers may think it was Moffat’s intention to reference Scream of the Shalka, which it wasn’t necessarily. But in this specific case, we should certainly create the separate page as well as mentioning it on the Shalka Master’s page, because, as Scrooge pointed out in the second page break, there is actual discontinuity there, not just a lack of elaboration. (Namely, in Time he accidentally invents the boyfriend, but he intentionally built the android body in Shalka, and didn’t invent the Master)

For me, as I said above, the reasoning comes first. I can live with Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows). It's irritating, but not ideal. I can live with a prominent, often referenced invalid story. I can live with weird implications of well thought out rules consistently applied. Poorly thought out rules, or well thought out rules inconsistently applied? That's when I have real frustrations.User:Najawin

I am certainly the opposite of Najawin here. To me, the policies are an emergent property of what the wiki should be like, not the inverse. So whilst an inconsistent policy is very bad, it is significantly less bad than something being wrong in the main namespace. This is because the wiki is made for the main namespace, everything else is supplementary.

In his second reply, Najawin brings up the idea of author’s view of the web of fiction connecting to their story(s) containing fiction which cannot be traced back to "An Unearthly Child" ^[+]Part of An Unearthly Child, Loading...{"namedpart":"An Unearthly Child","1":"An Unearthly Child (TV story)"} (rephrased), with this bleeding into the text. Is this not just a crossover? Although I suppose if the other webs of fiction aren’t licensed, its a bit different, although rule 2 is quite clear that we don’t care about the non-DWU concepts’ licensedness, so i think this just falls under the umbrella of a crossover, whatever that may be.

On invalidity

at “best” they're “unproductive dead-ends” — they might incorporate some context from the web, but are not intended to reflect back onto it — not "intended to count": they add further information to their particular spun-off version of a valid concept like the First Doctor, but with no intent that further works connecting to the broader web should incorporate these data as context for their own depiction of the First Doctor. The /Non-valid sources subpages are the solution e have found to efficiently cover such sources' transformative uses of preexisting elements.User:Scrooge MacDuck

As inspired by the above quote, I believe that a work of fiction should only be considered to break rule 4 if they are intended to not be referenced by future works of fiction which themselves are connected back to "An Unearthly Child" ^[+]Part of An Unearthly Child, Loading...{"namedpart":"An Unearthly Child","1":"An Unearthly Child"} by a distinct path. So the first issue of Doctor Whoah! is intended to be referenced by the second issue of Doctor Whoah!, or at worst the author didn’t think about it. But the first issue of Doctor Whoah! is intended to not (crucially different to “not intended to”) be referenced by, say Hide ^[+]Loading...["Hide (TV story)"]

Does validity trump invalidity? is a question Najawin brings up in his second reply, seemingly answering that this isn’t how inclusion debates have historically operated, and we’d need to change if so. I say we change, and so. The idea that validity trumps invalidity grows very naturally from the idea that continuity trumps discontinuity.

Angry Harry

Is this hypothetical "Angry Harry" still writing for the DWU? Seems to be to me, even if they don't consider their work suitable for others to referenceUser:NajawinForum:Rule_4_by_Proxy_and_its_ramifications:_considered_in_the_light_of_the_forum_archives#The Web or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deflationism

Najwin brings up the example of an “Angry Harry”, that is, someone who doesn’t want anyone else to reference their works. Well, if no one ‘’does’’ reference their works, and they never publish a story which ‘’is’’ intended to be referenced by other works in continuity with other parts of The Web, then yes, Angry Harry’s works should be invalid. Scrooge’s reply to this, however, states that “of course it’d be valid” as long as “Harry is open to the possibility of referencing this in future works”. I don’t think this is quite accurate, at least in the way it is phrased. If Harry writes - or is open to the possibility of writing - a sequel to his original work which features no DWU concepts other than those present in his original story, then the sequel should remain invalid, along with the original. Or just the original, if the sequel was entirely hypothetical. But if, as I think Scrooge is intending to suggest, Harry writes - or is open to the possibility of writing - a completely separate DWU story and references - or is open to the possibility of referencing - his original work, then the original work should be valid, unless the new work - hypothetical or otherwise - is intended to never be referenced. Najawin, in reply to Scrooge’s response, clarified his intent, which lines up with my interpretation. That is, that Harry’s sequels do not otherwise connect to the rest of the Web/DWU. However, Najawin still holds the position that these works should ‘’not’’ be invalidated, which I disagree with, and struggle to understand his reasoning, as none is given beyond “its a bit extreme” (at least, by the point im reading). In hiscurrently-latest reply, Scrooge points out that invalid stories must be standalone, taking precedent from Forum:Inclusion debate: Death Comes to Time. This seems…fair, in a way. But if The Minister of Chance (series) was published with no comment on its intent to be in the “DWU”, or to be in continuity with any given valid story, but it was explicitly in continuity with (“set in the same universe as”) Death Comes to Time ^[+]Loading...["Death Comes to Time (webcast)"], and Death Comes to Time was considered invalid (say, if we presume the closing-post reasoning was perfect and there was no r4bp case to be made, or whatever), then surely we would - and I think should - consider The Minister of Chance invalid? Saying that, I think that any series of connected invalid works should be seriously inspected, because as the series grows, the chance of some intent for future reference by otherwise-DWU stories (that is, “intent to be set in the DWU”) increases, and with R4BP that would validate the entire series.

But then Najawin says,

some crossovers later on down the line, but there's no backwards narrative connections?User:Najawin

In a case such as this, I would write it into rule-4/NuT:VS that a crossover between valid covered sources and invalid covered sources always retroactively brings the previously-invalid series into validity. This is because that series features licensed DWU concepts (or its debut story did) and it is now being acknowledged as taking place within the universe of a valid source. This seems like an ample r4bp case.

Within the same example, Najawin brings up the idea of “taking a DWU concept and divorcing it from its original context (hint, this means they do not refer back to previous part in the Web)” I plainly do not understand what these parentheses are meant to mean - any DWU concept, by definition, makes its debut in a DWU story, and so anything which features that concept is a reference, however minor, to that original story. There isn’t really any other way around this, its just a case of (minor) continuity trumping (major) discontinuity.

In his currently-latest reply (and in fact, the currently-latest big reply), Najawin clarifies that he was referencing/making a analogue to ‘’Vienna’’ (preliminary note: it would be appreciated to have these references spelt out for anyone who isn’t aware, in future. Potentially including the closing-admin, although of course they ‘’should’’ probably be aware of these things, but on the off-chance they miss a reference like this, it would be unhelpful. But also its just unhelpful to anyone reading the thread, especially in the future) and although I admittedly have neither listened to ‘’Vienna’’ or have deep knowledge about its controversy, but after reading Vienna (series), Talk:Vienna (series) (an admin should probably make a note saying that it ‘’is’’, in fact, valid now on the talk page, because someone could be confused) and w:c:Vienna:Vienna (audio series), it seems clear to me that ‘’Vienna’’ should always have been covered, because Vienna Salvatori is a DWU concept, and, if I recall correctly, it has since been concluded, outside of the pages that I linked (so I’d greatly appreciate it if someone else found where) that the “outside of the world of ‘’Doctor Who’’” was a marketing thing, similar to Mad Norwegian Press-era ‘’Faction Paradox’’. And the subsequent “crossovers” with otherwise-DWU stories is, as far as I can tell, an example of the crossover idea he brought up earlier, which I have counted already in this section.

On the T:CS/T:VS spit

Originating in Forum:Rule_4_by_Proxy_and_its_ramifications:_considered_in_the_light_of_the_forum_archives#T:VS,_the_beast_with_two_heads, at least as far as this thread is concerned, this idea is simply split up our policies on ‘’what works of fiction (and non-fiction) get pages, and which are granted full [[Tardis:In-universe perspective|in-universe coverage’’ and our policies on ‘’what works of fiction “count”’’.

In my mind, Tardis:Rules of coverage (As I think it should be named, or something similar, to allow for more nuance) would begin with the following:

Any work of fiction which is officially released and licensed by the BBC or other relevant licence-holder(s) should have a page on this wiki, and have in-universe articles written about it. However, not all covered sources are valid. In addition, some sources have the licence to use some of their characters, but not all. These sources should not have pages created for them, nor be written about in normal articles, [#Partially licenced media

And Tardis:Valid sources would begin with:

Most sources that this wiki covers can have normal in-universe articles written about them, and as such are deemed “valid”. However, some sources are intended by their author(s) - either explicitly or implicitly - to not be referenced by future works of fiction, other than sequels which do not draw additionally from other covered sources, although if this intention is contracted by a later author, we may still cover it.

Both of these are, of course, just experimental outlines, but I’d like to think that they are quite decent.

Crucially, you will have noticed that I worded R4BP into my new T:VS summary. This is because in a model where T:VS is basically just rule 4, all of the side-bits to said rule should be shown clearly. And I believe that such a feature is useful for this site for the original reason for continuity in the first place - context! If The Tomorrow Windows (novel) presumes that Scream of the Shalka takes place within the universe it is describing, then not acknowledging such a thing is being fundamentally dishonest to the work of fiction and our goal of being a reference for readers to better understand of the Web of Fiction Connecting Back to "An Unearthly Child" ^[+]Part of An Unearthly Child, Loading...{"namedpart":"An Unearthly Child","1":"An Unearthly Child (TV story)"} (WoFCBAUC - wof-k’borc)

And, as Scrooge outlined in many more words back in Forum:Rule_4_by_Proxy_and_its_ramifications:_considered_in_the_light_of_the_forum_archives#Why_no_invalidity_by_proxy?, invalidity by proxy should not exist because invalidity by contradiction foundationally will never.

Early in this thread, Scrooge suggested a ”simple rule 4” if Web Theory was deemed inappropriate. Below is the paragraph which I feel has the most going for it, but which luckily I feel I have a good counter for:

..And another strong argument is that, frankly, it could also describe a lot of currently-valid apocrypha. I'm not sure the writer of a short story in Doctor Who The Official Annual 2009 has any expectation that anybody, going forward, is going to remember it, let alone reference it as A Real Part Of Lore. Not even the writer themself. (As Najawin mentioned in the OP, Steven Moffat once forgot one of his own DW prose stories; can we really assume that when he wrote it, he intended to add an indelible Piece Of Lore™ to Wider Continuity™? Hm.) It's very Wiki-brained of us to assume otherwise.User:Scrooge MacDuck

In order to both not validate Doctor Whoah! and the like, but avoid invalidating any story wherein the author didn’t literally intend for it to be a Piece of Lore in the Wider Continuity, as Scrooge put it, I propose to change the phrasing from “intended to be referenced by future works of fiction” to “not intended to be not referenced by future works of fiction”, or rather to simply phrase it in the reverse. A work is valid, unless its author(s) intended for it to not be referenced by future works. So unless Steven Moffat, whilst writing Corner of the Eye was consciously thinking about the fact he planned to never acknowledge on-screen the story’s existence, rather than the idea of him or anyone else acknowledging it simply never occurring, the story should stay valid. And if he did consciously plan to never acknowledge the story, then the story should be invalid.

Additionally, I fully reject the idea put forward by Najawin in Does T:CS work that in crafting new policies we need to maintain continuity with past versions of said policy. It's okay if the T:CS split wouldn't have made any sense last year, because it is no longer last year, but this year.

However, immediately afterward Najawin brought up concerns that some R1-breakers still get coverage-as{{invalid}}. This is, indeed, a point of confusion. Technically speaking, the content which is covered from these apparent works of “non-fiction” is still fictive, just messed up in a larger work which also contains non-fiction. I think that the best solution to this is to ensure we do not have “non-covered” as an option in T:CS as it is, as Najawin points out, terribly confusing. Instead, T:CS should point out that only fictive information from works of non-fiction can be covered on in-universe articles - and then go on to say that said articles should probably be tagged as {{invalid}}, consult our validity policies.

On top of anything put forward by anyone on this thread so far, as far as I can see, I suggest splitting Tardis:Valid sources#Out-of-universe sources to Tardis:Out-of-universe sources, as its incredibly different to how we deal with valid sources, and having OOU-oriented pages link to T:VS is very confusing, and potentially misleading. On top of this, we never have an out-of-universe source be {{invalid}}-tagged, as such a source couldn’t have in-universe articles made about it, so there’s no need to warn people its “invalid”. This together makes me think that if it is ruled that OOU sources don’t warrant their own page, they should be on Tardis:Rules of coverage rather than Tardis:Valid sources.

And finally, the so-called “rule 2 by proxy”, or “Cyberon principle” (neither of which I endorse as official names, to note). This is the one RxBP I take seriously (other than r4bp), because having, for example, Phoenix Court valid would be very good for the wiki. However, I do admit that it creates quite a major overlap between T:CS and T:VS. This is because something could only be hypothetically “brought into licensed-land” if there was already enough continuity (which includes a simple concept-carryover) for a r4bp case if it were already covered, leading to a weird situation where it appears that it would be impossible for a source to pass “r2bp” and be invalid, which would be against the spirit of the CS/VS split. But it is not so! What if an invalid work of fiction brought a “completely not covered” work of fiction “into licensed-land” (this is getting rather strange, as I do not feel comfortable making up a proper idea of how this r2bp could possibly work, but it is also hard to discuss so vaguely)? Surely ‘’that’’ would result in an invalid, yet covered, work of fiction which was only brought in through r2bp, hence showing that the rules of coverage (“is this referenced [some additional detail I am unsure about but must exist to prevent the entirety of [Sherlock Holmes] being covered]]) and validity policies (“was the referencing story valid or invalid?”) are distinct. I’m not certain I got that last part right.

How should this thread be closed?

It is my firm belief that due to the fact that this thread has had such a small number of serious participants, when an Admin closes this thread, instead of either closing it as simply “unresolved” or enacting the consensus of the few (if there is one), they should create a new thread, linking to this one at the top using a new template, {{related threads}} (which I would imagine to look similar to {{mosnav}}, although probably organised manually rather than with categories. The closing admin of this post should then outline what needs to be done in that new thread - likely not the original intent of this one, hence the need for a new OP, and I also wouldn’t be surprised if multiple threads were needed for this. I understand that closing a thread as mammoth as this one is already insanely difficult, but as a counter to that, the admin who has read through the entire thread and reasoned to close it, would probably be the only person capable of starting the new sequel-threads.

Oh, if the closing-post admin agrees to implement {{related threads}}, I would like it to become practice to discuss, at Template talk:Related threads which archived threads should get this, for example Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon? / Forum:Operationalising the Infinity Doctors discussion. Although I can understand if any editing of archived threads is deemed inappropriate, in which case this could just be used for future threads.

Additionally, although it stopped rather quickly, I think the inclusion of those mathematical symbols is bad, not because they themself are, but because understanding them - and hence the thread - requires learning them, which people shouldn’t need to do to participate. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cousin Ettolrhc‎ (talk • contribs) .

Sylvestor McCoy’s page break

Considering my response. I'll say for now that some of the same concerns as in my last major response have cropped up at Forum:Roland Rat: The Series. (They cropped up independently of my interaction in that thread, but I did happen to be the one that pointed out how similar they were.) The "Angry Harry" analogy was, of course, a simplified version of the Faction Paradox situation as outlined in Forum:BBV and canon policy, which is why Scrooge and I had noticeable disagreement over it. I don't believe we're morally obligated to accept current definitions as they stand, except insofar as kinda sorta all categorical norms are roughly isomorphic to moral norms. Really vaguely. (Speaking of web theory...) It's more an epistemic norm. What I described when I talked about authors having a suitably large "mental web" could be a crossover, yes. But it doesn't have to be. And the issue of crossovers is itself tricky because it seems to cut off Web Theory at some boundaries under current precedent. (See the Roland Rat thread for discussion on this.) And I don't see anything wrong with the commutation diagrams that I used, because I literally used them as graphs. I didn't put functions over the arrows or anything. They were just graphs. Najawin ☎ 18:47, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

May actually do a full length reply. Have been trying to do one for a while, but had forgotten about it up until now. Preliminary thoughts: still don't like rule 4, we should get rid of it because any version other than the one outlined in the Infinity Doctors forum thread doesn't work because there isn't actually a reason for having any other. And Infinity Doctors r4 doesn't work because that would mean taking "it's in its own little universe" quotes at face value, which is clearly counterintuitive. Also, just thought of a new argument against web theory, which is that there's clearly a voluminous amount of speculation involved, which would be an absolute nightmare in theoretical future threads (more on that later, when I get around to writing the full reply). Aquanafrahudy 📢 19:11, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

We apologise for the inconvenience

Sorry about two long posts in one day, this is partly a reaction to the above, and partly it's own thing, I've been trying to do this for a while and failing, so let's just go over all of my thoughts on this in one long post.

Point the First: Rule 4 is a really bad idea

What is rule 4 there for, first of all? It's there mainly because of this one quote:

Tangerineduel has made the point that we can't believe a writer who says that their work is canonical. That's very true. But, in my opinion, he's incorrect on the reverse. I think we do have to believe a writer who declares, "Look, this isn't a part of the mainstream continuity." After all, we've believed it before. I don't see any rational argument for doing something different in this case. Moreover, it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity will have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you do take it seriously, because they're acting against their self-interest.User:CzechOut

As has been pointed out above, this is rendered null and void by the fact that we also take fourth-wall breaks and parodies to be "very strong evidence" of rule 4. Scrooge has tried to explain this away by saying a) that we do this because it would be too hard to try and cover, for example, Oh Mummy! (home video) on Sutekh, but this is exactly the same mindset that led to the banning of any fiction with the slightest hint of interactivity from the wiki, so I don't really think this holds up, and b) because the authors wouldn't want us to. Now, as has been pointed out by Najawin, passive negative authorial intent is a very different kettle of fish to active negative authorial intent. Passive negative authorial intent is where they probably don't intend it to be in the DWU, but they haven't gone around saying it. Active authorial intent is where somebody says "No, this wasn't intended to be set in the DWU. But the above quote only argues for active authorial intent, and does not apply to passive authorial intent. So it makes no sense to have stories with passive negative authorial intent as invalid, because we have no reason for doing so!

But furthermore, furthermore! The above quote doesn't even make any sense, because we have now discovered that it is common practise to use "set in its own little universe" as marketing tactics, and if the above quote were to be used as the basis for policy, we would have to take these at face value, which wouldn't make any sense at all! So, rule 4 makes no sense.

Point the Second: Web Theory is even worse

Web Theory is a theory that relies on divination, on crystal-ball gazing, on trying to guess, in short, if something was intended to "be referenced in further stories". Was The Gunfighters ^[+]Loading...["The Gunfighters (TV story)"]? God knows. How can we possibly hope to know what Donald Cotton thought at the time? Most likely, he didn't expect anyone to ever follow on from it, he thought it was just another installment in this funny little show. It was intended to be in continuity with previous episodes, sure, but who knows whether he intended other people to reference it? (Whether the following episode directly continuing from this one is enough is a different matter, but I would say it isn't as authorial intent is everything.) I'm sorry, Web Theory is just too embedded in guesswork for me. And there's no actual reason to implement it. So there.

Point the Third: The T:VS/T:CS makes sense

Even if I had misgivings about it earlier, if we are to keep rule 4, it makes sense to corner it off into its own thing. Also, as Ettolrahc pointed out, we should also split the bits about the real world, and we really need to do something about T:NO RW/T:NO SELF REF. But I think we should still maintain some level of symmetry between the two (or maybe that's just my autistic brain?), so I think that, on one level or another, rule 2 by proxy is still a good idea, but I won't dwell on this for too long, because it's getting late. So onwards we go!

Minor Divergence: Let's say what we mean

A minor divergence here, but may I just say that I unequivocally agree with Cousin Ettolrahc in that people should say what they mean, and not say "A hypothetical spin-off" when they really mean "Faction Paradox". I was, in fact, on the verge of asking "Sorry, which hypothetical sort-of-licensed story are we talking about here" before I realised that they were talking about Dimensions in Time ^[+]Loading...["Dimensions in Time (TV story)"], over at Forum:Charity Stories that are TECHNICALLY licensed.... So, let's say what we mean, and not talk about hypotheticals when they're tangible real-life things.

Conclusion

I think I'll stop there, as I can't think of anything else I want to say, although I think there's probably rather a lot, and it's also getting late, and I'm tired, and if there's anything else I'll just say it later. I did consider doing a long thing going "What ought we to cover?" and it was going to get all philosophical, but I honestly can't be arsed at the moment, so there.

So, there you have it. Sorry if absolutely none of that made sense, it tends to happen when I'm writing stuff (god forbid anyone lets me write a Doctor Who episode :P), and basically I only put this section in because it seemed odd to put my signature in the above section. So, thanks for reading (and I'm really sorry if you've started from the start), and good-night. Aquanafrahudy 📢 20:39, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

The Page Break of Paul McGann

As a preliminary remark, I object to Point the Second's flattening of Web Theory into the "intending to be referenced" clause, which is nonessential. You could very much have a version of the T:VS that ran on 'pure' Web Theory (essentially Web Theory + Simplified Rule 4), simply taking into account whether something is referencing a prior node in the Web or not, while disregarding the "speculative" question of intent-to-be-referenced.

I would also like to highlight re: Point the First that I don't think covering Oh, Mummy! on Sutekh would be hard. It wouldn't really. It's just that I don't think anyone actually wants us to or would want us to, including the people who made it. That's a different concern.

Furthermore I acknowledge that it all needs a degree of guesswork. But there's guesswork and guesswork, and this seems an acceptable threshold of a necessary evil to prevent the chaos of simply throwing out invalidity altogether. Mileages may vary. I wouldn't hate a Tardis Wiki that threw out invalidity, but… I don't think it would be supported by most of the userbase or readership, and I find their reasons understandable. So I'm sort of working backwards from the fact that we do need some way of delineating valid and invalid sources within what we cover — not because it's some mandate from heaven but because, realistically, I don't think complete abrogation of invalidity as a concept is going to happen in the coming decade. I may be wrong. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:16, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

As for Aqua's Point 2 (against Web Theory), I addressed this in my reply. Rather than saying that a story must be intended to be referenced in future, we say that a story must not be intended to not be referenced in future. And as for Najawin's Angry Harry, I had genuinely no idea you were using it as an analogue for Faction Paradox, I thought it was a complete hypothetical. And as for the graphs, all I can say is that I was finding myself confused.Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 05:36, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

But that changes nothing, because it's still speculation in voluminous amounts! How can we possibly hope to know what the writers of Oh Mummy! were thinking? Okay, so it's very very unlikely that they intended it to be set in the DWU, but that's besides the point! Furthermore, you're still conflating active negative authorial intent with passive negative authorial intent, which are two different things! Czech's original point was that we had to believe somebody who said that their work want set in the DWU, because there was a financial incentive for them not to (God knows that hasn't held up very well), but this doesn't apply to rule 4! You say that the producers and writers of Oh Mummy! didn't intend it to be set in the DWU, but did the ones of Animal Magic? Did Moffat when he wrote The Naked Truth? Did whoever wrote Mind My Minions? You say that nobody would accept it if we abolished rule 4, but why? Because they think that authorial intent, and speculative authorial intent, takes precedent over all else? Or is it just because they don't like parodies and rule 4 breakers? Because if it's the latter, then we shouldn't say "because of authorial intent", we should say "because of rule parody and rule fourth wall". I don't like it any more than you do, it's much to close to canon-thinking but it's a hell of a lot better than doing that but calling it something it isn't. Aquanafrahudy 📢 07:07, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm just not that compelled by the insistence that "it's still speculation", becaude… at the risk of going all philosophical again, I'm not so convinced that there is such a thing as certainty about questions like that, ever, even with quotes. Whether you can be certain that 2 + 2 = 4 is another kettle of epistemological worms, but when it comes to being certain of what a writer was thinking fifteen years ago — it's always more-or-less-high probabilities. Even if the writer tells you "I was thinking X", asserting that X is true is still just "an educated guess", the additional circumstantial evidence of the author's quote just raises the probability by some amount.

And no, I don't think people specifically place authorial intent over all else, but I do think people's unreasoned intuitions about what "ought" to be invalid, once they break out of a "contradiction"-based canon framework, will tend to track with a "come on, is this meant to be Wikified that way??" sort of gut feeling. Besides, to look at it another way, invalidating things which we're pretty sure were intended to count would be evil, so the Venn diagram (if you must) of "authors probably didn't want this to count" vs. "the editors probably don't want it valid" is the only intersection which we can cover as invalid with a clear conscience.

But again, I mean, we'll see. If you get support to abrogate Rule 4 altogether, fine, brave new world, I'm interested. My position was never an active defence of Rule 4, just a proposal at the least-stupid, least-false-negative-yielding way to ground Rule 4 jurisprudence if we must have Rule 4. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 09:24, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the "it wasn't intended to be wikified like this" really holds up to me, because AUC was never in a million years intended to be wikified like we have done. And with speculation, obviously there's going to be some, but we should most certainly attempt to use as little speculation as possible. Aquanafrahudy 📢 10:03, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

These threads grow up so fast. /tears in eyes/ (Naj response)

So, yes, to clarify this opening point, I think we have an epistemic obligation to note that current policy is what it is, and that we're modifying it. But this obligation is just the normal obligations we have to be rational and to believe true things. It's not anything specific here. I'm not entirely sure where the confusion about morality came into play, but it could be the tangent Scrooge and I went on about whether or not one could coherently believe that certain actions were morally wrong even if you didn't have a 100% solved theory of moral philosophy. I made a very glib comment that made much more sense in my head than on the page, I admit, and it took us into the weeds of metaethics a bit, and whether there were proper metaethical parallels for the point Scrooge was trying to make. His more general point, as I would steelman it, is that even if you don't currently have the answer to the problem in its totality, if you have a reasonable procedure, under certain specified conditions, that will lead to this solution in the limit, you're justified in believing some of its conclusions are approximately accurate on shorter time scales. The issue with this is that "certain specified conditions" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting here - and I would certainly reject that it's applicable to the situation where he's trying to invoke it. (As an example, without getting too specific because this treads into territory that's pretty niche, you can have procedures that, as time goes to infinity, will iterate towards a point with a certain property. However, in the short term, you don't get arbitrarily close to that point, you instead jump to points all over your space that themselves approximate the property to arbitrary precision. Which is just one of the most cursed things imaginable.)

I'm less than convinced that recursion is an inherently bad thing for a policy to have. I certainly don't think it's the best option, because, ultimately, it comes close to stating a tautology. But so long as there's some sort of base case or terminating clause (which T:VS has, in the form of the other 3 rules + voting off the island), it's not logically incoherent.

As for intentionalism and continuity, let me note that any further thread on that would, I believe, be an explicit T:POINT violation, as I argued quite strongly on that line at Forum:Temporary forums/An update to T:VS. I ultimately don't think Scrooge ever adequately answered my final line of criticism there, but that ship has well and truly sailed. R4bp allows for us to infer intent directly from continuity, and unless people decide to re-evaluate that in a thread not explicitly related to that issue, it's unlikely to be changed. (And, arguably, it probably can't even be discussed in that thread without a new argument. Perhaps, as idle musing, it could be that this entire original-R4-intent-contradiction + fundamental rewrite of T:VS discussion might be enough to re-open discussion. But that's fundamentally non-trivial. And I wouldn't want to be the one to bring it up. I've spent enough good will on this thread.)

To me, the policies are an emergent property of what the wiki should be like, not the inverse. So whilst an inconsistent policy is very bad, it is significantly less bad than something being wrong in the main namespace. This is because the wiki is made for the main namespace, everything else is supplementary.

Ettolrhc, just a question here. What do you think about Stream (The Hollows of Time) and the Man with the rosette? What should we do with them?

I agree that the best definition of the DWU, especially for this wiki, is the Web, i.e "all fiction legally connecting back to An Unearthly Child ^[+]Loading...["An Unearthly Child"]"

As inspired by the above quote, I believe that a work of fiction should only be considered to break rule 4 if they are intended to not be referenced by future works of fiction which themselves are connected back to An Unearthly Child ^[+]Loading...["An Unearthly Child"] by a distinct path.

Both of these run into the issue of crossovers, no? Crossovers might not actively intend to sever their ties from previous DWU stories. But we don't follow the events of the crossovers into the sequel stories without other reason to do so. Scrooge is pawning off a lot of this work into "does this have a legal relationship, direct or otherwise", and I think it's going to be hard to maintain that the answer is no in most cases, given how broad that analysis is. And even then, that doesn't actually save you, as that's not defining what the web is, that's just defining what sources are covered. These two steps are distinct. And as pointed out at Forum:Roland Rat: The Series, it's not even clear under current precedent that if you had a crossover, and a new legally distinct IP was generated, that this would be considered a DWU IP moving forward. (Another fun question based on this, I think your definitions here might be loose enough that some of The Book of Taliesin might be valid. Which is... weird.)

Does validity trump invalidity? is a question Najawin brings up in his second reply, seemingly answering that this isn’t how inclusion debates have historically operated, and we’d need to change if so. I say we change, and so. The idea that validity trumps invalidity grows very naturally from the idea that continuity trumps discontinuity.

So, to clarify, this is about how inclusion debates proceed once something is declared invalid. It takes quite a bit of evidence - usually - to invalidate something. However, revalidating isn't as easy as casting doubt on small pieces of the evidence used to invalidate it in the first place. Once a thing is declared invalid, it has, historically, been considered guilty until proven innocent, and efforts to validate these things are often monumental tasks involving scouring of interviews and large amounts of textual analysis. My point in asking whether validity trumps invalidity, is that in adopting R4bp we've circumvented this procedure entirely. All we need is a story to be valid and it to seem to reference another, invalid story, in an offhand reference and the invalid story is lifted to validity through a single droplet of validity, no matter how many interview quotes there are from its author saying it "wasn't intended to count", no matter how many narrative connections it has to other invalid stories, etc etc. Like, yeah, I want more things to be valid than invalid ceteris paribus, but it sure seems we're being inconsistent here. A single drop of validity in a sea of invalidity turns things towards validity, but only for R4bp. Not for normal validity discussions. Scrooge has defended this in discussions with me, saying

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

But I just can't agree that there isn't a major procedural problem here. It may be the case that we can agree on the idea that there's a very low standard for a source intends to bring another into the DWU. (I mean, I think it's rubbish, but that's what the thread decided.) But we then just push the issue back a step. It's then a procedural problem that a single source can force validity when it takes so much effort in other attempts to validate works that have been invalidated.

As to Angry Harry and Vienna. I did figure that Angry Harry / Mad Larry would be obvious. In retrospect, Vienna was certainly a bit inside baseball, as not even Scrooge got that one, I think. I note, for those not aware, that the Vienna thread is Thread:125464 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1. Per User:CzechOut:

Now, I see the phrase, "it's a locked off little side-universe that the Doctor has once appeared in" to be key. This puts Vienna in the same situation as Death's Head. We couldsay that because the Doctor definitely visited the Marvel Universe, landing his TARDIS on top of the Baxter Building, that we can therefore include the Fantastic Four on this wiki.

Now. Very few other people agreed with Czech. But this interpretation was one that stayed on this wiki for, uh, 9-10 years or so. That if you divorce a character from their original context, say that they inhabit a "sub-universe", or a "different universe", the wiki would suggest that their original premier was a crossover with a series that didn't yet exist, and treat that series as not DWU, not invalid, but outright not covered. And, in fact, the jurisprudence that led to it has never been overturned, because Vienna was validated through R4bp. I think this is a mistake in multiple ways. I also think it would be a mistake to further enshrine this view in policy.

Najawin brings up the idea of “taking a DWU concept and divorcing it from its original context (hint, this means they do not refer back to previous part in the Web)” I plainly do not understand what these parentheses are meant to mean - any DWU concept, by definition, makes its debut in a DWU story, and so anything which features that concept is a reference, however minor, to that original story.

I hope this digression begins to clarify what my parenthetical means to some extent, but in truth it's more complicated still. Suppose I create a character that has a few defining core properties and personality traits. I then take those core properties and personality traits and transplant them to another story. They are identifiably that character. But they don't actually do anything that refers to the universe they previously inhabited, even on the level of backstory. (Think of it almost like the 4th Doctor wandering around in the background of the Simpsons. That's clearly the 4th Doctor. But is 4 referring to anything specific in the web? Not really, he's just a DWU legal concept, which is the step that supposedly comes prior to the web.)

Additionally, I fully reject the idea put forward by Najawin in Does T:CS work that in crafting new policies we need to maintain continuity with past versions of said policy. It's okay if the T:CS split wouldn't have made any sense last year, because it is no longer last year, but this year.

I think you misunderstand my point in that section. Scrooge said we follow a three step procedure for how this wiki functions, and that T:CS functions based on the first two steps, and T:VS is fundamentally about the third. Not that we should follow. But that we actually, factually, currently follow this procedure, or seem to do so. So in stating that this analysis is simply impossible to have held one year ago, I'm suggesting not that we can't change things in the future so that it will hold, but that it's probably too simplistic and idealistic to be a description of what we're currently doing as a wiki. You know, up for debate, but it's not that policies from a year ago must 100% constrain us today. We should consider them and not make massive changes, imo, but that's not the same point there, and it's not suggesting that we remain static, either.

Technically speaking, the content which is covered from these apparent works of “non-fiction” is still fictive, just messed up in a larger work which also contains non-fiction.

Hmm? Escape games and plays usually don't contain non-fiction. Those are either R1 or R3 breakers. Well. I guess you could argue they do in a very, very roundabout way. But, like, you're sorta arguing that sense data is non-fiction at that point.

Rather than saying that a story must be intended to be referenced in future, we say that a story must not be intended to not be referenced in future.

You're still running into the lone branch problem. What if you're intentionally walling yourself off from the larger DWU but allowing things to reference your work so long as they don't reconnect with the broader DWU? Is this invalid? You say yes, Scrooge seems to think no, current precedent seems to say yes, but I think a lot of people would say no.

I do agree that ultimately closing this thread as one that generated many topics for discussion and spinning those off into threads in their own right might be the path forward. I know Nate was at least somewhat interested in this thread, but, dear lord, only so many hours in the day. Najawin ☎ 10:14, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

The War Break

Alack, every time I'm close to posting my next Big Reply, a new Big One arrives to render it obsolete! I have upcoming replies to a lot of these points…

I would like to once again clarify that the "three steps" is not intended to describe a chronological procedure of how we conduct inclusion debates, but rather, an idealised system of logical primacy governing our operatiions. I do think that we basically go "is this a Covered Source? if yes, we give it a plot summary and pages about its characters/etc.. Are those valid or invalid? That will affect how we structure the in-universe pages".

For now, a condensed off-the-cuff version of one of those replies: both in his latest reply and earlier, Najawin has gestured at the crossover controversies as cases where "Rule 4" considerations impact a Stage One question: we probably would uncontroversially cover Eps. 3-10 of Roland Rat if it was known that they were actively intended to be set in the DWU — Talk:Guinevere One and all that.

But I don't think this is a defeater to the T:CS/T:VS split! In fact, I think it's the opposite. The slightly-confusing thing is that, so to speka, T:CS and T:VS both have their own "is this intended to be set in the DWU" rules; and they're relatives, with a clear family resemblance, but actually quite different in the details. The loose T:CS "DWU intent rule" concerns itself with crossover-originating concepts and/or minor use of licensed concepts, can be grounds for non-coverage; while the familiar T:VS "DWU intent rule", what we usually think of as T:VS, is what governs whether a covered work gets {{invalid}} or valid coverage. T:CS!R4 has fairly stringent requiremens, while T:VS!R4 (under Web Theory) is an infinite grapevine. Under a T:CS/T:VS split, each policy page could independently explain the very different ways in which the question "is this intended to be in the DWU?" can affect the two very different questions of "should we cover this?" and "how should we cover it?".

That's it for now, but I'll keep hammering at the fuller reply! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:29, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

How funny! That's exactly what happened to me! Also, it's actually starting to feel like we're making some progress now, which is good. What's your argument for keeping rule 4, by the way? You haven't a actually given one, apart from "people will never stand for it". Feel free to answer this in the Big Reply, just interested. Aquanafrahudy 📢 12:42, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Re semi licensed fiction, I've been thinking of doing a thread on it for a while, as it seems silly that we don't actually convert them because parts of them aren't licensed. We should definitely cover the licensed bit, but this isn't a topic for this thread, god knows it's complicated enough as it is, so a thread will be forthcoming. Aquanafrahudy 📢 18:33, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I would like to once again clarify that the "three steps" is not intended to describe a chronological procedure of how we conduct inclusion debates, but rather, an idealised system of logical primacy governing our operatiions.

I don't think this is quite right? At the very least, you didn't portray it as an idealized version of anything when it was first brought up. I certainly do cede that it's a system of logical/ontological order of operations, but this doesn't impact my point. My criticism of it works equally well if this logical procedure simply cannot be applied one year ago - it's quite likely that the three steps analysis isn't quite accurate. Najawin ☎ 18:44, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

But I… think it could? I think it basically describes What The Wiki Does for as far back as {{invalid}} in-universe pages have been a thing. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:26, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

And I dispute this, as we've gone over before. But, again, the point I was making for Ettolrhc was that I wasn't saying "T:CS can't ever work as an idealized system period", but that I was objecting to it being a description of how the wiki functions currently, and my argument about the wiki as it existed a year ago was related to this. Najawin ☎ 19:45, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't think I can, at least currently, formulate this into a longer post. But Najawin's point, during the McGann Break (I didn't intend to set a precedent for naming them after incarnations of Dr. Who, but fair do's. Please lets name the next one the ninth, despite the fact its the tenth :), that "[he's] less than convinced that recursion is an inherently bad thing for a policy to have." I disagree with. Also, it doesn't seem, to me, to be getting "close to a tautology", rather it simply is, surely? And the other three rules part doesn't fix this, because something needs to pass all four rules to be "valid", and neither does the "voting off the island" clause because thats abhorrent and we should not justify our policies around hard-wired fixes in the logic. Additionally, a recursion/tautology isnt really a (functional) definition at all, and so harms the beaurocratic procedure of the wiki, as we get ourselves all tangled up trying to understand it, when we can't because theres nothing there to understand. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 18:51, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

For my part, while I do think the tautological issue is pretty silly, it's not even my main point of issue. I just object to this ludicrous notion that one of the four little rules is inapplicable to anything from before 2013. I need to do a fuller archive dive to prove it, but I do not believe it has ever been the popular understanding of policy, since T:VS has existed in something like its modern form, that the "intent to be set in the DWU" concept was flatly irrelevant to the validity of (basically) anything pre-Capaldi. I don't know what percentage of inclusion debates past and present are for pre-2012 stories, but really now. A core rule that can't apply to anything produced during 5/6ths of the history of the franchise is a wildly bizarre prospect; it would require quite extraordinary evidence for me to believe that everyone was silently aware that this was the policy, all these years, and only I and Ettolrhc never cottoned on.

Even then, mind you, I would argue against keeping such a policy — but this is not the policy. Maybe (maybe) the quotes we've been arguing over were written with this in mind (though I don't really believe that), but I don't for one moment believe that is how any of the subsequent jurisprudence ever interpreted it, let alone the wider community. I have some respect for intentionalism in the sense of going back to what the unspoken implications were at the time when they were more obvious than time has rendered them; but arguing for an interpretation that runs counter to how everyone interpreted it pretty much from inception, that's intentionalism gone completely off the rails.

I cannot overstate how strange and almost comically hubristic it would be to hinge a key piece of policy on this notion of authors having intentionality that specifically and exclusively relates to the fact of the Wiki's validity policy's existence, no more, no less. We'd be setting T:VS up as a turning point in Doctor Who history; there decades of "Before Tardis" works which could never know the light of T:VS, but as soon as T:VS comes into existence, then all stories must be judged by the degree to which they abide by Rule 4? And now we're in, what, Anno Tardisi Eleven? There's no way we think like this. You can't tell me everybody's been thinking like this for ten years without even ever explicitly discussing it! Goodness knows the community has had its faults, but we're better than that. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:19, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

This feels like a good time to use my position as a newer editor to add some insight to what newer editors are thinking, and it is not that one of our biggest rules only applies to stories from 2013 on, obviously I could be an outlier, but especially when I had just gotten started and was reading through the policy pages, not the any of the discussion or talk page rulings because I didn't know those existed yet, I had no reason to think that the time that Rule 4 was created had anything to do with what stories do and don't follow it. And given that this very discussion is the very first time I've seen such an idea even alluded to, I cannot believe that it's the popular interpretation of Rule 4. Time God Eon ☎ 20:00, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm fairly sure that I'm a newer editor than you, but no matter. I think that we're all getting in rather a tizzy over something entirely redundant. It seems to me that rule 4 is defined by the DWU, which is technically defined by our page on the Doctor Who universe. And therefore technically we can't apply rule 4 to stories written before 2013, because the DWU as defined by this wiki didn't exist back then. It's an incredibly strange and absurd policy that absolutely nobody follows, or even realised that it was one until Najawin pointed it out. Well, it wasn't policy if you're a complete intentionalist, but if you're at least vaguely literal, then it's policy. Or at least it was policy until we rewrote T:BOUND to say current practise is also policy. And as current practise isn't to not apply r4 to stories before 2013, then the policy is no more, and we can go back to arguing about important things like Galileo (Galileo was a joke).

Also, as a matter of vital importance, the next page break ought to be Rowan Atkinson's, just for fun. Aquanafrahudy 📢 20:39, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Politely, I don't see how these concerns are in any way compelling. The wiki's policies are notorious for being counterintuitive. And definitions may, of course, be tautological and/or deflationary. See, again, the deflationary notion of truth. Ettolrahc's argument that voting things off the island is bad policy is well taken, but that's hardly a reason to think this definition is incoherent and not functional.

I note as well that prior to the advent of T:VS, T:CANON did actually refer to Doctor Who universe. See here. It just does so in a horribly slipshod way, contrasting it with "other universe" articles, like CoFD or Cushingverse articles, and doesn't really act as a coherent definition - since the contrast actively undermines the definition it gives. Indeed, it effectively pawns off the real definition to the list of valid sources below. Like. The issue has always been that of valid sources, imo. Maybe you read the old canon policy page differently, and you think it just changed to be about valid sources = DWU midway through 2012. But as far as this scans to me, DWU on this wiki has always just been shorthand for "the world constructed by sources we like". At least as far back as 2010. (And I think you can argue 2007, as Tangerine didn't edit the "two sub-types" to "three".) Najawin ☎ 21:27, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi, just going to insert myself into the conversation in as-least-awkward a fashion as possible...

Being a newbie here, I'm mostly unfamiliar with this wiki's policies, and have been watching this thread unfold with a kind of morbid curiosity (dear god, this stuff is convoluted). I might be woefully ignorant of many aspects of this discussion, but there's a couple of points I'd like to raise:

1) Maybe it's just me, but imposing a hyper-rigid dichotomy between validity and non-validity seems slightly arbitrary. Sure, in the vast majority of cases, calling a story 'valid' or 'invalid' works fine, but in regards to Cousin Ettolrhc's hypothetical:

But if The Minister of Chance (series) was published with no comment on its intent to be in the “DWU”, or to be in continuity with any given valid story, but it was explicitly in continuity with (“set in the same universe as”) Death Comes to Time ^[+]Loading...["Death Comes to Time (webcast)"], and Death Comes to Time was considered invalid (say, if we presume the closing-post reasoning was perfect and there was no r4bp case to be made, or whatever), then surely we would - and I think should - consider The Minister of Chance invalid? Saying that, I think that any series of connected invalid works should be seriously inspected, because as the series grows, the chance of some intent for future reference by otherwise-DWU stories (that is, “intent to be set in the DWU”) increases, and with R4BP that would validate the entire series.User:Cousin Ettolrhc

...at that stage, wouldn't it just make more sense to give this specific thread of connected works a title of its own (i.e. the MoCU, or the DCtTU), rather than insisting that these stories are all invalid?

If a story is deemed to be 'invalid', the implicit implication wrapped up in that term, 'invalid', is that this story is also, in some way, anomalous; I think this implication should be made concrete: make it that only anomalous/stand-alone stories can be classified as invalid. If an invalid story receives a non-DWU connecting sequel, then this thread of stories should be classified as its own thing: a parallel lane to the DWU, not invalid. So you would have stories that are either: a) valid to the DWU, b) valid to the MoCU, or c) invalid to both. But there would be a kind of hierarchy at play, with the DWU being on top; if that MoCU thread later connects to the DWU, then the whole MoCU gets absorbed into the DWU and ceases to be a distinct thing.

There's probably a bunch of holes you can poke in this idea; I just wanted to throw it out there, though I don't see how this would pose any major issues, this should be a rare occurrence. But this would probably only make sense in the event that T:CS was implemented - and speaking of which:

2) Totally in favour of Scrooge's proposal, if a vote ever came to pass. And what a fantastic bit of writing that initial response was - the entire thing is calibrated to be as clear and concise as humanly possible, bravo! Can't claim to understand every nuance of this thread, but adapting a policy or set of policies in light of new circumstances is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Being beholden to what's past is comforting, sure, but it's also deeply limiting. If a wiki, an individual, an organisation, etc. is to grow and improve, calculated risks sometimes need to be taken. And this policy proposal seems like a reasonable calculated risk, and this community should take it! Why not trial these reworked policies, for say, six months, and then stage further debates, if needed? Otherwise, there's a good chance this will get bogged down in endless hypothesising, people talking about things instead of actually cracking on and doing things. So yeah, that's my two cents on this matter.

And also:

3) If I can, I'd like to greedily siphon off a little bit of attention from this thread's contributors (or readers). I'm an admin on the Stranger Things Wiki; I recently written-up that wiki's "Canon Policy", more or less by myself. Obviously, canon is a problematic, flawed and arguably even outdated concept (which I acknowledge in the writing itself). However, for various reasons, I think canon is a much more applicable and relevant concept to Stranger Things than it is to DW. I'm happy with how the policy currently reads, and I think it's logically consistent; that said, I would really appreciate if any of you guys were to scan through and give your thoughts on the policy, any potential issues that may arise in the future, etc. I understand that this is tangential, and a break in the flow of this conversation, so please, just leave feedback on my message wall, either over here, or on STW. TheGreatGabester ☎ 09:06, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

@Najawin:

"But as far as this scans to me, DWU on this wiki has always just been shorthand for "the world constructed by sources we like"."

Well, yes! That is what "the DWU" has always broadly meant on the Wiki! But the thing is: defining "intent to be DWU" as "intent to take place in 'the universe constructed by the sum of already-valid sources'" is miles away from defining it as the tautological "intent to pass Rule 4 qua Rule 4". That's my entire point. Throughout the Wiki's history, the Rule-4-style "DWU" concept has been understood to refer to "the idea of a fictional universe defined by the sum total of the contents of all valid sources thus far recorded on the Wiki", not to some kind of self-referential arbitrary tag! (Furthermore setting itself in "the universe constructed by" specific prior works of fiction is just a fancy way of saying you're setting itself "in continuity with" those prior works of fiction.) And it follows that it can be applied to sources that predate the Wiki, because we can check whether a story released in 1985 seemed to be intended to take place in "the fictional universe defined by all the 1963-to-1984 Who stories which the Wiki now considers valid".

The problem with this folk understanding of "DWU" is that if taken too literally, it's nearly impossible to pass. Rose wasn't intended to take place in the fictional universe you get if you add up all pre-2005 valid sources in a blender; he may have had DWM comics and the like on the mind as well as the Classic Series but RTD probably wasn't accounting for Daleks Invade Zaos or Grass. He was intending to set himself in a fictional universe constructed by a subset of valid sources. But elsewhere in our validity policies we've always acknowledged this asterisk: contradiction is no objection to validity, Genesis of the Daleks is not made invalid by contradicting ("not setting itself in a universe which inclues") Genesis of Evil, etc.

And hence, Web Theory. The whole point of Web Theory is to be much closer to the historical understanding of Rule 4 than the tautological thing. Let's set aside the "intent to be referenced" addendum for now: the basic gist of Web Theory is simply to synthetise the broadly-understood "intent to be set in the universe constructed by all the other valid sources" idea with the equally-venerable principle of "contradicting any one valid source isn't an objection to validity", and thus yielding "intent to be set in the universe of at least one preexisting valid source". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 09:36, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

@User:TheGreatGabester: Thank you for the kind words and support re "#2"!

Re "#1": this kind of framework was something I actually discussed in the old Cushing thread as a way to approach Cushingverse material if we couldn’t agree on validity. In principle it makes sense. The truth though is that, with the way things are, there does not seem to be such a thing as a long-running continuity of legally-DWU-related works that have stayed totally segregated from any suggestion of a diegetic relationship to the conventional DWU (albeit as an in-universe “parallel universe” or the like). It just hasn’t happened as far as we know.

Re #2: that looks robust, and certainly clearly and concisely conveyed! I like the array of templates. Counting off-hand quotes by production staff as trumping fully-realised EU stories is pretty foreign to how we think around here, but I see the logic given the differences between the franchises. On the whole if you’re going to bother with a contradiction-based “tiered canon” system at all, I think this is about as objective and effectively-conveyed a way as you could do it; including “invalid” information in boxes within the main page itself probably wouldn’t work here but it works very nicely for you and it’s a very cunning (dare I say out-of-the-box?) idea. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 10:03, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

If a story is deemed to be 'invalid', the implicit implication wrapped up in that term, 'invalid', is that this story is also, in some way, anomalous; I think this implication should be made concrete: make it that only anomalous/stand-alone stories can be classified as invalid. If an invalid story receives a non-DWU connecting sequel, then this thread of stories should be classified as its own thing: a parallel lane to the DWU, not invalid.

I mean, this is just saying that a term we use is slightly pejorative. Call invalid works what you want to call them. The fact remains that what you're proposing is, to a large extent, already implemented. Invalid stories can have IU pages concerning them, they just can't "talk" to the normal pages related to IU things.

Why not trial these reworked policies, for say, six months, and then stage further debates, if needed?

This is a horrible idea. What Scrooge is suggesting is a fundamental overhaul of how we include things on this wiki - one that has large holes in it. Even if we were to ignore these holes, implementing a large scale change for six months as a test run would simply cause headaches and confusion, and would cause even more work if we then decided to switch back.

Well, yes! That is what "the DWU" has always broadly meant on the Wiki! But the thing is: defining "intent to be DWU" as "intent to take place in 'the universe constructed by the sum of already-valid sources'" is miles away from defining it as the tautological "intent to pass Rule 4 qua Rule 4".

But I've never suggested it's the latter. It's always been the sum total of T:VS, including the ability to vote things in or out. See, for instance, my first object level response:

I think even if our validity rules didn't correspond to The Web at all, they would still reflect The DWU as this wiki understood it, since we've defined the term to refer to what we construct using T:VS.

The issue here, Scrooge, and where I think we differ, is that there isn't some deeper meaning to this. It's not talking about continuity at all. (I honestly don't understand how you're reading that from my comment, nuwho is at times wildly discontinuous from the classic series.) It's just wondering whether authors intend for their work to be like these things /gestures at list of valid sources/ or those things /gestures at list of invalid sources at the time, such as CoFD and Cushingverse/. And if an author makes statements that are ambiguous, the community gets to decide what bucket they're in. Again, this isn't a policy I'm over the moon about. But it's the reality of what we had.

Let's set aside the "intent to be referenced" addendum for now: the basic gist of Web Theory is simply to synthetise the broadly-understood "intent to be set in the universe constructed by all the other valid sources" idea with the equally-venerable principle of "contradicting any one valid source isn't an objection to validity", and thus yielding "intent to be set in the universe of at least one preexisting valid source".

This fails in two ways, though it has a lot of rhetorical force. The first is that things can be intended to fit within the DWU without referring to previous sources. Intent to be in a universe constructed by previous sources does not necessitate that you refer to those previous sources. R2 does necessitate one licensed DWU concept, but that usage of the concept doesn't immediately constitute a continuity reference, at least as I understand the conclusion of the bizarrely closed (imo) Forum:References into Worldbuilding. Indeed, I have a source in mind that uses a DWU concept in a very vague, off-hand mention way, but doesn't refer to previous DWU sources at all aside from that. And of course, the second, you can't set aside "to be referenced", so we really shouldn't suggest that web theory makes sense without it. It's critical to your point that you have both of these elements. Having one is disastrous, as I'm sure you've thought about. Najawin ☎ 17:55, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Impromptu unstructured big(ish) reply from Scrooge

(This wasn't the Big Reply I'd been tinkering at, but your latest post renders it moot, and this Break was starting to get long enough that the editor was starting to lag, so… here goes.)

“But I've *never* suggested it's the latter.”

*cries* Just when I think we've finally understood each other… I really thought you had. What's with all the talk of tautology and "I mostly endorse the 'arbitrary tag' characterisation" and "can't be applied pre-2012", then??

Setting that to one side… I think you and I may be using the word "continuity" differently. I mean, I don't understand what you don't understand unless there's a basic semantic talking-past-each-other going on. What on Earth do you think "setting yourself in a fictional universe constructed by a set of stories" means other than "being in continuity with those stories"? No, scratch that, reverse it, what do you think being in continuity with a set of stories is, if not setting yourself in the fictional universe they collectively construct?

Your reduction of this to "It's just wondering whether authors intend for their work to be like these things /gestures at list of valid sources/ or those things /gestures at list of invalid sources at the time, such as CoFD and Cushingverse/" is just… incomprehensible to me. What do you mean, "like" one bucket or the other? What does that even mean? "Like" in what respect? Either it's some weird vibes thing that's impossible to have consistent standards for, or there is a specific way in which they should be "like" valid sources and "unlike" invalid ones, in which case this framing is just passing the buck and we're still looking for the real criterion. Either way it's not clear how any of this could be described, in and of itself, as a policy about "intent to be set in the fictional universe constructed by the valid sources".

I say that insofar as this reduction is accurate, it's the second option, and "like" was implicitly (but non-rigorously) understood to refer to a continuity-related mindset when writing a story: is it meant to be "canon" (in the wooly, vulgar sense of the word), is it meant to "count" — a question which boils down to "is it meant to be in-continuity-with/in-the-universe-constructed-by at least most prior DWU stories" and "is it meant to add new details to this constructed world that later stories would be expected to abide by". And this is the unsophisticated, somewhat-biased set of implicit intuitions which Web Theory formalises and rationalises, at last, into explicit enforceable standards. "Is it meant to be in-canon" is translated into "is it in continuity with at least one prior node of the Web", "is it meant to 'count'" is translated into "does it intend to be referenced, or at least not intend to not be referenced".

“intent to be in a universe constructed by previous sources does not necessitate that you refer to those previous sources.”

That's not at all a problem. Check the bolded bit you quoted immediately before this sentence: I speak of the essence of Rule 4 under Web Theory being "intent to be set in the universe of at least one preexisting valid source". I never mentioned references. Really, now, we've gone over this: my contention is that continuity references are evidence of intent. A story can perfectly well be intended to be in the universe of one or more preexisting valid sources, in a way which we learn or infer from outside clues (like authorial statements or being printed in an anthology of DWU stories), without containing any particular continuity references!

I don't know if your unstated example is in fact Grass, but it works as well as any — we know it's intended to be set in the same universe as Miles's other FP stories, because he printed it in an FP-companion book with a foreword which basically said as much. It needn't contain any continuity references to Dead Romance for it to pass the standard of being intended to be set in the same universe as/in continuity with (among others) Dead Romance. Thus it passes the quoted standard!

“And of course, the second, you can't set aside "to be referenced", so we really shouldn't suggest that web theory makes sense without it. It's critical to your point that you have both of these elements. Having one is disastrous, as I'm sure you've thought about.”

Well, I mean, that's essentially "Simplified Rule 4", all the way back in my First Riposte. (You can have Simplified R4 without Web Theory, of course; its original intent was to mitigate the damage of old-school woolly-undefined-R4 without having to implement R4BP/Timeless Web Theory. But you can also have Web Theory+Simplified Rule 4 if you want.)

And I don't think it's disastrous. Annoying, probably — it would validate a certain category of stuff which I don't think it's in the Wiki's interest to validate, all told — but an invalid Shalka is a much, much worse thing than a handful of valid Doctor Whoah! strips, to my lights. And the validation of a few hundred comedy strips and the like, at most, is the worst outcome I can imagine of implement Simplified Rule 4. It's something we'd already suck it up and do under current policy if the author went out and said "I know they're silly but they are meant to take place in the DWU, you know" (cf. Titan backups, plus the validation-as-parallel-universes of the Quinn&Howett and Stringer stuff), so I find it hard to take seriously the idea that it'd be unprecedentedly disastrous to implement some policy which makes us do the same thing.

Or is there some other side-effect you have in mind which didn't occur to me?Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:44, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Ninth Break (The Curse of Fatal Thread)

@User:Najawin: Also, unrelated to the substance of the Big Reply above, some replies to your replies to Gabester:

“this is just saying that a term we use is slightly pejorative, (…) what you're proposing is, to a large extent, already implemented.”

I may be wrong, but I think the substance of TGG's proposal is that instead of an undifferentiated "invalid" (or whatever) tag, we should created a specific "Valid MoC-verse" tag for 'MoCU'-related stories, a specific "Valid Cushingverse" tag for Cushingverse stories, etc. — essentially creating multiple distinct, sealed-off in-universe areas of the Wiki, rather than just the duality of DWU and Invalid. This means, for example, that it would be just as forbidden to cite a Cushingverse source on a MoCU page as it would be on a DWU page.

“What Scrooge is suggesting is a fundamental overhaul of how we include things on this wiki - one that has large holes in it”

I'm starting to lose track, so setting aside the debate over whether Web Theory flows naturally out of a streamlining of the Old Rule 4 or not, I would appreciate if you could make a concise summary of these alleged "holes". What, in fact, would go wrong if we implemented my proposals for six months (or indeed indefinitely)? What sorts of things would be validated that shouldn't be, or vice-versa, in your opinion? How? Why? Could you give me some examples, hypothetical or otherwise? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:59, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

the basic gist of Web Theory is simply to synthetise the broadly-understood "intent to be set in the universe constructed by all the other valid sources" idea with the equally-venerable principle of "contradicting any one valid source isn't an objection to validity", and thus yielding "intent to be set in the universe of at least one preexisting valid source".

How is reducing what is valid or not to continuity respecting "contradicting any one valid source isn't an objection to validity"? There can be a source that is intended to be set in the same universe as something but isn't in continuity with it (theoretically, but it's a logical loophole nonetheless). One of my biggest objections to Web Theory is that it completely fails to respect that. Aquanafrahudy 📢 20:06, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

“There can be a source that is intended to be set in the same universe as something but isn't in continuity with it”

…Can there? I worry that this is the semantic issue again. I will say that, as I use the terms, I think you can absolutely be" in continuity with" something while contradicting it in one way or another. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:20, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Oh, okay. But how would we know what sources someone intends to be in continuity with? And I still think getting rid of rule 4 is the most sensible option. Aquanafrahudy 📢 20:24, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Just when I think we've finally understood each other… I really thought you had.

Okay, so this issue is a little nuanced. Let's go back to a comment of yours that I think is very helpful.

a vast majority of valid sources still predate the creation of the Wiki, let alone of the modern T:VS. You can't mean "intended to be set in the universe defined by T:VS" by "intended to be set in the DWU" or it is literally impossible for any stories from the 20th century to pass Rule 4.

I do, in fact, mean that "intended to be set in wiki!DWU" = "intended to be set in the universe defined by T:VS". This is just irrelevant for any analysis we do, because we don't ask about whether something is intended to be set in this universe, we ask whether it's intended to not be set in this universe. And this is an easier thing to do - instead of saying that your work has to play nice with everything, you're simply saying that it's decidedly not playing nice with something that we already accept. And not in the sense of mere continuity - you're suggesting that these things are qualitatively different. So it's the case that if you wish to say that your work is part of wiki!DWU you can only do so post 2012, since you have to be aware of what wiki!DWU even is, and you have to accept each work to do so, but it's not the case that you have to be aware of wiki!DWU to reject being part of it - all you have to do is say about something that is wiki!DWU "I am not like that thing. It's not that I disagree on the facts of what happened, but I am a different sort of thing than that".

No, scratch that, reverse it, what do you think being in continuity with a set of stories is, if not setting yourself in the fictional universe they collectively construct?

Generally referring to those stories is required. Is First Draft a DWU story? I can't think of a single DWU concept in it that's not also public domain. It's clearly intended to be DWU though, right? Its connections to FP are more thematic. (There's a framing device in the anthology, but that doesn't mean that the story itself instantly qualifies. At the very least it's immediately in the crosshairs.) You also have Erasing Sherlock, which mentions the Celestis in an offhand way once. These aren't continuity references in any meaningful sense, but they're clearly intended to be in the same literary universe.

What does that even mean? "Like" in what respect? Either it's some weird vibes thing that's impossible to have consistent standards for

I mean. I've never accused the wiki rules of being good. I'm just saying what they are.

I say that insofar as this reduction is accurate, it's the second option, and "like" was implicitly (but non-rigorously) understood to refer to a continuity-related mindset when writing a story: is it meant to be "canon" (in the wooly, vulgar sense of the word), is it meant to "count" — a question which boils down to "is it meant to be in-continuity-with/in-the-universe-constructed-by at least most prior DWU stories" and "is it meant to add new details to this constructed world that later stories would be expected to abide by".

This is difficult to maintain, given how explicitly people denied it, time and time again.

I speak of the essence of Rule 4 under Web Theory being "intent to be set in the universe of at least one preexisting valid source". I never mentioned references. Really, now, we've gone over this: my contention is that continuity references are evidence of intent.

You've confused two distinct issues. R4bp does use continuity references as evidence of intent under R4, confusing two types of intent. But Web Theory does not.

As I have outlined: I think that by "intended to be set in the DWU", we mean "intended to be part of the Web": we mean "intended both to have narrative connections to preexisting node-points in the Web, and to be suitable for later node-points to connect back to". Intent to be in the DWU is intent to reference and be referenced, to build upon and to be built upon, by other works in the big web of fiction stretching backwards to 23 November 1963.

Web Theory uses these as synonymous. And by doing this you end up cutting off some sources that are currently valid because they fail to have narrative connections but are still meaningfully part of the DWU. (I wasn't thinking of Grass, but Grass is another great example. I'd certainly argue that under Web Theory and the standard quoted right here it needs to be ruled invalid.)

Well, I mean, that's essentially "Simplified Rule 4", all the way back in my First Riposte.

I think it's actually strictly stronger, (in terms of what it validates) but yes. If we have to accept "or" rather than "and", we're validating quite a lot that I think most people here don't want to validate.

This means, for example, that it would be just as forbidden to cite a Cushingverse source on a MoCU page as it would be on a DWU page.

I mean, it's not strictly forbidden, but NCMaterial and T:BOUND basically do this already. Which Nate sort of pointed out in conversation with me.

What, in fact, would go wrong if we implemented my proposals for six months (or indeed indefinitely)?

Just off the top of my head. Invalidity by proxy still isn't resolved, nor are crossovers, nor are the various RXbps. (Each of those depend very heavily on specific wording related to how we go about doing this, so we can't just wave them away as red herrings, they can easily come back with a vengeance.) Using continuity as a guide to determine intent is largely still unresolved, Forum:References into Worldbuilding didn't touch on this, and, indeed, even if it did this thread would be empowered to change it, imo, as it was being written prior to the advent of that thread. If Web Theory is passed I will immediately call for the invalidity of quite a few sources that are obviously intended to be DWU but fail the criteria you've suggested above. Whether or not we can even use R4 at all anymore because it's been so fundamentally undermined is still up for debate. I'm sure I'm missing other stuff. This is just the stuff I've got off the top of my head.

Anyhow, I hope this clears things up more! I apologize if I was ever unclear re:my interpretation of DWU. Najawin ☎ 20:53, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

“all you have to do is say about something that is wiki!DWU "I am not like that thing. It's not that I disagree on the facts of what happened, but I am a different sort of thing than that".”

This still sounds insanely vague, bordering on meaningless, to me. "Not like that thing" how, if not in terms of "continuity"? What are the criteria, and if they're nothing to do with continuity, why this talk of constructed universes?

Relatedly to which:

“I've never accused the wiki rules of being good. I'm just saying what they are.”

Okay, but if you agree this is bad (even if you don't seem to view it as quite as inscrutably airy as I do), why are you arguing for keeping such a thing? I cannot imagine a universe in which my Web Theory-based way of doing things is more arbitrary and haphazard in its application than what you seem to be describing. Even if Web Theory won't do it for you as a replacement, I mean… between my "I don't think Old T:VS was quite so bad because it wasn't what you describe, but what you describe would be bad" and your "this is what T:VS was, and it is bad", can't we essentially agree on "old T:VS as you interpret it is radioactive nonsense and should be tossed into a pit first things, then we can get on with devising something actually intelligible to replace it"? Again, if you have another direction for a third way, please pitch it!

“Web Theory uses these as synonymous (…)”

Ahhh. Alright, so the fault here is entirely mine — it's my careless use of "narrative connections" in the passage that's misleading. The wording there was misleading. I never meant to hinge Web!validity on the presence of tangible references — just on "intent to be in the universe of one or more already-valid source", most commonly expressed via tangible references.

I certainly don't find the claim that Erasing Sherlock or First Draft would be invalid under Web Theory at all compelling. In the first place I think both have "tangible" narrative connections to The Book of the War (and/or other prior War works) by talking about the Enemy and the Celestis respectively. In the second place, see point above, they're both evidently intended to be in the same universe ("in continuity with", "narratively connected to") prior works in the FP line. Finally, both certainly fulfill the "intent to be referenced" (or "to be thought of by later writers as part of the universe they're writing into even if they don't explicitly reference it", if you must) clause, and as I discussed, I suspect on balance that clause alone can be sufficient even for something that doesn't set itself in the universe of any prior DWU works. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:15, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

As for the laundry list of alleged issues:

“Invalidity by proxy still isn't resolved, nor are crossovers, nor are the various RXbps”

This is not the whole of my answer in any of these cases, but these are not practical issues (except, maybe, for what you mean by "crossovers"). They are possible policy changes that this would create a precedent for, but Web Theory/T:CS/T:VS package does not in itself make these things live policy, it just creates an undesirable opening for someone to argue that there is no logical reason not to promulgate such policies. I still think we could, in a worst-case scenario, weather issue sof that kind quite easily, so long as we include a disclaimer to the tune of "we're pretty sure about the shape of the results we want; the rationale outlined here is our best attempt, but it breaks at the extremes e.g. by suggesting invalidity-by-proxy could be a thing, so please don't use the rationale itself as precedent in future threads". It would be ugly, and I don't think we need it because I think your supposed logical derivations are fallacious. But we could do it for six months and it wouldn't break the Wiki!

“Using continuity as a guide to determine intent is largely still unresolved”

What do you mean by "unresolved"? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:24, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Does Erasing Sherlock really intend to be referenced by future DWU sources? Really? I can imagine a non-FP sequel to ES, but I can't really imagine that it's supposed to be a tangible part of the web that other people can reference. And here we run into once more the ambiguity I criticised earlier. There is no possible way of knowing save for asking her. And even if we did ask her the question we'd have to ask would be so insanely complicated that she probably wouldn't know what to answer. Aquanafrahudy 📢 21:30, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

I mean, I would say that its printing as part of the mainline FP book series would have been done with the understanding that their involvement with Moriarty could then be drawn on as an event in the Celestis's history should another novelist use them again, yes. This seems like the default assumption when a book in an ongoing series makes use of one of the elements of the shared setting?? Why would you assume otherwise??? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:35, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

"Not like that thing" how, if not in terms of "continuity"? What are the criteria, and if they're nothing to do with continuity, why this talk of constructed universes?

How? However the users of the wiki decide. (It could, theoretically, be continuity, and has been in the past, but even before the advent of T:VS people moved away from this model.) Why the talk of constructed universes? Because the DWU is a constructed universe, and we're referring to things being different from the DWU.

Okay, but if you agree this is bad (even if you don't seem to view it as quite as inscrutably airy as I do), why are you arguing for keeping such a thing?

I'm not! I'm talking about what the policy currently is, and whether or not Web Theory / T:CS in any way follows from it.

Again, if you have another direction for a third way, please pitch it!

See comments above about mental webs. I think Web Theory is gesturing at some stuff that's useful to where we ultimately want to be, but it ends up going way too far in one direction.

The wording there was misleading. I never meant to hinge Web!validity on the presence of tangible references — just on "intent to be in the universe of one or more already-valid source", most commonly expressed via tangible references.

Didn't you say literally the opposite in my false-start hypothetical?

In the first place I think both have "tangible" narrative connections to The Book of the War (and/or other prior War works) by talking about the Enemy and the Celestis respectively.

Erasing Sherlock simply makes a single reference to "The Host Celestial" liking visceral rituals that bring them closer in contact with reality. This one is plausible, but certainly arguable. First Draft doesn't even do this, it just hints at the idea that humans and fictional characters are somehow in conflict with each other. It literally doesn't even use the term "enemy" (of any case) in the story. This one is really gonna be hard to argue for under this standard. Like. It features metafiction and the concept of enmity.

Finally, both certainly fulfill the "intent to be referenced" (or "to be thought of by later writers as part of the universe they're writing into even if they don't explicitly reference it", if you must) clause, and as I discussed, I suspect on balance that clause alone can be sufficient even for something that doesn't set itself in the universe of any prior DWU works.

Okay, now you've broadened R4bp even further, which I think everyone will object to. Even if we grant that continuity references are strong evidence of authorial intent - authorial intent which I still maintain shouldn't matter in the slightest - how on earth can we divine from the heavens that later authors intend to write in a universe that shares this story? And I don't think merely intending for others to reference your work does it. There are things you let in under this standard that you've tried to ward off - as per the false start example.

It would be ugly, and I don't think we need it because I think your supposed logical derivations are fallacious. But we could do it for six months and it wouldn't break the Wiki!

No, I quite agree that those things would wait for 6 months. Well, crossovers wouldn't. I don't agree that things like Grass wouldn't immediately become invalid though, I think you'd have a very hard time arguing for them.

What do you mean by "unresolved"?

I mean we started discussing it above and got distracted by other things and haven't gotten back to it? So it's unresolved? Najawin ☎ 21:57, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

“See comments above about mental webs”

That was terribly vague, though. I'm talking about policy proposals, something of similar heft to the TWT/T:CS/T:VS package. Something that could be enacted at the end of this thread. (Well — not so much "implemented" as "vetted for further prepwork/tinkering in Part II and then enacted", anyway.)

“Didn't you say literally the opposite in my false-start hypothetical?”

I don't think so. When?

Regarding First Draft, I mean, we discuss it at The Enemy, don't we? Either we recognise it as an appearance by one account of what the Enemy are, or we don't! But if we do in one place, then we consider it to be an appearance by the Enemy as discussed in prior War-related works and there's nothing to worry about.

But like. If I were to agree that it had no narrative connections to any other DWU works, nor was intended to be something that future more conventional FP stories would be expected to acknowledge as something which "happened", then, I mean… I don't think (outside of R4BP through the Briefings) I would want such a thing to be valid? You speak of thematic connections and literary universes, but An Adventure in Space and Time certainly has thematic commonalities with the end of Matt Smith's TV tenure, there's a reason it's got a place in the consensus viewing order of NuWho that e.g. YouTube reactors tend to adhere to. It's easy to argue that it's part of the "literary universe" of Moffat's Doctor Who run. Doesn't mean, to my mind (nor to that of the old thread about it), that it passes Rule 4.

“Okay, now you've broadened R4bp…”

No, no, no! The bit you're replying to is about passing regular Rule 4. It's about the mindset of the author of the original story itself, and how they intend their story to affect the mindset of writers of future stories. Picture, say, Chris Chibnall writing The Timeless Children. He does not necessarily expect future writers to reference his lore explicitly; but he does expect that future Doctor Who stories will be written with the implicit understanding that those are events the Doctor went through. Yes? Nothing to do with R4BP.

Though it wasn't my point, I suppose the reasoning does potentially imply that a story could R4BP another simply via an external statement that it's intended to be in a universe where [Invalid Story X] happened, even if there are no tangible references. But by definition this scenario would be triggered in a case where the author tells us as much explicitly (say — complete hypothetical here — somebody writing a new story with Beep The Meep and saying in an interview/commentary "by the way, this is very much written with the intent that Who on Earth is... Beep the Meep is something that very much happened to Beep as I write him here, even if it doesn't come up"). No "divining from the heavens" necessary. As always: we care about authorial intent which can be inferred either from the presence of continuity references in the text, or from explicit BTS statements.

“Well, crossovers wouldn't”

Elaborate?

“I mean we started discussing it above and got distracted by other things and haven't gotten back to it?”

But is it unresolved in any more soluble way than "one of us has to be wrong but neither of us seems capable of even grokking how the other guy thinks about this, so it's up to the closing admin to officially say which of us is Officially Right and whose way of thinking should be listened to about this question if further doubts arise"? I'm not sure. That's not rhetorical: genuinely not sure if there is stuff left for us to discuss there as opposed to leaving it up to the closing admin to say who's wrong and who's right. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:25, 20 September 2023(UTC)

Forgive me for getting a bit lost, but what exactly does Najawin mean by "invalidity by proxy"? How could something make something else invalid? The best I could come up with would be a hypothetical scenario where a source becomes invalid and then causes other sources to fall into invalidity with because that was the only point of contact they had to the DWU, but that wouldn't have anything to do with R4bp as it currently stands, so I don't know what Najawin means when they say that. Time God Eon ☎ 23:13, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

That was terribly vague, though.

Guilty as charged. I came here intending to argue against R4bp / that keeping R4bp necessitates us making certain modifications to the rules and have wound up having to also argue against a change I think would be disastrous for the wiki. I am in no way prepared to fundamentally rewrite validity as it stands, I think this is a much larger task than even this thread has approached. I've gestured towards ideas that I think are helpful in this regard, but to do this in a fully rigorous manner I'd need quite some time. The earliest versions of the OP here were swirling around in my head back in, say, February or March. (Obviously the specifics I talked to you about was in late April, but even on that time scale there's three months! And what we're discussing here is something far more in depth, imo.) And I still felt rushed by the time I wrote it up in late July / early August. (And, of course, the full scope of what I wrote changed quite dramatically in that time!) I have fragments, fractions of an idea on how to proceed, and I think I see the rough outlines of a path forward, but it will take me quite some time and effort to do this. And it might collapse or change massively. I think what you've proposed is a non starter and changing to it will cause the wiki many headaches that we're best off avoiding. That doesn't, however, mean that I think that what we have currently is perfect.

I don't think so. When?

I think we might be speaking slightly past each other?

If Harry creates a standalone starting point that holds DWU licenses but doesn't connect to anything on the Web, and then spins that forward, with no initial intent for any of the spun-off sequels to connect back to other parts of the Web, …that whole branch is just sort of floating there. It's not in the Web. It's its own thing. I struggle to think of an actual example of such a thing anywhere in the annals of the Wiki. But if it existed, I frankly don't understand why Najawin would be baffled at the thought of my excluding it from the Web and thus from current theories of validity. Seems precisely the sort of thing we would generally deem invalid!

To me, if the false start is fine with things referring to it, even if it's not specifically intending for planned sequels it has to then refer back to the web, it's still DWU, and you seem to be denying this here. To me, this is an archetypal example, almost, of "lack of intent to fail to be in DWU", and prior rulings to the contrary are mistaken.

Regarding First Draft, I mean, we discuss it at The Enemy, don't we?

Do not quote the deep magic to me, etc etc. I was hesitant to actually place it on that page, given the story in question, and it was only given: A) The framing device of TBotE B) The larger context of metafiction and it's relation to The Enemy and C) The very nature of Faction Paradox and how you're required to interpret texts in it, that I felt comfortable doing so. I would not have done so on any other page. (Since, let's be honest, that page is already basically one of those conspiracy theory cork boards.) And I do not believe it's appropriate to interpret this as being unambiguously referring to The Enemy. The ambiguity is, imo, part of the point.

It's easy to argue that it's part of the "literary universe" of Moffat's Doctor Who run.

I think it would be far easier to argue that Sherlock is. The argument for Adventure seems relatively weak to me, since if you look at Gatiss interviews he emphasizes heavily that it's about real people and real events.

No, no, no! The bit you're replying to is about passing regular Rule 4. It's about the mindset of the author of the original story itself, and how they intend their story to affect the mindset of writers of future stories.

Ahhhh, "intent to be thought of etc etc". Gotcha. That clears it up. "To be thought of" on its own simply does refer to the act of being thought in that way, hence my confusion! Apologies.

Elaborate?

Crossovers present a potential problem to the coherence of Web Theory as a whole, for the reasons we're discussing above that you've not addressed? Since you need to demarcate where one literary universe ends and the other begins?

But is it unresolved in any more soluble way than "one of us has to be wrong but neither of us seems capable of even grokking how the other guy thinks about this, so it's up to the closing admin to officially say which of us is Officially Right and whose way of thinking should be listened to about this question if further doubts arise"? I'm not sure.

I mean, maybe? We left off on epistemological limitations, iirc, which I believe Ettolrhc found at least somewhat compelling. Najawin ☎ 23:25, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Invalidity by proxy: Back in The Days of Yore^TM, sequels to invalid stories were declared invalid because they referenced invalid stories, so were signaling that they too were invalid. This was overturned so long as these stories didn't themselves violate R4, as the wiki doesn't base validity off of narrative continuity, but instead on other factors. So if a story failed R2 or R1, but had a sequel, that sequel would now be valid. Or if a story failed R4 but had a prequel, so long as the author didn't indicate that being a prequel to an invalid story itself made their story invalid, it was now valid. The R4bp thread said "oh, no, we're going to change this so stories that fail R4 but are referred to in later stories using continuity references are now valid, and we justify this by saying that actually factually continuity is evidence of authorial intent." But now we're in a bootstrap paradox, because if continuity is evidence of authorial intent, we should never have validated the sequels/prequels to R4 breakers in the first place, and for any story with a continuity reference to an R4 breaker, we're now epistemologically untethered and are unable to tell whether or not the author intends for this reference to show that the prior story is actually factually DWU the entire time, or that this new story they've written isn't DWU at all. And this is invalidity by proxy. Where referring to invalid stories can suggest to us not that that invalid story is valid, but that the supposedly valid story might be invalid using the same underlying reasoning. (Scrooge and I have gone back and forth on this, there are nuances, but this is the basic idea as to what I mean.) Najawin ☎ 23:34, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

They grow up so fast: Another Big Scrooge Reply

The Break of Fatal Atkinson is already lagging and I have a lot of things to say, so… alright.

Of Crossovers, Coverage and Web Theory

You write:

“Crossovers present a potential problem to the coherence of Web Theory as a whole, for the reasons we're discussing above that you've not addressed? Since you need to demarcate where one literary universe ends and the other begins?”

Web Theory doesn't need to, no! Not if you accept the T:CS/T:VS split (I mean, accept it as a way forward, if not necessarily an accurate formalisation of the implications of the old system. whatever). The whole idea is that Web Theory is a T:VS tool: it only governs the validity or invalidity of stuff we already decided we had a duty to cover. Whether to include a Roland Rat or whatnot — that would be a T:CS question, and T:CS might be a more bounded thing than NuT:VS (because, unlike NuT:VS, T:CS would necessarily be rooted in questions of practicality, not just of the most principled, objective way of covering what we've decided to shoulder the burden of giving coverage to).

That is: Episodes 3-10 of Roland Rat would hypothetically pass Web Theory, but first they must pass whatever standards we set at T:CS for coverage of crossover concepts, and we might design those non-validity-related standards in such a way that they never get that far. Compare the status of something like Cyberon under current policy: the fact that it "passes Rule 4 but not Rule 2" has been discussed in the past. The broad way I'm leaning right now is that the principled way to exclude Roland Rat is not using Rule 4 (where we would accept that it hypothetically passes) but using Rule 2 (specifying our definition of "a licensed DWU element" such that the Roland-related concepts that happen to be introduced in the same story with the Sixth Doctor cameo don't count as DWU elements). So, in regenerated coverage policies terms, T:CS rather than T:VS.

That's not the whole of my thoughts on this, just a first draft of an answer. I think there may be room, as I mentioned earlier, for a sort of… bizarro Rule 4 at T:CS, which would be narrower in scope than T:VS's Web-Theory-central equivalent. And then there are other questions; there's e.g. Talk:Guinevere One and its ilk to account for. Betruth, T:CS is one place where I would accept a degree of arbitrariness/community-decision-freedom, because again what we cover is not just a matter of principles, but a practical question — what we add to our workload. At the edges it's an inevitable reality that we can't allow in everything which, if we could snap our fingers and create perfect coverage of overnight, would be marginally positive. Otherwise, as discussed at Forum:Relaxing our fan works policy (within reason), we could just say that all Doctor Who fanfiction can be covered, and leave the details to the magical genie who's apparently making that happen for us.

To tell you the truth… it's a distinct idea from the Rule 2 thing I mentioned, but I have, in the past, mused off-Wiki about a sort of "secret Rule 5" that guides my views on questions of coverage, as opposed to validity-of-covered-things. The question it asks is "Is this best covered on Tardis or on another Wiki?". It's a hard one to formalise, because in some ways it's a subjective one; there's a reason I haven't put it forward as a policy proposal per se. And it's also rooted in my philosophy that we should do a lot more with interwiki linking than we currently do, which is a massive project in itself. But it's the sort of concern that I think a T:CS-based coverage thread would take into consideration, and indeed, it's a question which has, in an unofficial way, already guided past decisions about coverage. A major part of the FP reinclusion debate was "trying to segregate FP off to a different Wiki renders proper coverage of much of FP and War-related Doctor Who stories worse-to-impossible"; Sleeze Brothers was excluded on the basis that the Marvel Wiki could do it better than us, and brought back into the fold when it became clear that in practice they couldn't, in fact, be trusted to do it basically at all. Sometimes a single work might have trivially been allowed in, but becomes a weightier question when it's the stepping stone of a giant franchise that's not generally perceived as being in the DWU's orbit: see Talk:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series). Etc. etc.

Again, these are questions to think about in Part II if my broader direction is greenlit. But the shape of the answer is "T:CS will have its own standards, independent from T:VS's Timeless-Web-Theory-based concept of validity".

Matters of Magnitude (Also, Eggs)

“I came here intending to argue against R4bp / that keeping R4bp necessitates us making certain modifications to the rules and have wound up having to also argue against a change I think would be disastrous for the wiki. I am in no way prepared to fundamentally rewrite validity as it stands (…)”

I know, I know. I am sorry. But from where I'm standing, the way you went about this made it inevitable. I have perceived the various policy reforms of the last few years as parts of a whole, a rising tide, an organic shift away from the worse elements of the Old T:VS and towards a Better Way that we could just begin to glimpse on the horizon; of that Better Way, Web Theory at least I was already envisioning, while the T:VS/T:CS split was something that only consciously slotted together partway through typing my First Riposte. And R4BP was a part of that transformation.

And now here you are, arguing that the tensions between R4BP on the one hand, and the bits of old T:VS that have yet to be cast off, were untenable and needed to be resolved. If you would not budge from the view that the status quo couldn't be maintained, then — believing what I do — what other answer was there for me to give you than "well if you find the awkward inconsistencies of the hybrid, transitional stage untenable, we'd better speed up the maturation of the consistent Better Way, hadn't we"?

I must be going a bit cross-eyed again, because I'm starting to think in improbable allegories once again, but… please try to understand: from my perspective, we were midway through making an omelet, and you come in aghast at all the messy-looking broken eggs. "Unbreak those eggs at once!" you cry. "What's this talk of cooking? Fire is dangerous and unpredictable. We were much safer with the unbroken eggs in hand. In any case omelets taste rubbish." Alright, I say, but no one here likes eating raw eggs, and we've already broken the eggs — listen, if you want to do something else with those uncooked yolks, I'm listening… But we won't get anywhere if you insist that we should do our best to pour the yolks back into the shells and glue the poor things back together and stick them back in the refrigerator. That's just clumsily rolling things back to a status quo that no one liked! It won't lead anywhere goood!

“I think what you've proposed is a non starter and changing to it will cause the wiki many headaches that we're best off avoiding. That doesn't, however, mean that I think that what we have currently is perfect.”

At the risk of repeating myself: I think this whole thing comes down to unjustified status-quo bias on your part. By your own definitions, the old policy is much messier and full of loopholes than even the kind of TWT/T:CS/T:VS draft I'd be capable of taping together in 24 hours right now if the need arose. The old policy as you understand it runs on vibes and well-wishes, it whimsically uses words like "fictional universe" to mean… nothing in particular, and it explicitly allows the community to invalidate things against the authors' wishes (presumed or otherwise) if it feels like it. It's rubbish, thoroughly irredeemable rubbish. It is more rubbish than I've ever thought T:VS-as-I-understand it ot be.

And our differences in interpretation of what Old T:VS was all about is an argument against status-quo-bias all on its own. No one on this website can seem to agree on precisely what Old T:VS means, and that's pretty horrible state of affairs. Maybe Web Theory has faults but at least it's an intelligible, living thing whose originators can be reached for comment and modification at a day's notice, rather than an accumulation of words whose very meaning is challenging to even agree upon, let alone modify in a principled way.

Besides, again, the eggs are already far too broken to get anywhere good by trying to glue them back together. Your interpretation is at odds with the reading of policy that was used in several recent thread conclusions, so where does that leave those? As we've discussed, you may not like it, but a Webbish understanding of Rule 4 is already the underpinning of the validity or invalidity of e.g. fourth-wall breakers, do we need to relitigate all those now? Stuffing the genie back in the bottle isn't as simple as re-invalidating the handful of valid R4BP cases. It would mean throwing away the wisdom of half a dozen massive threads at least. The transition is begun. If you think we need to change our exact destination then that's a valid point of view, but returning to your idea of the old policy — well, that is something I would call disastrous.

Miscellaneous Minor Points

“To me, if the false start is *fine with things referring to it*, even if *it's not specifically intending for planned sequels it has to then refer back to the web*, it's still DWU, and you seem to be denying this here. To me, this is an archetypal example, almost, of "lack of intent to fail to be in DWU", and prior rulings to the contrary are mistaken.”

Aaah. No, I was merely disagreeing with you/misunderstanding you about the facts of the hypothetical case. I agree that if Hypothetical Harry is fine with being referred back to, then sure, that's all fine and dandy, it's not a false-start in my terminology.

“The argument for Adventure seems relatively weak to me, since if you look at Gatiss interviews he emphasizes heavily that it's about real people and real events.”

So what? I mean, perhaps I'm lost again. But I thought you were contrasting literary universe in the critical sense to any continuity-based, Sherlockian-Game sense of "universe". Hence, for example, First Draft belonging to the "literary universe" of FP because it's thematically connected to the series even though its plot might very well not be in any real sense events that you're meant to read as having diegetically happened in the Spiral Politic as described in The Book of the War. If that's not what you were talking about, then I'm lost again.

Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 14:00, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Ninth Break (Thread of the Shalka)

Obviously I'll engage in greater detail with this later, but as two minor points, I would consider a docudrama to be "strong indication of authorial intent" (:P) that the work isn't meant to be in a literary universe predominantly constructed by works of (effectively) pure fiction. There are... exceptions, but we have reasons for thinking they're connected with that literary universe aside from thematic connections or shared production circumstances.

I, again, find myself confused by the comments as to the false start comments here. You did say

Intent to be in the DWU is intent to reference and be referenced

and Ettolrahc suggested we change that to "lack of intent to not be referenced" as a result, which you just didn't respond to. Indeed, I think this is in contradiction with your original statement of Web Theory.

at “best” they're “unproductive dead-ends” — they might incorporate some context from the web, but are not intended to reflect back onto it — not "intended to count": they add further information to their particular spun-off version of a valid concept like the First Doctor, but with no intent that further works connecting to the broader web should incorporate these data as context for their own depiction of the First Doctor.

The hypothetical has no intent for further people to incorporate their work into the larger Doctor Who corpus. They simply do not care. It's fine with people doing this. It's fine with people not doing this. But if we accept that this is okay, then I think you have to reverse your own opinion on the jurisprudence of DCtT? Because I suspect Nev Fountain felt much the same?

Maybe others can comment, but I'm very confused as to this issue, as well as to whether Web Theory actually clearly highlighted narrative connections as a heuristic from the beginning, or whether it seemed to be the entirety of the theory. I certainly read it as the latter - to me it was very explicitly about narrative connections, and if you failed to reference or actively wish to be referenced to you were right out. Perhaps others can comment on whether they did as well? Najawin ☎ 14:35, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

That's more or less how I interpreted it as well, yes. But I'm just going to say that in all honesty I don't see the merit in taking a fundamentally incorrect and broken system (and just about everybody has acknowledged that this is what T:VS is, implicitly or explicitly) and replacing it with one almost exactly identical that is no more based on rationality and logic then the one before. If we're going to replace rule 4, we need one that's foundation is in logic and reasoning, and not conjecture and speculation. Aquanafrahudy 📢 14:42, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Also, something that's been bugging me, with Web Theory, does it have to be intended to be referenced by a valid source, or merely by a source that passes T:CS/the first three rules? Because if the former, don't you think that's a little recursive? Aquanafrahudy 📢 14:46, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

More to come, but:

The thing, Najawin, is that I did not consider there to be a difference between “intent to be referenced” and “lack of intent to not be referenced”; “intent to be referenced” could just as easily be expressed as “intent to be suitable for referencing”, or however circuitous phrasing you prefer. I think e.g. “Oh Mummy!” and “Doctor Whoah!” are thereby excluded well enough; I think DCtT is too, or at any rate it is by the original reading of the quotes, though I agree it’s wooly in the sense that Fountain could very imaginably have said something else if the questions had been worded differently (but so it goes).

I also remain confused about what you mean by “literary universe”. I could easily imagine a *purely* BTS work that’s part of a literary universe: arguably “Doctor Who Confidential” was part of RTD1’s “literary universe” (well, televisual), in the sense I have in mind. In the sense that even if it doesn’t Watsonianly connect, the expected viewer of a given new RTD episode might be expected to bear the latest Confidential in mind to the same degree as the previous narrative episode or the contents of the latest Annual. But that doesn’t seem to be what you meant…? So again, how does it differ from my Webbish view of Sherlockian universes? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:17, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

I mean, maybe in the sense you have in mind, but not in the sense I have in mind? Like, it seems we're discussing this section here:

But if you write a book that you insert into your mental web, and its actual connections, usually narrative, but sometimes thematic or other types, are far stronger to other series than they are to what we understand as the DWU, even if fully licensed, we might just cut the cord.

And I'm just not sure how you're reading that thematic overlap is a sufficient condition for things to be in the same literary universe.

As for how it differs from the web view, I mean, the first printing of Grass and the can of worms that's associated with that problem (for those who are unaware, since this one is also inside baseball, see Talk:The Stranger (novel)) is sort of a good pointer towards the differences. The issue is one of intentionality on the part of the author, not of continuity connections, which may or may not actually exist as of publishing, and may or may not end up existing in the future, and may or may not be something the author is actually open to when they publish. (With that said, as the talk page notes, it's not like there's hard and fast agreement between you, me, and Nate on whether or not the first printing of Grass should even have been invalid or not-DWU or whatever. Just, you know, as an example.) Najawin ☎ 16:38, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

“it seems we're discussing this section here (…)”

No such thing! I'm still talking about First Draft and Erasing Sherlock (or as the case may be a hypothetical Erasing Sherlock without the Celestis name-drop, but still printed as part of the FP range, etc.). You seemed to be saying that First Draft may or may not take place in the Spiral Politic in a literal sense, but is meant to connect to other FP works on a literary/thematic level, and this is reason enough to consider it to be in "the FPU" (and thus "the DWU") even if it's not in continuity with the DWU in the way of a story that's genuinely meant to describe events which putatively occurred on the same Earth walked by Cousin Justine and Michael Brookhaven. So I was saying "no, I'm pretty sure a thematically but not diegetically connected story hasn't historically been the type of thing that passes Rule 4". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:09, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm quite confident both of those are intended to be in the Spiral Politic. They just, in the hypothetical for Erasing Sherlock, lack any reference to elements of it. I used the term "literary universe" simply to make sure that continuity contradictions weren't going to be an issue here, because First Draft is weird enough that it actually might need that sort of caveat. It's solely about continuity vs intent. Not about the Spiral Politic vs some other (potentially not even fictional) universe. Najawin ☎ 17:33, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Ah, gotcha. But then yeah, you're just using "continuity" in a narrower sense than I am. Too tired and headachey right now to type more. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:49, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

(why in the hell is this break called "ninth" when it's the eleventh... please let's have the word "twelfth" in the next one.)

As an aside to everything discussed in this Break so far, I think that a covered source should only need to pass the "intent to be referenced in future" / "lack of intent to not be referenced" point, and that they really don't actually need to be in continuity ("set itself in the same universe as") any prior otherwise-DWU stories. As long as it passes T:CS/r1-3, then in my mind it shouldn't need, strictly, be in contuity with past stories. 109.144.216.177^{talk to me} 07:27, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

And how are we to tell when something is intended to be referenced, may I ask? Aquanafrahudy 📢 08:02, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

I do see your point, mind, and it kind of makes sense. But we need a method to be able to tell whether something passes this, and I would very much like further clarification on what something has to be referenced by to pass this standard. Aquanafrahudy 📢 08:08, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Anon, regarding numbering of breaks: at this point, sooner than later we’d run out of Doctors, and given the subject matter, it seemed fitting to tip the hat to the ‘Three Ninth Doctors’ (plus Hurt) - hence #9 was Hurt, #10 was Nine (Atkinson), #11 was Nine (Grant), and #12 when it comes will be the Christopher Eccleston Break. Not strictly sensible, but then the ToC at the top of the page has “serious” numbers…

You’re not wrong about “lack-of-intent-to-not-be-referenced” being sufficient. I did mention as much before, and it’s part of the Timelessness of my preferred Timeless Web Theory: that is, intent to (or “lack of intent not to” if we must) retroactively be in the same universe as hypothetical *future* works is just as good, if not better, than intent to be in the same universe as past ones. When you put it like this, though, it does cast my prior formulation as less than maximally elegant/parsimonious; I shall ponder a more elegant one. (Though that’s also what the planned Part II is for.)

@Aquanafrahudy, I remain sympathetic to your concerns in spirit, but please, what policy would you propose to allow us to maintain the invalidity of e.g. Doctor Whoah! and It’s Showtime under your proposed no-Rule-4 regime, without running any risk of invalidating The Daft Dimension or The Curse of Fatal Death? Or do you once and for all bite the bullet that you don’t think there should be invalid sources (aside from mixed fiction/non-fiction Rule 1-breaking things, maybe)? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 08:10, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Regarding your latest post, we certainly don't mean that it has to effectively be referenced by something, just that the authorial intent has to be that it could be. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 08:13, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

As a note, that IP edit was me (in case I'm somehow still logged out ,I'm Cousin Ettolrhc); I was accidentally logged-out. As for what to name the breaks - fair enough, I suppose, although Id like it to be fully up to the digression of whoever writing a big reply to choose the name. But anyway, @aqua As for what I mean by "intended to be referenced" - it should be the presumption that a source published in a series which has already been concluded to be intended to be referenced by future otherwise-DWU works. This narrows down the amount of cases we need to consider. If a source within a series intended to be referenced by future otherwise-DWU works has an authorial quote clarifying that it actually isnt intended to be referenced by future otherwise-DWU works, then in that case we could discuss invalidating it. And we decide whether a series is intended to be referenced by future otherwise-DWU works by presuming that it is (if it is a covered source, that is, in the current model, it passes r1-3) unless there is an authorial quote clarifying in the reverse, or if it fits into our category of "genres presumed to not be intended to be referenced by future otherwise-DWU works unless otherwise clarified", which, as far as I know, only includes parodies as of right now. I'm aware your against the inclusion of this clause, and that's fair, you can have that opinion. We'll see if the closing-admin or participants of Part 2 agree with this

@Scrooge, will look forward such more eloquence, here or in Part 2.Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 08:34, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Ettolrahc How would you define an otherwise-DWU work, though?

@Scrooge I still fail to see why Doctor Whoah! should be invalid, save for the fact that "it doesn't exactly look very good for us to cover this on Ninth Doctor"/"covering this on Ninth Doctor would just be silly", which I don't find very good arguments. Aquanafrahudy 📢 09:32, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Aqua, I use the term "otherwise-DWU work" to refer to a work of fiction which would be considered "part of the DWU" whether or not the source in question is valid or invalid. For example, The Time of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"] is otherwise-DWU to Erasing Sherlock ^[+]Loading...["Erasing Sherlock (novel)"], so if Time referenced Erasing, that would be a r4bp case if Erasing had previously been deemed to not take place in the DWU, but a work of fiction which is a sequel to Erasing but no other work, wouldn't (in my mind). Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 09:44, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Aqua: So you do bite the bullet. Alright. As I keep somewhat helplessly repeating, I am not confident in your chances of building a consensus for this “let’s just get rid of invalidity altogether” business, but like, I intellectually respect it. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 10:37, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Scrooge But what's your argument for keeping validity? And why don't you think I'll garner support for it?

@Ettolrahc So what's the exact definition here? Is it just Doctor Who television stories, or does it extend to some of the EU as well. Because if it's just television stories, we may have invalidate some stuff. Or do you mean things whose validity isn't affected by the source in question? Aquanafrahudy 📢 14:01, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

(As an example, I don't support removing rule 4/invalidity. Maybe I'll try to formulate a "why" later.)

@Aqua - the latter, as I said.Sorry if that wasn't clear - perhaps I should have used two non-TV examples. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 15:52, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm thinking about the larger formulation here in my large response, but I'm pretty sure that "lack of intent to not be referenced" can't actually be enough to formulate a DWU that's synonymous with Web Theory. It's a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition, for something like Scrooge's theory. Just think about it. 100,000 BC is our fixed point, but then we have The Daleks. The Daleks references 100,000 BC, but that doesn't make it DWU. What makes it DWU is that it's fine with being referenced. But referenced by what? Well, referenced by other DWU stories. But those stories themselves are defined as such by their lack of intent to not be reference under this scheme, no? So we have a definition that's just as recursive as the one that some of you hate. So "and" seems to cause problems (imo) and reducing it solely to this particular direction seems to be endlessly recursive. Najawin ☎ 18:02, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

I’m not committed to this way of thinking, but I’m not sure it’s recursive. You could simply specify “referenced by other *Rule-2-passing* stories”, by other stories that have a legal line of descent from An Unearthly Child.

(Irrelevant digression: I note your title-switch and I respect it, but I do literally mean Episode 1; Episode 2 itself is only covered as a descendant of Episode 1 under original-flavour Web Theory. In any case if you’re going to insist on 10,000 BC then you ought to say The Mutants or The Dead Planet, not The Daleks. Digression over!)

This would, of course, tip things towards my view that if Freedman had intended all along to create sequels to DCtT, then that franchise would be incontrovertibly valid. And that would extend to any Quinn&Howett-style parody series with its own continuity… but that seems acceptable to me so long as we enshrin that we’re okay with saying “In one reality…” (though not anything specific like “in one parallel universe”, natch) to talk about such coherent-but-non-connective continuities. And it still locks out knowingly-inconsequential larks of the ‘Oh, Mummy!’ type. Seems viable. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:25, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Certainly this isn't the case under current R2. And if it's true under your modified R2, it's only true insofar as your modified R2 is so broad we can drive a bus through it. Najawin ☎ 18:58, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

…What now? I don't recall modifying R2 in any other sense than tidying away the Dimensions in Time/likeness-rights… thing… and I don't see how that could have any wide-reaching consequences for validity prospects in the way you seem to imply? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:12, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Well, R2 as part of the new T:CS. Focusing on "legal relationship[s], direct or otherwise". Najawin ☎ 19:32, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Oh, that. Again, I think you’re reading too much in less-than-maximally-precise language of mine (sorry)… “Direct or otherwise” was simply meant to refer to second- or third-generation spin-offs and whatnot, not to imply that other kinds of relationship than filiation would be considered. "The EDAs, which begat FP" -> direct, "the EDAs, which begat Iris Wildthyme, which begat Theo Possible" -> indirect. That's all. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:15, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Najawin I don't personally see how my definition is as recursive as yours, as long as we remember that only covered sources can even be checked for this meaning of "intent to contribute to the DWU". Non-covered sources would need a subtly different criterion (intent to be in continuity with past official-DWU sources, and lack of intent to not be referenced). So for covered sources, the only "recursion" is that, technically, this definition reaches all the way to the end of the universe. Also, I will admit that this definition only works particularly well for sections of the Web with multiple branches behind them, from a release- chronology. But even for the case of The Daleks ^[+]Loading...["The Daleks (TV story)"], it simply has the lack intent to not be referenced by future Doctor Who television stories, in any form they may take. Not a particular story, just the general idea of a future story. This even applies to stories produced and released under the understanding that the show may well be cancelled, because I seriously doubt - I would support encoding into policy this presumption - that the writers of a "final episode" would be surprised (read: it subverts their intention) if a future DW publication (the existence of this may surprise them, but that's sort of irrelevant) referenced their work. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 05:42, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

But parody stories can clearly be covered, no? Supposed we still considered the Daft Dimension as invalid, separate from the rest of our valid sources. How would we choose between DD being what we label as "valid" and the "mainstream DWU" as what we label as "valid"? DD will still allow for things, in this hypothetical, to refer to it. It's just things that we would traditionally consider invalid. Najawin ☎ 06:00, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

I still object to WT in general, but surely most parodies would pass the "lack of intent to not be referenced" clause. I'm sure the creators of Untitled ^[+]Loading...["Untitled (The Lily Savage Show)"] wouldn't care tuppence if somebody were to reference them. They might be surprised, sure, but no more than the hypothetical "writer of the final episode of Doctor Who". They certainly wouldn't be actively hostile to the notion. The creators of something like Doctor Whoah might be? But then if you take a single issue of Doctor Whoah, then it is presumably intended to be referenced by the next issue, yes? (and additionally note that the next issue is in no way affected by the previous issue, as we removed the "must be in continuity with something else" clause) Now, I in no way object to this, due to the arguments I presented earlier, but I think there may be unexpected consequences of Web Theory that people haven't thought of. Aquanafrahudy 📢 06:50, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

The Doctor Whoah example is precisely illustrative though. When we say "intent to not be referenced by", there's an implied "by other stories in the Web!DWU" there. Doctor Whoah does intend to be referenced by things. It's just that the things he intends it to be referenced by are not in the same set as the set we've identified as Web!DWU. And to define the set "Web!DWU" we have to make a choice between all of these disjoint subsets in a way that's logically problematic. And, of course, this doesn't get into the problem of what happens when individual writerly intentions within Web!DWU disagree on what constitutes Web!DWU. (Thus, there's distinct intent to not be referenced by certain parts of what we consider mainline DWU, perhaps even a great deal of it, whereas other writers would be perfectly fine with their work being referred to in that particular part of the DWU that has become isolationist if it ever came up.) This latter issue isn't an inherent problem, and I don't want to suggest it is. But it's something we'd need to be pretty careful about. Najawin ☎ 07:23, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Come to think of it, Scrooge's rule 5 not-proposal might actually be quite a good idea. Maybe something like this: "If a series or corpus of works becomes so interconnected with the DWU that it becomes difficult to cover them on separate wikis, then we should cover the series/body of works in its entirety", or something of that nature. I'm not quite sure of the specifics, we would definitely need to freshen it up a lot, and as it's fairly late I may just be rambling and this may make no sense, but there you are. To my mind, it's an intuitive proposal that would make sense. Though that last sentence doesn't, really. Thoughts? Aquanafrahudy 📢 20:56, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Scrooge, just to clarify, should I expect another large object level response or should I take that as a baseline to respond to? I know you were working on other stuff that you scrapped due to, apparently, a misunderstanding of what I meant by wiki!DWU, and I'm not sure if any of that is transferable. You also say in your first response after, "More to come". If this is indeed the case, I'll hold off. Najawin ☎ 03:06, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Aye, aye. I'm getting my thoughts in order for another Big Reply. (Some small part of me hopes we shan't need further rounds after that.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:40, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I highly doubt this to be the case. But we'll see! Najawin ☎ 16:53, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I've thought of how a hypothetical rule 1 by proxy could work! And it actually sort of makes sense. You see, the vast majority of rule 1-failing fiction that we cover as invalid is covered as invalid due to either being a mix of fiction and non-fiction (e.g., Winning Designs (feature)) or for having no clear end and seguing into non-fiction (such as several of The Fan Show webcasts). And I think that it is the latter to which we can apply Rule 1 by proxy. You see, if a future story were to reference its events, but leave out the non-fictional bits, then we would have a clear ending for it, and it would end.

Also, here's another black mark on Rule 4. If we were at all consistent in applying our rules, then we ought to invalidate all of NuWho. (Of course, there's the argument to be made that they were only joking when they said that; after all, they said it in a jovial sort of manner, but then we enter the realms of complete and utter speculation and just urgh.) Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 09:54, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

The War Between Scrooge And Invalidity, or, The Crux on R4BP Road

Happy British-time New Year! We're back, and, as stock pictures of Paul McGann would say, it's about time.

It might be considered irregular that I'm posting the next Big Reply again even though User:Najawin never got around to fully refuting the previous one, but it's alright, I can refute myself. The replies in the Break of the Shalka, and the subsequent hiatus, have given me a thought to read over this monster of a thread again, and think, and ponder the way forward. By agreement with User:Najawin and User:Bongolium500, that way forward is mainly to wind this thing down and then get started on the "Part 2" we've discussed several times before; but first I wish to try one last time to outline my thoughts on this issue, since they have changed somewhat. And that's good, that's okay. You gotta keep moving… so long as you remember all the things that you used to say.

Let's try this one last time, and then Bongo will set the metre for the new debate.

(Unless Najawin changes his mind and wants to reply to this here before Bongo arbitrates? I assume Bongo would permit it if Najawin asked.)

Part 1: Why are we even talking about all this?

I think looking back at all these words (so… many… words), the question to be asked is: what the heck have we all been talking about for an entire academic semester? What is the crux of our disagreement? Why do things appear obvious to me that are not so to Najawin? (One assumes he asks himself the symmetrical question.) I think the Crux on R4BP Road is very simple:

“What the hell is validity for?”

My first Riposte started from this point, but we seem to have lost sight of it at some point. In the latest discussion areas, User:Aquanafrahudy asked multiple times for us to justify why there should even be such a thing as a valid/invalid distinction, arguing very reasonably that it's not clear why we should even entertain the notion of keeping any version of Rule 4 if we can't articulate a logical foundation for it.

Part of the reason for the extended hiatus is that I was very busy, but part of it is that my replies to Aqua's repeated question weren't entirely persuasive even to myself. After all, I've worked in Wikis that have no such thing as canon/validity policies as Tardis would recognise them; the Jenny Everywhere Wiki, for example. And the sky really doesn't fall, you know. So why not simply do that? We have a great system for dealing with "weird" or "contradictory" accounts. The sky wouldn't fall if we validated every single item in Category:Non-DWU sources. "In one account" this, "[[The Doctor's reality (Insert Pardoy Title Here)]]" that; there is no piece of data in any one "invalid" source that isn't equalled in weirdness by one or another bit of trivia from an incontrovertibly valid story somewhere.

I've sometimes mused that it would be very easy to cover a random piece of fiction with no connecton whatsoever to the DWU on the Wiki without it looking particularly "off" in execution. "In one universe, which shared some basic elements of history with the Doctor's universe, a Gaulish warrior called Asterix was documented by a number of accounts as defending his village against…" Who would blink first? It would take conscious investigation to notice that, in fact, there are no narrative tethers between that set of accounts and the expanded Whoniverse, aside from the "In other realities" section of real-world things. It would be a silly thing to do, certainly, but when "an arbitrary decision to cover the Asterix comics as valid" doesn't seem like it would fundamentally break the Wiki in any immediate sense, it's worth asking why we're so scared of covering, you know, actual comics about the Doctor published in Doctor Who Magazine. Gasp! Choke! Whimper!

In short I felt I couldn't return until I could fully articulate why I wasn't going to join Aqua on the "abolish Rule 4 completely" wagon; or at least until I had a better way to tackle that question than "I think people would vote against it for reasons I can't really formalise".

It wasn't easy to achieve even that. But let me tell you, Old T:VS is even worse at it than I am.

Part 2: The old justifications for T:VS are untenable

And I don't think it's a question that was really asked back in the day when old-T:VS and old-R4 were devised, not in so many words, and this is very worrisome. Letting "old-T:VS" speak for itself, its authorial voice does not sound like that of someone with a great concept of why there should be such a thing as a valid/invalid divide among licensed sources. In its final state before I started redrafting it, the only passage that even gestures at the question is this:

The Doctor Who universe is a tricky place when it comes to defining what should "count" and what shouldn't. You should make sure you understand why the DWU isn't like other franchises before you go on. Suffice it to say here that any reference guide about the DWU must, of necessity, make certain choices about what to include – and what to kick off the farm.Old T:VS

Uhm, excuse you, no it doesn't "suffice to say"! But okay, this is referencing the then-live revision of Tardis:Canon policy, and that does go into a little more detail… but it doesn't cover itself in glory in doing so.

In-universe articles are those written about the narrative elements of the DWU — articles like Amy Pond, ambulance and Andromedan. The only valid sources for these articles are stories. Thus we need to know which stories "count" and which don't. If we didn't attempt a little bit of definition, our biography of the Doctor would have to include "the time he spent on Earth when he was a human called Dr. Who" or "the incident in which he regenerated into his thirteenth body that looked an awful lot like Joanna Lumley", "the one time he sounded an awful lot like Nick Briggs, "the other time he sounded an awful lot like Nick Briggs", and so forth.Old T:CAN

This extract fascinates me like a strange bug. It fascinates me like a record of a bygone, dictatorial age. It fascinates me like a glimpse into the mind of a medieval monk, or a three-headed Venusian philosopher. "If we didn't have Rule 4, our biography of the Doctor would have to include [proceeds to list things which our current biography of the Doctor is obviously much, much better off for including]". It floors me, it really does.

I'm sorry, but this is canon thinking. I'm not proud of everything in the Lost Closing Post, but I could quote from its own Part 2, About Canon Thinking, verbatim in this particular conjuncture. (And that's all live policies from a forum thread that's already three years old…) Despite all the high-minded claims about "not invalidating things just because they're discontinuous", the T:VS-appealing-to-T:CAN dyad of yore betrays the very fallacious, toxic mentality it claimed to be moving away from: a base belief that "c'mon, we can't just act like [XYZ story] is real because then we'd have to say that Weird Things that Contradict Established Wisdom are real". One wonders why the rules were written in such a way as to permit The Dr Who Annual 1966 — save carelessness — if it really is beyond the pale to allow in stories that force us to say that "according to one account the Doctor was a human called Dr Who".

This. Is. Nonsense. It's not even the complicated mindset that led to people defending the exclusion of Faction Paradox — which was loosely "oh, that's a whole other mythology with its own vibes, it might have some elements in common with Who but ultimately they're best considered apart from one another, just as the Miles quote about different universes bears out and underlines". That happened to be wrong in that particular case, but it was wrong in a tricky, ponderous way bound up in a mixture of subtle fallacies, and factual errors in the alleged evidence. The hollow elbow-in-ribs snark of that old T:CAN passage is not even that.

It is parochial and small-minded. It is an appeal to the ‘not-like-us,-not-like-us’ recoil at the unfamiliar and jarring; to the quintessentially fannish sentiment that has made people swear up and down that the Timeless Child or bi-generation have "broken the canon" of Doctor Who. Even if there were a TV Who canon to be broken, these things wouldn't break it — they're each presented as newly-discovered secrets, long buried or thought mythical; with the arguable exception of A Good Man Goes to War in the former case, neither "retcon" actually introduces any narrative or worldbuilding contradictions. But what each does do is add a very weird footnote to the fan catechism of "here is what regeneration is, here are the Doctors in order, it's This Way And No Other". It's a purely aesthetic, knee-jerk dislike of in-universe data proving more complicated than "here are the names of all 15 Doctors" can encompass.

Whatever the specifics of the authorial intent on The Curse of Fatal Death or indeed Doctor Who Unbound, there is nothing prima facie wrong with a source alleging that the Doctor at one point regenerated into Lumley or Briggs. Why would there be? If we're talking about parallel universes or rewritten time, it does not even rise to the level of contradiction. It's just odd, that's all. But the mindset that wrote T:CAN couldn't stomach "odd", even if that's precisely what the DWU sources are serving up; so it reluctantly accepts the occasional oddity of "unintentional" narrative discontinuity, but exults when it's able to sever the more glaring "aberrations" by hook or crook. Whether or not this cripples proper coverage of other stories it leaves in its wake, in the way that a page like Dr. Who's reality (Dr. Who and the Daleks) would be pointlessly difficult to write if the actual Cushing-starring stories were the one thing we were not allowed to connect in-text to the various later sources trying to riff on or explicate them.

User:Najawin has already been quoted several times for saying:

For me, as I said above, the reasoning comes first. I can live with Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows). It's irritating, but not ideal. I can live with a prominent, often referenced invalid story. I can live with weird implications of well thought out rules consistently applied. Poorly thought out rules, or well thought out rules inconsistently applied? That's when I have real frustrations.User:Najawin

But for heaven's sake, man, old-T:VS is not well-thought-out. Not only have we been unable to agree on precisely what its Rule 4 is saying exactly, but it can barely articulate why such a rule ought to exist, and on the occasion that something like an implicit reasoning becomes apparent, it is patently obvious that it is a "reasoning" born of bias, parochialism and arbitrary dislike of the weird, not of a careful deliberation on what actually leads to the most informative, legible documentation of the body of work we have taken on the burden of Wikifying. Old-T:VS has at its heart a deeply incoherent and unjustified unwillingness to allow in "weird" sources even if in practice being able to cite them is beneficial to broader Wikification efforts.

I don't want to keep driving old-T:VS into the dirt like this — the bits about not heeding narrative discontinuity were an indispensable first draft of the more principled way we look at these things nowadays. It has always been, as I said before, remarkably good by the standards of Wiki policies, that just doesn't say much when a vast majority of big Wikis don't even begin to examine the concept of "canon". However trailblazing, we must recognise that in absolute terms it was not and has never been a wholly good, consistent policy. Not even remotely. The simple reason we have been unable to agree on what galaxy-brain thing old-R4 might or might no thave been doing is that we were giving it far, far too much credit. There's no "there" there, just a convenient hammer with which to "kick off the farm" (oh, how I hate that phrase) those sources which our predecessors, for their own biased reasons, didn't want to bother to Wikify properly.

Digression: a few words on consistency, counterproductive compromises, and the plight of the TV purists

I quoted the following, and touched on this point, before, but it bears repeating, given just how central "canon-brain" turns out to be to all of this. User:Najawin writes:

I know some people IRL who are massive Doctor Who fans, just massive. And they despise the wiki and consider it near unusable because it mixes together EU content and show content. I keep telling them that this will never change, that it's a foundational principle of our wiki that all sources are equal, but it really puts them off. And our decision validate all of these R4bp works, well... Some of them frustrated them more than others, but to them it just wasn't helpful, it obscured things more than made it clear.User:Najawin

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a fan of the Doctor Who TV series only, and not liking to think of the rest of the DWU as real in your head. People can do what they want. I want to be very clear about this. My steadfast belief that the Wiki must not give this mindset an inch is not to be misconstrued as a claim of moral superiority. It is unfortunate for TV-purists that they will not get what they want from our Wiki. I understand their plight, I sympathise, and I hope someday people who do not include myself put in the work to create a completely parallel TV-only Wiki to fulfil their deeply odd preference.

However —

— there are two important things which, to my mind, void this as an argument against broadening the breadth of validity.

• First, there is no non-circular argument for TV meta-primacy. i.e. there is no reason an earnest preference for the continuity primacy of "all mainline BBC Who and nothing else" should be more catered to than an earnest preference for the continuity primacy of "Classic Who and its contemporary EU material, but none of that newfangled Cardiff stuff", or "Classic Who and NuWho S1-S11, but none of that Timeless Child stuff", or "Faction Paradox and maybe some of the Doctor Who novels including the Target novelisationss, but nothing of that daft live-action stuff". Giving our readers everything, clearly-labeled — everything to such an inclusive degree that only very few of us genuinely believe every single valid source to be real in their mental DWU — is the most neutral compromise between all these contradictory preferences that we have been able to reach. By scrupulously citing everything, and not claiming that any specific bit of non-TV content is more valid than any other bit, we are giving TV-purists as much as we can give them without unfairly giving them special treatment above and beyond other kinds of purists. I'm sure some TV-purists will still find that insufficient, because they believe that TV has some innate claim of greater legitimacy, but, you know, accepting that argument makes you a TV-purist; as I said. Circular. (Well, that or the numbers game, but we are an encyclopaedia, dammit, not an entertainment channel. We cannot allow popular demand to affect the rigorousness and accuracy of how and whether we document information; statistics on readers' aesthetic preferences can only guide, well, aesthetic decisions.)

• Second, while I acknowledge that "everything(ish) is equally covered, sort through it yourselves using {{cite source}} if you care so much" is pretty far afield from what TV-purists want, they will not be getting what they want either way.

This second point is the one I wish to emphasise most, because it is also key to what makes the residual canon-brained thinking in old-T:VS/T:CAN detailed above so hopeless and counterproductive. One must have consistency. We have already committed, very hard, to being the kind of Wiki that freely covers Yarvelling and looms and the War in Heaven and the many subtleties of the Doctor's species. I don't want to say that there's no one who's okay with covering John & Gillian as valid, but not Rowan Atkinson. But it's a comically specific line-in-the-sand at best. The vast majority of people annoyed at our breadth of coverage are going to be annoyed either way; inconsistently sacrificing The Curse of Fatal Death and The Daft Dimension, while happily covering The Equations of Dr Who and Crimes Against History, is not going to move their needle. It just makes us look weirdly finnicky on the margins for obscure, esoteric reasons that nobody off-Wiki actually cares about, even if they might individually approve of an invalid Curse and Daft Dimension for unrelated reasons.

Yes, it will annoy some number of people to carry on covering Curse of Fatal Death and Daft Dimension and so on as valid, but (with all due sympathy) whether people who do not care about the osurces under discussion are annoyed or not should not be the determinant of good documentation — and by and large, those people are annoyed with us anyway and always will be. Please let us not compromise good Wikification in futile gestures at "compromise" that leave us about as impenetrable to the purists, while inexplicably poking holes in the implacably logical universality of what our coverage aspires to me. There's a genuine population out there that wants "Hartnell but no TVComic, Cushing or Atkinson"; there is a neutral documentary case for "Hartnell + TVC + Cushing + Atkinson" and it's what our Wiki is best geared to provide; but "Hartnell + Cushing + TVC, but no Atkinson", or other such combinations, are not combinations that actually make anyone happy.

Part 3: So, why validity? (And validity by proxy?)

What, then, is validity for, if it is not intended simply to fruitlessly pander to canon-brain or TV-purism? Having identified the fundamental unworkability of the old rationale, why not do as User:Aquanafrahudy suggest, and stick with Tardis:Covered sources? This is an important question, because it will determine the ethos with which we approach Part II's task, which, if User:Bongolium500 agrees with the basics of my argument, will be tasked mainly with actually rewriting Tardis:Covered sources and Tardis:Valid sources wholesale based on principles which are actually clear and straightforward, and rooted in an archivists's unbiased neutrality, rather than the whim of people who happen to believe the idea of Joanna Lumley being a real Doctor is too outrageous to be true.

And here I must return to part of my original riposte: not the specific three-step summary, whose specific implications proved more controversial than it was worth, but the basic kernel per which validity is ultimately a merging policy. It guides the degree to which we ought to cover similar elements of different works of fiction on the same pages vs. different pages. It allows us to say that when tackling the business of Wikifying The Daleks, one ought to link to the same Susan Foreman or TARDIS or human or indeed The Universe pages as when Wikifying An Unearthly Child, rather than create a separate one. But the truth goes beyond that simple fact.

The thing is that "what we do here" involves in large part discussing fictional connections between different stories. I implied in the earlier post that discussing connections was simply a byproduct of being parsimonious about not needlessly multiplying First Doctor (An Unearthly Child), First Doctor (The Daleks) etc. pages; but that was giving such editing-work too little credit. The truth is that connecting the dots is the heart and soul of in-universe Wikification. Everything comes back to this. Ultimately, if we did not ever merge in-universe pages for similar characters and elements in different sources, then we may as well not bother with the in-universe pages; First Doctor (An Unearthly Child) would tell you little that An Unearthly Child" could not. The whole point of fiction Wikis lies in centralising data which even the most dedicated viewer could not hold in their mind all at the same time, and putting it all in a neutral, informative order that highlights points of connection from one work of fiction to the next. And this above all else is why "continuity trumps discontinuity" — why it must trump it.

Pages like The Doctor's ninth incarnation that highlight the contradictory ways in which later sources might relate to a given original one are not merely fun novelties, they are the heart and soul of the concept of having an in-universe Wiki at all. If our policies are not maximally conducive to smoothly, naturalistically writing pages like that then the policies are fundamentally ill-thought-out. Wikipedia can give you the normie-friendly list of all fifteen official Doctors, and a brief overview of the conventional asterisks e.g. John Hurt; our niche lies in teasing out all the subtle implications and connections and semi-contradictions that footnotes and off-handed lines here or there have introduced to complicate the simplistic view. It is our very essence.

Part 4: So, why *in*validity? Featuring a Sampling of Theories and the Throwing of a Gauntlet

What place is there for "invalidity" under this view?

Perhaps none. Perhaps Aquana is correct and we should just be done with the whole business — or at least with "Rule 4"-style invalidity. (On practicality grounds I think we would be well-served to retain invalidity under Rule 1 — that is, New Rule 1, the "complete work of fiction" thing — either way. Aquana's suggestion of a R1-by-Proxy at the ned of the previous discussion breaks seems like a nonstarter to me: the question was never which fictional information was definitely in-universe, which is what a later story referencing the fictional bits of a R1-breaker might confirm, but rather confirming which bits of IRL bleed definitely weren't.)

I think, put simply, and this is what the talk of dead-ends was trying but failing to get at, it ought to be a practical measure to quarantine things that have nothing but discontinuity in all directions, in such a way that the only opportunity for discussion of "narrative connections" that they award is in the negative — in the "according to one account everything was completely different" sense. The Corridor Sketch and its ilk, even something like It's Showtime. "According to another account none of Doctor Who was real and it was just something some goofs made up in an afternoon"; "According to another account none of these other things actually happened in any way and the universe worked according to wholly other principles, even if there was indicidentally still a man called the Doctor who looked like Matt Smith". Is this interesting? Is this fulfilling the purpose of an in-universe Wiki any more than trying to cover Asterix the Gaul on Tardis would? Is it?

For aye, this is all becoming reminiscent of my Asterix thought experiment, notwithstanding that all those bits of ephemera do still purportedly old a license entitling them to coverage under T:CS, so we'd be stuck covering them either way. But then, arguably my dream-self cheated by starting with "In [[Asterix's reality|one reality]]…", because ultimately what we don't have for these ephemera is any suggestion that they're even a "reality" or "universe" that exists in any way relative to the Doctor's universe, in the Omniverse sense. We might choose to believe such if we choose to follow the view that the Omniverse contains all possibilities by definition, but that would be bringing in a controversial speculative-fiction idea from outside the story, and thus speculation/fanfic. So it really is down to accounts in those cases, and "According to another account, the universe had nothing in common with the usually-documented stuff except for that which also exists in real life" just isn't an interesting thing to say. Crucially this ceases to be the case if there is ever a story that even gestures at connecting back to the Corridor Sketch, because then it becomes very meaningful to try to triangulate what the two sources are saying on the topics they share.

All of this raises questions and possibilities galore.

Perhaps a "strong" view of dead-end invalidity would hold that only something that has legal grounds for coverage, but no fictional concepts shared, like The Corridor Sketch, might wind up invalid under a "Rule 4"-like principle. The "weak" view of dead-end invalidity, meanwhile, would extend to free-floating one-offs with their own "spins" on fictional DWU elements, thereby excluding the It's Showtimes and Oh Mummy!s of the world.

Perhaps my scruples about "reality" pages are ill-founded — perhaps we should do as the Jenny Everywhere Wiki does, and simply call things which seem to be intended to take place in realities of their own "valid realities" on principle, without taking a side on whether they relate to the Doctor's universe in any specific way, whether it be as "alternate universes" or "palimpsest" or "parallel". Perhaps that's enough to stave off the specter of fanfic-creep, at least as much as the uncontroversial widespread use of "According to one account…" language. (After all, to a churlish reader that might be taken to unwarrantedly imply the diegetic existence of such "accounts" as in-universe objects of some kind!)

Perhaps, to stave off the plague of frivolous "Reality (Random tangentially-related comedy strip)" pages, we might retain invalidity for true one-offs, but award validity and "reality" coverage to any branch of covered works which connect to one another, even if they are discontinuous with the rest of the dreaded Web? So Daft Dimension would have been a valid "reality" all the time, even if its creator hadn't specifically confirmed it as a parallel universe in the diegetic sense, but we wouldn't have Sutekh's reality (Oh Mummy!). Seems workable. Bit cobbled-together, but in line with the truth of the one thing (to my understanding) that validity can neutrally be argued to be for, which is the main thing. Put a laser-gun to my head right now, that's what I'd go with, I think.

But for pity's sake, "if it wasn't 'intended to be set in the DWU' [and note, bloody wars will be fought about what we mean by 'the DWU'] then it can never be valid ever whatever happens" cannot be the best we can do. Such absolutism runs completely contrary to the reason validity exists by foreclosing any tangible ability to discuss narrative connections between initially-"invalid" works and others in in-universe sections. Invalidity at that cost is not worth the benefit of having invalidity at all and we may as well abolish it and be done with it.

Ultimately I'm not confident in any of my ways forward, though neither am I wholly confident in Aquana's abolitionism. But that is the gauntlet thrown. The old justification for "invalidity"'s existence was little more than at worst an artefact of canon-thinking on the part of the policy-crafters, or at best a half-hearted attempt to placate TV-purists who will never find our Wiki satisfactory anyway. Very probably there are good reasons to keep it around in some form, but the onus should really be on people who want it to be a thing to present a well-thought-out rationale for having such a thing, not the other way around. And furthermore, a proposed invalidity policy that would designate as invalid any source in whose fictonal contents the Wiki would otherwise find interest in discussing connections to other, valid stories, is by definition to be considered a bad invalidity policy, as running directly contrary to one of the main reasons why we have a "valid" in-universe area of the Wiki at all.

Part 5: Final thoughts

Well, here we are at least, bloodied and bruised. Perhaps Najawin will reply to some of this, perhaps he won't. Other people should free to, of course. Sainte Eccleston prsides at last over the "definitive" Ninth break, which looks likely to be the last in this thread. I dunno if we've achieved anything constructive. Maybe. But by God, I hope if I've achieved one thing it's to show that the old policies cannot stand, both because we can't agree on what precisely they were saying, and because what little we can divine of the intent behind them often fails to inspire confidence. They were invaluable first drafts, but we are older and wiser now; it's time for a change. The New Year's as good a time as any to finally get moving on that.

My heartfelt certainty is that we need a Part II, and this Part II needs to be about rewriting our coverage/validity policies from scratch, using everything we learned here as a springboard — starting with the fact that things like the various R4BP targets absolutely must be included in the final valid output, or else we haven't found the right algorithm yet. Surely we can do it.

And there are, of course, other things for it to hash out. Perhaps we might at last discuss the standards of inclusion on Talk:Guinevere One/Talk:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)-type issues; certainly it would be a good place to discuss the long-floated matter of non-fanfic non-licensed works whose fictional contents retroactively become inextricably intertwined with the DWU to the extent that it harms our coverage of various covere/valid sources not to be able to cover the originals, as discussed at Talk:Bibliophage (short story) and embodied by Phoenix Court. Certainly we shall discuss crossovers and Roland Rats. Oh, it'll be a big one. But if this thread was deconstructive, I must hope Part II will be fundamentally constructive, and that I will, maybe, just maybe, get fewer headaches in the process this time.

However, if by some twist of fate that hope for a reforming Thread II should be thwarted, let me at least say that keeping R4BP just-as-is (and dismissing invalidity-by-proxy, R1BP, R2BP and R3BP on principle) would be better than nothing, because contra Najawin's increasingly strained claims, the pre-R4BP policy regime was neither well-thought-out nor coherent. It was always a self-contradictory mess of casuistry, good and bad impulses, and half-articulated principles. That ungainly, shambling mass has historically pointed in more or less beneficial directions despite its inherent limitations; pasting "R4BP but none of its alleged logical extensions" on top of the shambling mass makes it marginally uglier but marginally better at pointing in beneficial directions, and comes out positive at the end of the day. If we're not going to go the whole hog and put the shambling mass out of its misery and start over based on actually objective principles, then the least we can do is avoid making the shambling mass's functionality worse via a meaningless "improvement" to its hopelessly-lost level of inner consistency and well-thought-out…ness.

In short, either T:VS-as-we-know-it goes, or R4BP-as-we-know-it stays. Not my best slogan, but it's 1 a.m. on January 1st. You get the picture.

Thank you to any staggering, exhausted traveller who's made it all the way down. Let's hope that long long road leads us somwhere in the end. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 01:12, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Ninth Break (Christopher Eccleston Edition)

First and foremost, I'll address the issue of not responding fully to the last object-level-response. As I gestured towards above, when you said "more to come" this was interpreted as you having a large comment pending, so I held off, which you indicated was the correct interpretation, it seems to me.

But for heaven's sake, man, old-T:VS is not well-thought-out. Not only have we been unable to agree on precisely what its Rule 4 is saying exactly, but it can barely articulate why such a rule ought to exist, and on the occasion that something like an implicit reasoning becomes apparent, it is patently obvious that it is a "reasoning" born of bias, parochialism and arbitrary dislike of the weird, not of a careful deliberation on what actually leads to the most informative, legible documentation of the body of work we have taken on the burden of Wikifying

Well, I note here that I also emphasize rules that are inconsistently applied, as I was referencing a rule that I believed would be inconsistently applied by its very nature. But disagreement does not entail that there's an active issue. And I strenuously object to your characterization of how R4 emerged. Might ultimately it not be the correct standard? Sure, of course. I think we can both agree old-T:VS is imperfect. But we know precisely what led to this view. Indeed, it's, I believe, the only case in T:VS that we don't fit into the strict valid/invalid dichotomy but instead say "it's complicated". It's pretty uncharitable to characterize it as you did. It requires us to psychologize the individuals involved and see deeper motives on that framing of R4 when they already allowed themselves to vote things off the island whenever they wished. (Now, if you wish to argue that bit in particular is what wasn't ever justified, I mean, fair enough, but I can think of quite a few reasons to do so. I'm sure anyone can if given five minutes.)

the basic kernel per which validity is ultimately a merging policy. It guides the degree to which we ought to cover similar elements of different works of fiction on the same pages vs. different pages. [...] The whole point of fiction Wikis lies in centralising data which even the most dedicated viewer could not hold in their mind all at the same time, and putting it all in a neutral, informative order that highlights points of connection from one work of fiction to the next. And this above all else is why "continuity trumps discontinuity" — why it must trump it.

Stream (The Hollows of Time), Man with the rosette, etc. You're suggesting not just a rewriting of T:VS, but a rewriting of how we merge pages far and away more extreme than the Homeworld principle. Maybe we should do this. But it's certainly, certainly not the case that this is how the wiki currently operates. We'd not just be rewriting T:VS, we'd be rewriting fundamental aspects of how we treat concepts, abandoning over a decade of precedent.

The old justification for "invalidity"'s existence was little more than at worst an artefact of canon-thinking on the part of the policy-crafters, or at best a half-hearted attempt to placate TV-purists who will never find our Wiki satisfactory anyway. Very probably there are good reasons to keep it around in some form, but the onus should really be on people who want it to be a thing to present a well-thought-out rationale for having such a thing, not the other way around.

The basic ideas for why, if invalidity does exist, R4 has a pretty solid case for being part of our considerations, are sketched out in Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?.

• If the author doesn't believe it's the "real" continuity, why should we? [...] There must be some metric by which we define our borders, or we'll be pickin' Rose/Dodo lesbian fan fic off the walls
• Tangerineduel has made the point that we can't believe a writer who says that their work is canonical. That's very true. But, in my opinion, he's incorrect on the reverse. I think we do have to believe a writer who declares, "Look, this isn't a part of the mainstream continuity." After all, we've believed it before. I don't see any rational argument for doing something different in this case.
• it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity will have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you do take it seriously, because they're acting againsttheir self-interest.

I don't quite agree with all of these, and I certainly wouldn't use the language in these as to how I would frame the discussion, it's very much of its time. But it's certainly the case that we have to cut off our wiki somewhere, and if an author tells us point blank "this is not supposed to count, this is just for fun, you can have your headcanons, but I don't think this happened in my view of the DWU, whatever that means, and I'd prefer if DWU stories, whatever those are, don't reference it", I'm pretty sold on us excising those from validity. I think it's about as good as we're ever gonna get. Other people then trying to force them back in with other stories referencing them is, honestly, not something I can bring myself to care about. The author's intent has been made clear. If we're ever going to invalidate licensed works, it's got to be these sorts of things, they have as clear a claim on this status as anything ever could. Ultimately should we invalidate licensed works at all? This is up to the wiki as a whole to decide. I note as well, the same forum argues fairly persuasively that if validity/invalidity exist we must never use solely narrative details to adjudicate this standard.

• Everything we've put outside the canonical wall has been placed there precisely because of out-of-universe arguments. [...] We must have an out-of-universe reason to throw it out. Otherwise, we're making a value judgement about the narrative. I'm not saying there can't be other, narrative reasons mentioned in the inclusion debate, but we have to have a valid out-of-universe rationale for exclusion.

Once again, time moves on. It's been ten years. But if the next thread is to be constructive, and specifically constructive in the manner Scrooge wishes it to be, we need to realize that it will require a radical rethinking of wiki policy on multiple different levels as to how we approach in-universe articles, not just as it applies to validity vs invalidity. The decision to purge narrative and continuity from our decision making procedures (I, again, believe, rightly) in this manner has been so deeply engrained in our policies that it will be a monumental effort to reverse it. And if we think this thread is long, I can only imagine how long a thread dedicated to discussing all of those issues will be. Najawin ☎ 03:58, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Replying in brief to some of the points:

• I did not mean to say you'd done anything odd in not putting up another Big Reply; the "it might seem unorthodox that it's me who…" was meant as a historical note for the benefit of readers scrolling through this page, who might miss this nuance and wonder why (at the macro scale) I'm replying to myself.

• As I stressed multiple times, yes, there are good bits in Old-T:VS; when I say that "it's" unjustified I mean that the unjustified bits that are unjustified, not that there's naught in there that's worth saving or praising! Nor did I mean to "psychologise the individuals involved"; I specifically avoided any language putting the blame on the specific individuals who wrote it up. Apologies for sounding a little bit Hegelian just now but I really was blaming the then-prevalent mindset in itself, beyond what any individual editor might have been expected to buck against.

• Man with the rosette is a very odd and controversal situation, and I object to you acting like it's the be-all end-all of policy in this matter. Compare the way we do Weapon (The Eyeless) (which was worked out in a thread), or the acknowledgement that The Magistrate=The War King in some sense (even if there is a long-standing argument from n8 that the pages shouldn't be merged, he's certainly never argued that we should banish any links to BTS). On the whole, as per T:HOMEWORLD we've long moved away from the "unless it's explicitly the same thing by name then we can't ever acknowledge the implicit links" mentality which you depict as sacrosanct. Talk:DARDIS is also instructive in this matter. Might I also ask why OOU reasoning is the only thing you'll accept on matters of validity, but IU the only thing you'll accept on matters of other mergers, when, as I have demonstrated, validity is largely a matter of mergers? It seems rather inconsistent to me. My standard for both is "is this more or less conducive to discussing the narrative connections between these accounts in a neutral way" (and as demonstrated by The Moment/Weapon (The Eyeless) such an approach permits other conclusions than the binary of "merge 100%" vs. "don't acknowledge the apparent connections anywhere except maybe ib BTS").

And perhaps most importantly… None of Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon? strikes me as a pertinent justification for validity/invalidity. None of it is free from canon-brain. Everybody involved seems to be accepting the premise that there ought to be such a thing as a validity/invalidity divide for licensed stories; why should something as esoteric as "whether the author means for it to be in continuity" affect our coverage? It isn't an objective fact about the text, and it's not clear that it makes our Wiki better, since, again, it objectively greatly hinders the writing of a whole swathe of terrific pages e.g. The Doctor's reality (Death Comes to Time). (And I stress once more, by the way, that I'm not sure what the hell you think "continuity" here means other than narrative connections, but oh well.)

Looking at the specific arguments you quote, they're full of frankly baffling non-arguments. "There must be some metric by which we define our borders, or we'll be pickin' Rose/Dodo lesbian fan fic off the walls" if it means anything is an argument for Rule 2, not Rule 4; and furthermore R2 considered as a matter of whether-to-cover rather than cover-as-valid-or-invalid, as certainly the intention wasn't that we'd have pages on all these femslash fics, only with a little {{invalid}} tag in the corner. And again I feel like there's a toxic "appeal to absurdity" going on in the specific example chosen; we are no more equipped to cover all "canon-flavoured", unremarkable "the Doctor lands on a planet and foils some Daleks" fanfics than we are equipped to cover all romance fics with supposedly 'unlikely' pairings. As clarified in the conclusion of Forum:Relaxing our fan works policy (within reason), the problem with the hypothetical Rose/Dodo fic isn't that it's Rose/Dodo, it's that there's way too many things like it for us to hope to ever do the job without sacrificing all standards of quality. The pearl-clutching about "but imagine, what if we had to say by one account Rose was gay" really is an irrelevance; when a licensed source says that, for example, Liz Shaw was gay and in a relationship with a modern-day Leela lookalike that's really quite alright.

Moving on to the second bullet point, the whole "we have to believe a writer who says their work exists outside mainstream continuity" is just flatly asserted without any good justification for why there even is coherently such a thing as "mainstream continuity"; why it ought to be what the Wiki cares about; or why a writer's notion of it should be thought to correspond to the Wiki's hypothetical definition of the same. "After all we've done it before" and keeping it at that is a comically weak argument for such a thorny and prima-facie-unconvincing position. The urge is immense to hop in a time machine and go back and reply "Very probably we 'did it before' because editors at the time were overcome with the pervasive canon-brain thinking that infects our fandom, just as you are, not because they had a mysterious good reason you can't articulate right now! Come on!".

The "sales" argument just depresses me. But if nothing else it bakes in a wholly unjustified idea that DWU stories are necessarily for-profit; how are we to judge a Rule 4 quote for a free online story then? Hmm? And in a broader sense it seems again intent on psychologising the writer involved for some reason, instead of looking at what's in the text, how the text connects to other texts, and what the optimal neutral way to document the fictional contents of that text might look like.

As for your own gloss… Firstly, isn't "and I'd prefer if DWU stories, whatever those are, don't reference it" accepting that some version of Web Theory's 'dead-ends' would have to be part of a formalisation of what we mean by 'intent not to be set in the DWU'? Interesting, I find this. As for the rest, "other people then trying to force them back in with other stories referencing them is, honestly, not something I can bring myself to care about. The author's intent has been made clear" just remains open to the same issue. It's not clear how your personal feelings on such a matter relate to what's best for the Wiki. The author's intent does not seem like it affects whether it's better Wiki-work to cover it as valid or not. Why would it be?

And all this is before we get into all the well-trodden secondary issues about how it's monstrously difficult to find any uncontroversial instance of an author making a mythical Rule 4 statement, because actual DWU authors do not use the word "universe" the way we do and we ourselves don't all agree on what we mean by "the DWU". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 13:41, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

As this thread draws wearily on, and we run about in circles in a manner not unakin to that of a headless chicken, the prospect of a new thread rethinking our validity policies from the ground up seems increasingly attractive (and is what I've been wanting for ages; I hadn't thought of the new thread bit, but the rethinking of our validity policies is something I've been wanting, and it follows that if we were to do this, we would want to have a larger input group than just us four (five?)). Our validity rules are dearly in need of a rethink, and, as I have said above, rule 4 seems no longer to stem from any coherent or logical principles.

The arguments in the Infinity Doctor thread don't seem to me to be very persuasive; the former appears, as Scrooge has already pointed out, to be an argument for rule 2 more than rule 4, or very possibly rules 1 and 3. But certainly not 4! The latter does not follow remotely; for a start, if this is the logical underpinning of rule 4 as it currently stands, then rule 4 as it currently stands (as has already been pointed out) is not remotely coherent! For a start, if this were to be our guiding light, then why are parodies and fourth-wall breakers considered invalid? "After all, we've believed it before". People have believed all sorts of things before, this isn't a particularly compelling argument.

it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity will have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you do take it seriously, because they're acting againsttheir self-interest.

Well, not really? We have, after all, established that it's common marketing practise to say that a series is "in its own universe", hence the validation of Vienna (iirc, may be using the wrong example). And what do we mean by continuity anyway? And Scrooge's argument for non-commercially released stuff holds. I do get that this was used as an example, rather than the argument, but still. (still what? heaven knows. Apologies for all these brackets, I'm rather tired, and fear I'm babbling. Oh, look at that, a babble!)

As to Scrooge's proposed way of doing things, and rationale, well... suffice to say I'm not entirely convinced, but I certainly think it makes a good deal of sense, if not a complete amount of sense (was that a coherent sentence? I don't think that was a coherent sentence, sorry). Just getting rid of rule 4 entirely still seems to me to be the simplest and most stress-free option, but whatever.

Yes, this is my opinion, and I have expressed it as best I can, which may not have been very well, considering the amount of sleep I got last night (and also note for posterity that I did not stay up late intentionally, but entirely by mistake, blasted insomnia). Was it coherent? Fuck knows. Was it elegant? Probably not? Was there a lot of random digressions and babbling? Yes, sorry. Can I be bothered to edit it? No. How long are these sort-of-rhetorical questions going on for? Not long, now. Did it reflect my overall views on this thread? Hopefully.

Thanks for reading (and well done if you read through all that), Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 19:55, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

It seems to me... bizarre to characterize our progress in the discussion heretofore as

[Scrooge has] demonstrated, validity is largely a matter of mergers

I mean, you've certainly claimed this. But there's no argument for it, it's just an assertion about what you view validity as being. Indeed, the pages we're discussing now are clear counter examples to this basic line of thought. If we cared solely about narrative connections, we'd have merged Weapon (The Eyeless) and The Moment. The fact that they're on separate pages with information present on each to talk about the varying accounts of the issue tells us that validity is not about merging pages. Everything present is in a valid work. If we were to merge works as you're suggesting we'd have one page discussing all of the competing ways in which the Doctor ended the time war pushed together. Now, of course, you realize that this approach is problematic to your argument, so you try to head it off at the pass. Are you successful?

My standard for both is "is this more or less conducive to discussing the narrative connections between these accounts in a neutral way"

No. This is completely subjective. It's arbitrary in practice, it's precisely the worst type of rule we could implement on this wiki. (And as an aside, the reason why I use OOU reasons for validity and IU for merging is that I don't believe validity is related to merging, since we very distinctly do not always merge like you're suggesting. It's about cataloguing. Which appears similar.)

It's also, I want to stress, not the only standard Scrooge has to hold. There's nothing preventing us from creating a page called "Time War Ending Device/Weapon/Whatever" and merging every account of the issue there and trying to cover things neutrally there. It would be horrible. But it would be neutral! And it would probably cover the narrative connections better than we do currently. So why don't we do this? If validity is about merges, if we want to discuss narrative connections in a neutral way, and that's all we care about, why don't we? We can't do this trick with, say, Richard III of England, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, but we can do it here.

None of Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon? strikes me as a pertinent justification for validity/invalidity. None of it is free from canon-brain.

Oh come now. Under this standard you can argue that all of T:VS is irrelevant as it's not free from canon-brain. It's not six months before the writing of T:VS. They're explicitly using "canon" in that thread to refer to proto-T:VS, with perhaps 2 exceptions.

"There must be some metric by which we define our borders, or we'll be pickin' Rose/Dodo lesbian fan fic off the walls" if it means anything is an argument for Rule 2, not Rule 4

I'll focus on this, the rest is really quite irrelevant to the point being made. The statement made is just that some boundaries must exist, by the reference to a particularly ridiculous slashfic. Since some boundaries must exist, authorial intent is perhaps the most easily defensible metric, as they've explicitly insisted that they "don't think it counts". Whether or not you buy this, w/e. But it's not an argument for R2. It's an argument for some boundaries and then, given that boundaries must exist, R4 following after. Two arguments. Not one.

the whole "we have to believe a writer who says their work exists outside mainstream continuity" is just flatly asserted without any good justification for why there even is coherently such a thing as "mainstream continuity"; why it ought to be what the Wiki cares about; or why a writer's notion of it should be thought to correspond to the Wiki's hypothetical definition of the same

Again, this happens to be the one example where the conclusion of the thread ended in "it's kinda valid". And the statement made is specifically referring to that work. But you're making a mistake here. Perhaps there's no coherent thing as mainstream continuity. Sure, whatever. But it's still kosher for a writer to say "even if there were to be a mainstream continuity, my work is not like that. Whatever you think of as mainstream continuity, my work is not that." They can define themselves in negation to the term, even without the positive example exists. And Czech isn't even arguing there that the wiki should care about the positive example. Just that those people who define themselves in opposition to it are taken at their word. Obviously the wiki to writer conversion is nuanced though.

The "sales" argument just depresses me. But if nothing else it bakes in a wholly unjustified idea that DWU stories are necessarily for-profit; how are we to judge a Rule 4 quote for a free online story then? Hmm? And in a broader sense it seems again intent on psychologising the writer involved for some reason, instead of looking at what's in the text

Publicity? But we can't look at the text to determine intent of DWU-ness, obviously. That would make us precisely as bad as our worst detractors accuse us of being, trying to decide what is and isn't DWU based on what we think from the text. Personally I don't think much of this argument though, I've read the ra.dw logs about Curse, Moffat actively encouraged people to watch it and donate by saying it wasn't real, and to donate to charity to "keep Curse out of canon".

Firstly, isn't "and I'd prefer if DWU stories, whatever those are, don't reference it" accepting that some version of Web Theory's 'dead-ends' would have to be part of a formalisation of what we mean by 'intent not to be set in the DWU'? Interesting, I find this.

Nah, on a first draft I didn't include that. I put it in specifically to better appeal to you, to make the hypothetical more extreme.

It's not clear how your personal feelings on such a matter relate to what's best for the Wiki. The author's intent does not seem like it affects whether it's better Wiki-work to cover it as valid or not.

I mean, sure. But it's just question begging, in the real sense of the term, to suggest that it's better wiki-work to cover it as valid. It was really the next sentence that mattered there, that if invalidity was ever going to exist, it was these works that would have to be invalidated. Do we want to invalidate things? We can discuss this. But I just don't see an argument here that gets around this issue, that if invalidity is to exist, these are the most natural objects to be invalid.

And all this is before we get into all the well-trodden secondary issues about how it's monstrously difficult to find any uncontroversial instance of an author making a mythical Rule 4 statement, because actual DWU authors do not use the word "universe" the way we do and we ourselves don't all agree on what we mean by "the DWU".

You'll find no argument from me that this is difficult. But I don't believe that such a thing is impossible. Indeed, I'm fairly confident that at the time of release Curse met these criteria. Whether or not we can trust the statements Moffat made, given the motives I referenced above, and how he's changed his tune since then, you know, w/e. But his comments at time of release seem to be sufficient to me. So it can be done. It's just rare. Najawin ☎ 20:19, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

I never said it was the only merging standard which would direct merging policy! I said it was a subset of the merging policy. Though for what it's worth a "Weapon which ended the Time War" overview in the manner of The Doctor's ninth incarnation might well have merit, as an overview coexisting with, and distinct from, the pages about the specific versions. I'm not quite sure what fine-grained difference you see between a merging policy and a cataloguing policy.

“Oh come on. (…) They're explicitly using "canon" in that thread to refer to proto-T:VS, with perhaps 2 exceptions.”

Apologies if I was unclear, but I'm not talking about their usage of the word "canon" — I agree that's largely irrelevant. I'm talking about "canon-brain" as I defined it in the Lost Closing Post, i.e. a frame of mind where the Wiki in some sense tries to describe a "real DWU"; where the invalid/valid distinction would correspond to statements (however tentative; attempts to make descriptive statements about this do not quite come from the same place as would a proper "canon policy" where the Wiki attempted to dictate this based on its own judgements) about what "actually" "did" or "didn't happen" in some fantasmagorical "mainstream continuity" of the DWU — as opposed to being a matter of whether sources are fit to be cited as evidence of a given fact. The distinction now highlighted at the top of Tardis:Valid sources, the paramount point "Curse of Fatal Death isn't a valid source for writing about the DWU in the main namespace" ≠ "we actively hold that no such events as its plot happened in the DWU we talk about"… I don't think that was at all clear in the thread.

I think it's hard to argue against the idea that people in the thread were labouring under that kind of mindset. The opening post from User:CzechOut alone is full of such tells as taking at face value the idea of a preexisting free-floating "normal DWU" that TID might or might not fit in with, and repeatedly fussing over whether we can "speak of [the book's] events with certainty". User:Tardis1963 chimes in with a complaint that the book "doesn't make sense in the context of DWU canon", again emphasising the weirdness of the events described in the book — very much saying "come on, we can't say this stuff really happened, can we? it doesn't make sense" rather than "on its own this stuff could very well have happened, the weirdness is neither here nor there, it's only that Parkin seems not to mean for us to cover it that way". Further down the page we again find Czech talking about things like Curse being "clearly outside [Who's] own continuity"; I think any reading of that paragraph as coming from a place of "obviously if we had no reason to think Moffat didn't for it to count, then it'd be all fine and dandy, it's only the BTS context that makes us conclude otherwise" would be extremely strained at best. Czech really does seem to be assuming that there is a general "mainstream DWU", and that certain sources describe events which actively Do Not occur "there" . Just look at his bolded rationale for the invalidity of Scream of the Shalka: "because RTD told us not to believe in it". Believe in it. That's canon-brain if anything is. Or see later him alleging that Parkin "wrote the story in such a way that it was canonically impossible". (And it's not just Czech: look at User:Josiah Rowe talking about how "We exclude Scream of the Shalka, The Curse of Fatal Death and Death Comes to Time because they're just not reconcilable with the rest of the Doctor's life".)

And yes, at other points in the debate, some people, at times Czech himself, try to step back from this and assert that "we don't look at narrative contradictions to determine validity". (I am incidentally somewhat gratified to see Josiah Rowe inventing proto-Web Theory, complete with dead-ends, at one point: "Curse is continuous in only one direction. It works as a (parodic) follow-on to the Doctor Who which preceded it, but not as a precedent for any of the Doctor Who which followed. TID is continuous in both directions: it builds on elements which came before, and elements from it are picked up in the narratives that follow".) But it's a noble aspiration that's entirely failing to save them from the weight of canon-brain. Again and again we come back to the fallacious, destructive notion that "is a source invalid or valid" has something to do with the question "did its events 'actually' happen in 'the' DWU", with nary any questioning of what this mythical 'the' DWU even means. One more Czech quote from the road: "If we're going to continue to allow the book to be cited, the only way I'd only be happy if we attached a note saying, 'Our community is of divided opinion as to whether the following statements accurately describe the DWU, because we disagree as to whether its source material is actually set the DWU.' Or words to that effect". He 100% participated in this debate (and steered, and ultimately closed it) within a view that validityhad something to do with "accurately describing the DWU", as though the DWU had a real external existence to which a source could be more or less "accurate".

That is what I mean by canon-brain. That is the fallacy which I think must be scoured from T:VS at all costs, and which renders any decisions made under its influence deeply suspect, albeit not necessarily useless. And I'm afraid that however historically relevant it might be, that crippling problem is all over the TID thread.

Moving on:

“The statement made is just that some boundaries must exist, by the reference to a particularly ridiculous slashfic. Since some boundaries must exist, authorial intent is perhaps the most easily defensible metric, as they've explicitly insisted that they "don't think it counts". Whether or not you buy this, w/e. But it's not an argument for R2. It's an argument for some boundaries and then, given that boundaries must exist, R4 following after. Two arguments. Not one.”

Okay, it's not specifically a R2 argument, I misspoke. But it is, as it were, an argument for Tardis:Covered sources. It goes "we do not have the manpower to cover everything, therefore there must be boundaries to what we cover"; it does diddly-squat to justify that there should be different ways in which we cover the sources we do cover. Therefore nothing like Rule 4/invalidity, whatever the specific criterion determining validity/invalidity, can follow from that basic argument in any way.

(I think it kind of did in Czech's head at the time, because as Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon? also evidences, this is an artefact of that dark, dark period in the Wiki's history when {{invalid}} sources weren't consistently allowed to have pages made about their bespoke in-universe concepts, meaning they meaningfully were covered less. But, I mean, that was self-evidently awful and we moved on from it a very long time ago; before even my time.)

And onwards:

“you're making a mistake here. Perhaps there's no coherent thing as mainstream continuity. Sure, whatever. But it's still kosher for a writer to say "even if there *were to be* a mainstream continuity, my work is not like that. Whatever you think of as mainstream continuity, my work is not that." They can define themselves in negation to the term, even without the positive example exists. And Czech isn't even arguing there that the wiki *should* care about the positive example. Just that those people who define themselves in opposition to it are taken at their word.”

But… Najawin. Why would "taking the writer at their word" on such an issue have any influence on Wiki coverage unless were granted the unjustified (and, you claim, non-actively-argued-for) premise that the Wiki normally cares about the positive thing? That is, why should the "taking the writer at their word" not consist of making an informative BTS note of "Fun fact, Lance Parkin apparently believes in a thing called 'mainstream continuity', and sort of placed TID outside of it", without that impacting the way in-universe pages are written in any way whatsoever?

“(…) But I just don't see an argument here that gets around this issue, that if invalidity is to exist, these are the most natural objects to be invalid.”

I, for one, think the most natural objects to be invalid are Rule 1 breakers. It is for them, ultimately, that I would retain the {{invalid}} framework if otherwise going along with Aquana's Rule 4 abolitionism. If we think of validity as a matter of "these sources are not to be used to make positive claims on in-universe pages" rather than a matter of "do these sources 'accurately' describe 'the mainstream DWU' or not", then sources which are held to be structurally deficient — ones, for xample, whose fictional boundaries are muddy in a way that makes it difficult to determine what precisely warrants coverage as fiction — have a much clearer justification for second-class-citizen "invalid" status than sources whose contents would be quite simple, and indeed often easier, to neutrally and accurately integrate with the in-universe namespace, but whose paratext happens to include authorial statements about being-set-in-'the'-DWU-or-not. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:18, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

But again, it's just not a subset of the merging policy. And this is really easy to see, there are times when it's wholly improper to do things with the valid/invalid distinction where it might be proper to do it with any other merged pages that could communicate with each other. Suppose a parody comic, a clear, unambiguous, parody comic with authorial statements and everything, that we've ruled out through R4, has a strip where the 10th Doctor in a style distinctly reminiscent of Titan Comics shows up. This 10th Doctor interacts with people in the strip, does a gag, perhaps even referring to the different styles of art, and that's that. Future strips reference this event. The author of the comic (who is known to be well read about weird DWU shenanigans) is asked about if he thinks this is "canon" and he explicitly says that he doesn't, he's doing his own thing, and he doesn't think it in any way impacts anything anywhere, it was just a gag. It would absolutely, positively be improper to reference these events in the body of the normal 10th Doctor article. This is as R4 invalid as R4 invalid gets, it even explicitly fails R4bp under current policy. But you can reference them in the BTS section, and there's nothing preventing you from referencing them, including even linking to the proper, valid, 10th Doctor, on the pages for the relevant parody comic characters. This is a situation that doesn't occur anywhere else, and it only occurs because in-universe articles consider valid sources "real"/"reliable" (in terms of our wiki-writing kayfabe) and not invalid sources.

I'm not quite sure what fine-grained difference you see between a merging policy and a cataloguing policy.

It's worth going over this again since it was so far up thread. Instead of your three step model I suggested that a more accurate model would be:

1. We determine what things to cover on this wiki and in what way, in line with T:VS.
2. We write pages, both IU and OOU, based on the decisions made in the previous step.

Apologies if I was unclear, but I'm not talking about their usage of the word "canon" — I agree that's largely irrelevant. I'm talking about "canon-brain" as I defined it in the Lost Closing Post

Yes, but I think TLCP suffers from much this same flaw. It psychologizes people based on the usage of the word "canon" to take them to mean things they very clearly do not. For heaven's sake, in order to show that the wiki as a whole viewed things as you believe you're quoting someone who has under 100 forum posts total over the span of 3 years. Clearly it's unfair to compare the new forums to the old, but just look at OS25, who was in this thread. His first 100 forum posts were in ~6 months. Some users clearly did think what you're claiming they do, yes. But there's no real evidence that it was operating procedure at the wiki level, and we have multiple direct statements from the wiki's earliest days saying the exact opposite.

Further down the page we again find Czech talking about things like Curse being "clearly outside [Who's] own continuity"

Yes! This is why thinking that validity was continuity was bad and I'm glad we moved away from it! During proto-T:VS they were doing just this! We're regressing 10+ years and it's a very bad thing! :P (I'm not sure what the big insight here is, this is precisely how wiki-canon was defined, and it was explicitly demarcated in opposition to headcanon in the Curse thread, they're not taken to be the same thing. "And remember, we're talking about whether it's canon in terms of our canon policy, not whether it's a part of your personal canon, or whether there is such a thing as a Doctor Who canon. In other words, can we take the events described in COFD or Scream of the Shalka and describe them as if they are part of the same universe of which the First, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors are a part?" Much of the rest of your concerns are about this same issue, but this is precisely the criticism that I brought up in the original R4bp thread - we're regressing to canon once again, just the loosest possible form.)

If this is what you mean by canon brain, by all means, scour away. But R4bp will not survive it. It will be its first casualty. If instead it's, as you allude to, our kayfabe of writing articles as if we're reporting on things that actually happened, I'm not sure how the wiki as a whole wouldn't be radically transformed by this scouring, if you mean we should erase this on every level. If you mean that just certain people couldn't keep it in their heads properly that, well, it's a game, we're performing a game, we can change the rules when we wish, I just don't think this is an accurate historical representation of what occurred in these threads. I can quote Tangerine and Mantrid on this quite extensively.

Why would "taking the writer at their word" on such an issue have any influence on Wiki coverage unless were granted the unjustified (and, you claim, non-actively-argued-for) premise that the Wiki normally cares about the positive thing?

I certainly wouldn't invoke "mainstream continuity" as my loadstone of choice, even if this was the term used then. Insofar as I think we care about statements of "mainstream continuity" it's because I think people will use them, often, as synonyms for "DWU", or "N-Space" or similar, depending on context. But I do think there's a reasonable claim to make that we could define R4 invalid works solely by people expressing their intent not to be part of an in group even if it's poorly defined in the first place. (Think apophatic theology here, right? Or skepticism of abstract objects, when abstract objects are defined through the way of negation. You can gesture towards these things and work with them still, even if it's difficult.) But we're very much getting in the weeds here, and perhaps we're best served in wrapping up this thread. It's been a long time coming. Though User:Cousin Ettolrhc may wish to have a say first. Najawin ☎ 03:37, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

“It would absolutely, positively be improper to reference these events in the body of the normal 10th Doctor article. This is as R4 invalid as R4 invalid gets, it even explicitly fails R4bp under current policy. (…) This is a situation that doesn't occur anywhere else, and it only occurs because in-universe articles consider valid sources "real"/"reliable" (in terms of our wiki-writing kayfabe) and not invalid sources.”

I mean, yes, it would fail current R4, but that's a bit of a tautological statement. What I am asking is why we have written R4 in such a way that such a thing fails it. There are two possible answers to that question — one is rooted in canon-brain, in "come on, it's not meant to have really happened, and we're here to write about what really happened", and is wholly and categorically improper; such that if that is the only reason R4 exists then R4-as-it-stands must go. Alternatively there could be an answer rooted in "this approach of putting the info about the strip on a different page e.g. Tenth Doctor/Non-valid sources seems like the most effective, informative way to document the various sources at hand, including the parody strip taken on its own terms as no less important a source to document than The Christmas Invasion or The Eyeless". Only this second argument would constitute a satisfactory justification for Rule-4-invalidity as a concept; I am more optimistic than Aquana that such an argument can exist; but I do not think this argument has been made in whole anywhere; and so we should try to find that argument, then go from there to figure out how it implies that we ought to draw the boundaries.

It's an issue that the TID thread hovered on the edges of, but in largely insufficient way. Take the quote you highlight: "In other words, can we take the events described in COFD or Scream of the Shalka and describe them as if they are part of the same universe of which the First, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors are a part?". It's so close, but it's subtly wrong. The answer to the question is self-evidently "yes", after all; we can. We can do anything. The question to ask is whether we should, provided we define our general Wiki duty as "cover all these sources, Curse included, as well as we can, with a particular focus to documenting narrative connections and shared concepts between all of them". (And I don't know how else you'd define it; this isn't rhetorical, I am open to a rival pitch of "what is Tardis Wiki even for" if you have one!) And furthermore here, again, the phrasing says "the" same universe "of which the First, Tenth and Eleventh Doctor are a part" as though there's just one, genuine, independently-extant "main Doctor Who universe" that we're trying to describe. There's no real awareness here that "the DWU" is an optical illusion that emerges from our stylistic decision to write with an in-universe perspective about all our valid sources — as opposed to a real external object which the I.U.P. facilitates the "accurate" description of.

I am by no means arguing against the I.U.P., our "kayfabe of writing articles as if we're reporting on things that actually happened". What I am saying is that we should bear in mind that it's just an arbitrary kayfabe on our part; that we should not act as though we expect all our in-universe sources to cohere into "the" "real" DWU in a way that we have any reason to think should match a preexisting free-floating concept, let alone the same free-floating concept as what Lance Parkin might mean when he says things like "the mainstream DWU". To put it another way this is me arguing against the whole endeavour of trying to translate between "the DWU defined by T:VS" (i.e. the body of work which T:VS recommends us to talk about in the main namespace using the in-universe perspective) and authors' quotes and intentions about stuff "really happening" in their personal concept of the main setting of Doctor Who. I think that's a completely misbegotten idea because it not only implies T:VS and T:IUP to be working to create a particular vision of what "the DWU" is — which I think it does only 'by accident'; it comes about from us writing neutrally in an in-universe way, side-by-side, about all things asserted by distinct writers and voices about their own DWUs, which is not the same nigh-fanfickish thing as asserting "imagine a universe where all these things happened, at once" — but furthermore, it bakes in this ridiculous, recursive assumption that the result of that endeavour would have any claim to being "the" central concept of what "the" DWU is, in a way that makes it meaningful and relevant to try and translate between it and individual authors' quotes about what they might call "the DWU".

In practical terms we probably could "define R4 invalid works solely by people expressing their intent not to be part of an in group even if it's poorly defined in the first place", but why, positively, should we do any such thing? That is the question which I think requires active belief in the proposition "the Wiki is trying to talk about 'the' 'real' DWU, an externally-extant if blurrily-defined thing" to be answered in the positive. And as that belief cannot be countenanced, I place the onus on you to find an alternative reason why we should define R4 in such a way; to tell me (and the rest of us) why you think it makes the Wiki better to write R4 that way.Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 11:50, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

I think everyone is best served if we leave the larger T:CS/T:VS discussion for the next thread, where more users can be a part, to be perfectly honest. And we've tried everyone's patience too much with this one as it is. I'll leave you the last word on that front, as a result. But I do want to call attention to

I mean, yes, it would fail current R4, but that's a bit of a tautological statement. What I am asking is why we have written R4 in such a way that such a thing fails it.

No you're not, these are just not the prior statements you have made. You're claiming that validity is about merging pages. Not that it should be about merging pages. That this is what the thing is. This is strictly false. If you want to say that validity would make more sense as a merging policy, based on the philosophy you've outlined above, I think that's perfectly within the scope of whatever the next thread would be (as I'm quite confident it would erase the T:CS/T:VS distinction for anything but R1 breakers). But that's just not what you've argued until now. You've repeatedly asserted that this is what validity is. From your original OL response to the latest. These distinctions matter. Najawin ☎ 20:59, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Keeping this short for the same reason - I meant to argue that this is the heart of "the coherent thing that the current partially-incoherent mess is striving to become", for which I think "validity is fundamentally a merging policy" is a fair gloss. (Oh — this is just a mirror of our earlier argument about whether the currentl Rule 4's DWU "is" the Web or not.)

Also, for the avoidance of doubt — I'm not sure if you're misreading me on this point — "a merging policy" should not be construed as meaning "a policy saying to merge stuff", but rather "one of multiple policies about reasons we might or might not merge stuff"; I am saying it is a policy whose practical upshot is that it guides when and how we merge things, not that it is a policy whose purpose is merging things, nor the only policy by which we judge whether to merge things. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:04, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Part of this is incoherent to me, there's clearly a distinction between "a policy that, coincidentally, impacts what pages are to be merged" and "a merging policy". The latter clearly requires purpose. I can't imagine in any other area we'd use language where potentially marginal side effects that didn't seem to be the perspective which the authors framed the policy in serve to characterize the policy. (I guess you could argue about, like, structural discrimination, but usually we characterize these policies as such not just because of unintended side effects but because some of the principle authors did think this way, even if all did not.) But of course it's not the only policy guiding when to merge pages. There's T:HOMEWORLD, for one. Perhaps a bit academic here. Najawin ☎ 00:46, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree with what Scrooge said in the latest Big Reply. And I majorly struggle (although I am trying) to particularly care about the difference between "should be" and "is" with respects to the parts of R4 being discussed here. As for Part 2, I elect it should be created at Forum:Reworking our validity and coverage policies, should link back to here at the top (but make it clear this thread isnt required reading), and should be opened by the admin who closes this thread. Said opening post should invite discussion on grounds of "should we split T:CS and T:VS?" and "how should rule 4 work?" as two sub-discussions, as the T:TF "Speedround" debates did (Perhaps specifics could be discussed at Forum talk:Rule 4 by Proxy and its ramifications: considered in the light of the forum archives before the new thread's opening? Wouldn't want it to run off the hinges, though...) Oh and yeah, no more Big Replies please, further major points should be held off until Part 2.Cousin Ettolrahc ☎ 17:43, 5 January 2024 (UTC)