User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20170618182814/@comment-24894325-20170619004356

Now for the really subtle points raised by both OS25 and NateBumber, where we have both the full in-universe credentials and an unidentified cameo. If only we could write a general policy... Each case is different and usually there are at least some clues or connections that allow one to include such cameos into the main body of the article. I already used the example of Neil Armstrong in the same story. The amount of evidence needed strongly depends on the context. For instance, for the images present in this story:

• One was identified as Yuri Gagarin. I have perfect vision, but I cannot make out a face, not even a gender. It could as easily be the first woman in space (or any other cosmonaut, assuming that the make of the space-suit really pins it to Communist Russia, which I'm not sure about either).
• One was identified as Winston Churchill. But in DWU, Churchill looks differently: suspiciously like Ian McNeice, whose image was in fact considered by the production team. Does our DWU knowledge trumps RW?
• One was identified as Mother Theresa, who is already present in DWU as Mother Teresa without a shred of context in either case.
• Then there is a someone standing in front of a BBC microphone that I don't think anyone recognised so far. Is he a famous guy we missed? Or was he a fabrication by the Monks?

So in this very special case, I am not prepared to accept any images at their face value precisely because they are explicitly described as being forged in-universe. This whole discussion actually originated when this picture was used as in-universe image of Gagarin. See for yourself.

My personal behaviour in such cases is agonising over the details and trying to find some additional supporting connection somewhere in DWU. If I do, then I confidently put it in the article proper. If I don't, well, maybe I haven't looked carefully enough. In short, what I was trying to explain about Gagarin originally is that finding a small additional contextual or textual (or any really) connection, in addition to the visual/audio evidence of our senses, serves as a quality control, as a reminder of T:NO RW.

I wrote the very first message (not quoted upthread) initially having this specific forged image of Gagarin in mind. Perhaps, my mistake was that I allowed the discussion of one forgery to get general. The need to describe the method that would apply to such falsified in-universe images led to the most conservative formulation. I myself would not formulate a general rule in a more permissive way. A real-world bleed, once introduced, is very hard to detect and remove without reading someone's mind. So for me presenting information in BTS is the least of two evils by default. But I am happy to consider each case separately.