User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-31010985-20191101112654/@comment-5918438-20200118093356

Part 1: Foreword

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has put their time and energy into these discussions, helpfully exploring the context and content of these four stories. It is always important, when the community is of two minds, that we clarify the boundaries laid out by policy, making sure that new decisions fall in line with past deliberations, and always with an eye for future applicability, for the precedent we're ultimately laying down.

It's here that policies like Tardis:Valid sources are really brought into practice, and all perspectives are immensely valuable in the work of shaping out each case as they come. After all, it's often been necessary for us to condense years of local precedents, having mixed in all sorts of outside evidence, before a truly consistent approach can be found.

And more often than not, the push and pull brought out by the community during these debates make way for the solution to rise up, out of a growing understanding, out of the points made and the level of specificity so often sought after. However, when disagreements turn away from points and counter-points, and into the realm of ad hominem attacks, they are never allowed to continue down this trajectory. When it comes to attacks on other users, we take a no-tolerance approach.

Part 2: Forum policies

It cannot be stressed enough how seriously this wiki takes our forum policy. It's what makes all this possible. I will quote briefly from that policy, but really, it's all there, in quite a bit more depth.

Just remember: personal attacks won't be tolerated, and information about any un-released story in any medium is not allowed. Also, you should make every effort to stay on topic in any given thread.

I did say briefly. That's it.

Even though it started strong, this thread ultimately had to be closed after participants wound up violating policy along all three of the above offences. Most importantly, personal attacks directed at other users are not permitted anywhere on the wiki, including the forums. More specifically, the substance of arguments made in the forums should always be based on the facts of the case, on each other's arguments (note: this is not equal to "on each other"), or in matters of precedent and policy.

Never should we see ad hominem attacks cropping up instead, focused on attacking the character of other users, rather than the substance of their arguments. Disagreements are expected, to be sure, but any efforts to discount the contributions of other participants (and, strangely, non-participants) through the means of personal attacks are clear violations of policy. Potential slander being made about real world persons or businesses are also not to be taken lightly. But perhaps most prominently: given the need to stay on topic, the public forum is really not the place to be airing out issues of a personal manner.

Such behaviour between users is never tolerated. And some cases require a little more than getting rid of a post or two to get things back on track. So as T:FORUM outlines, you should expect in such cases that an admin will come along and enforce this. "When your post may be deleted or moved" covers this in greater detail. Leading us, at last, to...

Part 3: Going forward

Given the circumstances requiring this thread's sudden closure, I think we'd all still like to give a fair shake to the matter of whether these four stories ought to join others of their kind on the list of valid sources. I would like to give everyone a chance to participate, in accordance with T:FORUM this time around. As a result, any user is permitted and invited to start a new discussion in a few weeks' time, without any need for new evidence.

This will be to clear the air with final arguments, and it will have a tentative close date of 3 weeks from the time of the first post. Any messages violating T:ATTACKS or T:SPOIL will be promptly deleted. If they do occur, do not respond to them. This will be the last chance for those wishing to prove that one of the four rules for validity has not been cleared.

Additionally, until such a time as evidence presents itself to suggest we should not be covering these stories, the pages will remain on the wiki. To quote again from policy, this time Tardis:Valid sources:

"Except in the most obvious of cases, community discussion is required to declare a story invalid. In these discussions, sufficient evidence must be provided that the story either doesn't have permission from all relevant copyright holders, or that there are solid non-narrative reasons to believe the story does not occur in the DWU."Tardis:Valid sources

Part 4: Where are we now?

As of the time of this thread's closure, I do not see that sufficient evidence has been provided to show that these stories are any different to comparable releases from Candy Jar Books or BBV Productions, which are founded on licensing agreements with individual authors (or their estates). These have a long (and storied) history of being covered. And naturally, we have precedents for short stories released exclusively for the web (see: WEB short stories), including those released in blog format (see: Christmas Special), for stories released for free that make use of known licenses (see: Free Comic Book Day and The Paul Spragg Memorial Short Trip Opportunity) and finally for crossovers (see: Stories that crossover with non-DWU series).

Tardis:Valid sources tells us that we need sufficient evidence that one of the four little rules has in fact been broken, if community discussion is to declare these invalid. But all here seems to be in order.

In point of fact:

"Stories licensed by an individual author are generally allowed here."Tardis:Valid sources

The first collection containing these stories has a copyright note on, well, the copyright page, which lists exactly whose rights have been acquired, and the introduction to this same release explicitly states these are "commercially licensed" stories.

We even get this more extensive account:

"Every story required not only that I get the rights and approval to use every story element I borrowed, but that the creators of them get the opportunity to make sure they lined up with their own vision. The fun thing about that was that every little thing I ended up having to change made the stories better: creators, of course, know their characters well!"James Wylder

Part 5: What does all this mean?

So, a little history. In the 2011-12 original discussion on BBV, Forum:BBV and canon policy, CzechOut establishes that (1) a quote from DWM in which the makers of P.R.O.B.E. (and not the rights holders) discuss at length how they went about acquiring a license from the BBC, along with (2) the "acknowledgement at the end" itself that the two parties had agreed on, provides a "pretty comprehensive statement of the legal picture". In this discussion, each BBV production was dealt with on a case-by-case basis. This one was one of the more clear-cut examples, for reasons which map out exceedingly well to the evidence that's also been established here.

Conversely, for The Killing Stone, CzechOut opts instead for us to wait for "incontrovertible proof that it had the BBC's blessing", because the story made use of "[Sarah Jane Smith], the Fourth Doctor, the Brig, Benton, the Master and Yates": a tall order for small-business rights acquisition which he finds "just seems so unlikely". So a statement and an acknowledgement have always been sufficient grounds to determine the legal situation for a story, except in those most obvious of cases (like where a small outfit like BBV, which usually acquires rights for DWU stories from individual authors, seems to be using BBC-owned elements without any clear record of actual rights acquisition). Or in other words, as also quoted above, "This thread has firmly established the need for some sort of legal usage of characters in a story before we'll touch it. We didn't actually have that concept before."

The same idea came up again in a more recent case, where The Lego Batman Movie was correctly denied a page, after much discussion, because no indication was given in the movie's extensive credits that permission had ever been obtained from the Terry Nation estate for their use of Daleks. As outlined in that closing post, again by CzechOut, the film had to be excluded (that is, not even given a page) because there were no behind-the-scenes statements, and there were no credits given at the end of the film to indicate these rights had been acquired. So we decided not to touch it.

Here, however, we are in no shortage of such evidence for rule 2 — with credits attached to the stories, and statements from the publisher, and statements from some of the authors that they have in fact been involved — and, honestly, I'm not sure that rule 4 has ever been clearer.

Multiple quotes have been drawn up from the publisher indicating, quite clearly, that the intent is for these stories to cross over with the Doctor Who universe. The most salient piece of information, which formed the basis of this thread — a quote from Wylder which plainly reads, "You can read all three of the 10,000 Dawns stories set in the Doctor Who Universe (for free) here" — was, of course, absent from the last discussion. Another reads, "Getting to play around in the edges of the Whoniverse has been an honor". No matter how you slice it, the intent (which forms the basis of rule 4) has been directly stated.

Where does all this leave us? Early on, this thread established that the quote from Wylder which had been central to the last closing statement, regarding "a whole new universe" and "a new science fiction universe", were in fact referring to the 10,000 Dawns universe, with which these short stories are intended to cross over. To be clear, we will not be covering the 10,000 Dawns universe.

Instead, we take the same approach as with Assimilation², indeed the same approach as with Death's Head, and the same approach as with Decalog 5: Wonders. That is, we only look at covering those stories which are intended to be set in the Doctor Who universe. All others do not so much as get pages.

The final part

So, you may be asking, is this unusual? Slightly. As established at Thread:208233, as elsewhere, the universal admin approach here is usually to conduct research — independently, generally as an admin who has not yet participated in discussion — and then to both present these findings and come to a final decision within the same closing post.

But it seems to me this is an unusual situation: twice has a thread on this topic had to be shut down for improper forum use. So in case this discussion, cut short, might have led back to good-faith, productive dialogue, I'd like to make sure that everyone is given the opportunity to participate within the confines of policy, so that all voices can be heard.

Once again, in order to prove that these stories should be treated as invalid, sufficient evidence needs to be provided that one of our four little rules has not been passed.

Some other points have also been brought up which do not belong here, but which absolutely can be explored in their own forum threads. First off, the reference book brought into question does not fall within the topic of this inclusion debate. Any suggestion to cover this would require its own discussion. As well, any new rules being proposed that would affect all stories that are released for free, which would necessarily affect Big Finish and Titan output that up to this point have not been questioned, would also need to be the subject of its own Panopticon debate.

I will end with a quick reminder that, in the final thread, this is the golden rule which must be followed:

Argue the point, not the person.Tardis:No personal attacks

I wish you all happy editing, and that we should encounter only good spirits in the course of our discussions in the days and weeks to come.