User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130325173913/@comment-188432-20130413205839

It's so hard to know what to do with your comments sometimes SOTO. You "understand and agree with all that" — yet you then completely dismiss everything I'm saying. Which is it?

Downtime is set in the same universe as the Doctor. In fact, one version of the story actually has the Doctor briefly in it. Vienna is not like that. The producers have said it's either "not in the Doctor Who world at all" or "another, locked off side-universe that the Doctor has once visited". Take your pick of those two creator-given explanations, but that is not the same as Downtime or P.R.O.B.E. or even your average episode of SJA or Torchwood which in no way even mentions the Doctor.

And indeed, you're quite wrong that they don't have a license from the BBC to use the Doctor. They could if they wanted to. They could just make Vienna a companion of the Doctor. They do have a license to use the Doctor. But they choose not to. That's completely different from Downtime or other RP/BBV productions.

These two things are not the same:

• a story set in the DWU that doesn't feature the Doctor
• a story not set in the DWU which therefore does not feature the Doctor

And, really, SOTO: "you must be hearing ['not in the DWU'] simply because you're expecting to]"? Why in the world would I expect to? I didn't bring it up. I wasn't on a witch hunt to get rid of this thing. I literally found a BF Christmas podcast in my iTunes feed that had somehow escaped my Yuletide notice, and Richardson introduced a new series by saying it's "not set in the Doctor Who world" and "I know people have been saying it's a spin-off of Doctor Who but it's not." I had no prejudice whatsoever towards Vienna. But the common sense interpretation of those words is that the creator is saying it's not a part of the universe in which the Doctor Who series is ordinarily set.

Your interpretation of what side-universe means stretches the English language to the point of incredulity. Just like your interpretation of "Doctor Who world". "Doctor Who world" does not mean "the world inhabited by a character named 'Doctor Who'". It means the world (in the dictionary sense of "universe") in which the show Doctor Who is set. And side-universe doesn't mean "a side of the universe". It means another universe that is "on the side" of the principal one – in exactly the same way that the mainstream Marvel Universe is "on the side" of the DWU thanks to Death's Head.

Now please stop trying to break the English language. :P

Instead, please explain to me how it's possible to allow Vienna but not allow the Marvel Universe. Tell me why it's better to allow Vienna than to have a simple authorial intent litmus test. I don't think that there's any doubt whatsoever that both these guys have clearly said, without any qualification, two times each, that Vienna is not a Doctor Who spinoff. So what I need in order to allow Vienna in this site is a way to explain in T:VS how a thing that is not a Doctor Who spin-off can be a valid source for writing articles about the Doctor Who universe. And I need to know why we would want to sacrifice a perfectly good, simple litmus test for determining the validity of a source on the altar of Vienna.

It isn't about this one thing, guys. It's about how this thing impacts broader policy. And it's not about you guys against me. It's about the voices in this thread being opposed to the voices in other threads. It's about determining a coherent, rational and simple policy that fits this discussion and others, so that the work of other users in the past isn't just tossed aside by this one discussion with good cause. If we allow in Vienna it will be an exception. So the reason for making the exception, in the face of one of the clearest statements we've ever had from a copyright holder, needs to be better than anything I've heard so far.

So far, all that your side has is that there's enough in what Spragg said to allow us to choose to cover it. Let me grant that to you for the sake of conversation. Even if Spragg gave us the opportunity to choose to cover Vienna, why would we want to? What's the upside to not choosing the easier option? How does it help the wiki to choose to make narrative continuity the basis for allowing a source to be valid?

I freely admit that our policy will exclude the very occasional story for which there might be a plausible narrative rationale for inclusion. But by focusing squarely on authorial intent and out-of-universe considerations, we keep in a heck of a lot more than we would by any other method I can think of.

Again, if you guys have anything better than "everything is included as long as

• it's an officially released story
• it's fully and properly licensed
• it's not obviously parodic
• there's no suggestion by the people behind it that it's not set in the DWU

I'm all ears. Until then, it is simply easier to automatically disqualify things that are described by the makers as "not a spin-off of Doctor Who".