User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20121212231649/@comment-188432-20121219220537

Well, you've already done that for yourself:

OttselSpy25 wrote: Well, it depends on the story.

Good policy cannot proceed on that foundation. In order to run the wiki in a fair and balanced way, nothing can "depend on the story". All decisions about what we do and don't cover — what we will and will not allow — have to be based on a transparent process — not on your personal idea about the story.

And there must be some sort of consequence to declaring a story {{notdwu}}. If all we're doing is swapping out the article's tophat template, what's the point? If a user can come to such an article and find assertions about the continuity that story enjoys, then why have we bothered to declare it invalid?

See, the consequence of declaring a story invalid on in-universe articles is that all information from that story must appear in a section clearly labelled "behind the scenes". The consequence on the story page must be that no continuity be alleged. We're not denying the information to our readers; we're simply placing it on pages like Amy Pond and Rory Williams in the BTS section. That way the reader can clearly contextualise the information.

If you just put it on the story page, like any other story page, then the reader would almost have to think that we're staying the story is, in fact, continuous with the rest of the DWU.

Forcing the information, instead, on to BTS sections of individual in-universe pages resolves this confusion rather neatly.

Again, you can say something in the lead about the important points of {{notdwu}} stories. I wouldn't have a problem with something like "Kate O'Mara made her final appearance as the Rani in Dimensions in Time." You can certainly put something like that in the lead at Dimensions in Time.

But continuity sections don't lend themselves to that kind of out-of-universe observation. Take a look at the points actually raised at P.S.:

1. The Angels Take Manhattan implied that Amy and Rory had been sent from the cemetery to circa 1938, the era to which Rory was first sent.
2. The Angels Take Manhattan also implied that Amy and Rory remained in or about New York City. P.S. confirms this. Anthony's sister was in New York during their parents' lifetimes, both as adult River Song in the summer of 1969, and as young Melody and infant Mels in January 1970. (TV: Day of the Moon)
3. The Doctor and his TARDIS were momentarily in Manhattan twice during Rory's and Amy's temporal exile: once carrying the First Doctor in 1966 at the Empire State Building's observation deck; and again in July 1969, piloted by the Eleventh Doctor and carrying Rory's and Amy's younger selves on the side of a skyscraper under construction. (TV: The Chase, Day of the Moon)
4. Anthony is stated to be in his mid-sixties, and to have been adopted as an infant in 1946. However, The Power of Three and P.S. take place in or after 2020, by which time, Anthony would be in his mid-seventies, barring time-travel.
5. Rory says that he realizes "having a grandson who's older than you is so far beyond weird". Rory grew up with his own daughter and also knew her as a woman considerably older than himself. Even in their youths, Mels was already several years older than Rory and Amy, despite appearing to be their age.
6. Asylum of the Daleks established Amy's inability to bear additional children after Melody, resulting from the events at Demon's Run. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War)
7. Amy and Rory are the second and third former companions shown to have adopted children, after Sarah Jane Smith. (TV: Invasion of the Bane, Sky) Ben Jackson and Polly Wright were said to have operated an orphanage in India. (TV: Death of the Doctor)
8. Rory mentions that he bought a trowel, in response to Brian's suggestion. (TV: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship)
9. Brian is watering the plants when Anthony arrives, as he told the Doctor he needed to do. (TV: The Power of Three)

Every single one of those statements is a narrative connection. Exactly none of them highlight the behind-the-scenes significance of the piece. These are notes that begin with the presumption that this story is a part of the DWU.

And it is not, according to the objective metrics that we have established at this wiki.

Let's just look in detail at each point. If you eliminate the points with the phrases "implied that", "suggest", and the conditional tense in general, you'd get rid of points 1 and 2. Point 4 is eliminated because it states for a fact something that isn't: this thing about The Power of Three definitely being "in or after 2020" is logical speculation only. It's not the only possibility.

And then there's point 3. Which is one of those kind of statements that you find in our continuity sections that seems right, but is instantly wrong if you do what we're supposed to to do on this wiki, and consider all media. There are any number of stories in other media where the TARDIS happily lands in Manhattan. I can think of Martha the Mechanical Housemaid, The Monsters from the Past, and Salvation just for a start, and I think you could probably throw Time Bomb in there too.

Likewise, point 7 seems possibly untrue from an all-media perspective, and would certainly have to be investigated before being accepted on face value. In any case, noting the second and third instance of something is hardly as exciting as noting the first.

That leaves us with the things that are actually true about the narrative — but my God are points 5, 6, 8 and 9 boring. If this is your idea of "important" facts that we're denying our readers, you and I clearly work from different dictionaries.

But leaving our relative ideas of significance to one side, the point is that it didn't happen. Any of it. The scene didn't get made.

We're lookin' at a storyboard, not a story.