Talk:Fanboys (short story)

Title

Page was moved to "Fan boys" incorrectly. There is a space between the words on the dust jacket, but the table of contents page and the story heading of the actual book have no space. I've moved it back. Shambala108 ☎ 15:30, December 7, 2016 (UTC)

Unsourced

Moving the following here since it is unsourced and has been for a long while. Shambala108 ☎ 23:45, May 24, 2019 (UTC)

• Chris and David represent Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.

Validity

To save me the trouble and time of searching, can someone please post here the forum thread which decided this was valid thanks Shambala108 ☎ 01:31, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

Hiya Shambala. While I appreciate your concern, this story was given a spurious invalid tag by User:MystExplorer in 2013, based on a misconception that as this story was about a Doctor Who TV show, it couldn't be in N-Space, despite previous stories (Remembrance of the Daleks (TV story), Who Killed Kennedy (novel) and Bafflement and Devotion (short story)) proving otherwise. So really, it shouldn't have been invalid in the first place.

(Not to mention that In the Forest of the Night, The Terror of the Umpty Ums, and The Zygon Isolation reaffirm this.)

Epsilon the Eternal ☎ 01:37, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

User:MystExplorer also was the user that reverted this tag. So very clearly this is a case of a mistake being rectified, not anything sneakier. Najawin ☎ 01:43, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

I'm afraid that there's little difference in a "spurious" change from valid to invalid and vice versa. Especially when the invalid tag stayed unchallenged for seven years. I'm changing this back for now, and I'll look into the matter to see if this warrants an inclusion debate or not. Next time, ask an admin first before reverting a long-standing change, especially one concerning validity thanks Shambala108 ☎ 01:50, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

Shambala, you do realise that it was a mistake to have an invalid tag in the first place? It only went unchallenged because this was a short story in an obscure and expensive out of print book! So nobody actually knew better!

Epsilon the Eternal ☎ 01:53, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

Ostensibly it went unchallenged for seven years because very few users on this wiki have interest in the extended works of Paul Magrs, and it was only challenged because Epsilon has recently been doing the herculean task of going through articles related to these works and bringing the wiki up to date. If, since nobody seems to has downloaded it (and I apparently was the only person who even noticed its existence), I put a spurious edit on The Hollow Planet, it too would go unnoticed for quite some time. That doesn't mean that the community has tacitly agreed with the edit, it just means that the community is wholly ignorant as to whether the edit is correct. This reasoning may hold on more mainstream, populated articles. But not such obscure ones as these. Najawin ☎ 01:59, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Epsilon and Najawin. I mistakenly added that tag because I hadn't read the story and just assumed it was invalid because it was about Doctor Who. But since some version of the show exists in-universe, then the story is indeed valid. That's why we think the tag should be removed. MystExplorer ☎ 03:02, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

It also concerns an author insert character who appeared in another DWU story - one you yourself had previously asked about and there was a thread concerning just today, Shambala, Imaginary_Boys_. I think this one is pretty obvious. There's precedent for this sort of self referentiality, it's explicitly in a Doctor Who anthology, the user who originally thought it was invalid cedes it was a mistake and there's no obvious rule 1-3 concerns. Prima facie it's valid. If there should then be a non-inclusion debate, that's fine and dandy - I don't expect it to go anywhere, but whatever. But the default stance we should have towards this story is validity. Najawin ☎ 03:29, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

Obviously I need to make something clear here. When a matter is under discussion, there is to be no change until the discussion is resolved. Sometimes it can be hard to determine which is the original status, but in this case, the invalid tag has been here for seven years. Therefore the default state is "invalid" until an admin decides the discussion is resolved, whether here or in an inclusion debate.

It has occurred in the past where a new user or an IP user takes it upon themselves to change a story from valid to invalid or vice versa, based only on their own opinion. Obviously we can't have that. That is why admins make the final decision on closing a debate, and there is to be no changing while there is still a discussion. Shambala108 ☎ 13:54, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

With no offence to User:MystExplorer, the thing is that what happened seven years ago was a case of a then-new user changing a story's validity tag without any kind of discussion, based nothing more than a personal misconception about who "David" in this story was. The original status quo was that this page was valid; it was changed to invalid for flimsy reasons by one random non-admin, and no one noticed until now simply because this is a very obscure story indeed. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 14:36, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

Just going to correct a slight misconception here. This story may be obscure, but I'm one of the people who own and regularly edit the Short Trips short stories, so the original edit didn't go unnoticed by me. Shambala108 ☎ 15:10, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

…in that case, might I venture to ask why you let it slide then, instead of reversing the edit as you did Epsilon's, and telling Myst to create an exclusion debate in the forums? --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 15:17, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

Point of information, Shambala didn't just reverse Epsilon's, they first reversed Myst correcting their original mistake. It just strikes me as bizarre that we're not supposed to be able to fix our mistakes if they've been here for long enough without admin approval. Surely a user who has been around the wiki for a longer period of time can say "oh, I did this without knowing about xyz, which makes this edit incorrect", and that's sufficient reasoning for it to be undone until further discussion puts it back. For instance, I joined the wiki just a few months ago, I had no knowledge of Doctor Who (N-Space) outside of the Remembrance of the Daleks reference. It's not at all unreasonable to think that a new user would be unaware of that, especially since there have been a lot of recent forum posts concerning it that might not have had analogues at the time.

I can understand opening up an exclusion debate for this story. But the idea that the default state is invalidity is absurd. Najawin ☎ 17:46, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

I will echo what Najawin has said and note that there's no opinion involved here, just a misunderstanding on my part. Also, I do not think this discussion was worth banning Epsilon over. MystExplorer ☎ 21:43, August 21, 2020 (UTC)

Politely, have you made progress on deciding whether an inclusion or exclusion debate is needed Shambala? Najawin ☎ 00:38, September 6, 2020 (UTC)

I am once again, three months later, asking if we have movement on this issue. Najawin ☎ 04:25, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Alright, I'm going to call it.

User:Shambala108 is the only person on the Wiki to have said anything even close to arguing that this story should "remain" invalid — by stating that it hadn't been mere oversight on her part to fail to reverse User:MystExplorer's original edit. But that's not a rationale; that's, at best, a promise that there is a rationale. But in the several months since, Shambala has not elaborated on what that rationale was, despite multiple calls to do so. Shambala's rationale may well be a very good one for all I know — but that's the problem: no one, not other admins, not the community, has access to it. Regardless of how good the actual evidence is, imagine a judge keeping somebody in prison indefinitely because they have seen evidence that this person should be jailed — evidence that the judge refuses to hand over for review by anybody else. That is, if you'll pardon the expression, a due process nightmare.

I am, to be clear, not blaming Shambala for having failed to speak up here; she is, like everyone else on this Wiki, a volunteer, and her time is her own. But the fact is that, aside from Myst's mistaken assumption that this story had David Tennant in it (…and mind you!), no valid reason has yet been publicised why we should not treat this as a valid source.

And even if Shambala did come forward with her rationale, that is not how these things work. Unless it's a completely uncontroversial case (e.g.), even admins like Shambala and myself should not take it upon ourselves to individually invalidate a valid source. Nor, for that matter, to revalidate a story that had been ruled an invalid source in the Forums before.

If Shambala, or indeed anybody else, wants to present an actual, fact-based, T:VS-compliant reason why this shouldn't be a valid source, they can open an inclusion debate in the new Forums whenever they surface. In the meantime, this spurious invalid tag has evidently, and, again, for no publicly-known reason, been holding back User:Epsilon the Eternal's praiseworthy efforts to clean up the Wiki's overall coverage of Paul Magrs "lore". Well, I decree "no more".

Call it the restoration of due process, a matter of practicality, or even — since it is still December 25 in my timezone as I type this — a Christmas amnesty: PROSE: Fanboys is once again officially a valid source, and will remain so until such a time as somebody argues otherwise in the Forums, as they should have from the very beginning. Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 20:35, 25 December 2020 (UTC)