User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-28349479-20161216221639/@comment-1046-20161221031642

Admin here, albeit one who isn't really active any more. (In fact, I just noticed that I was still listed as a "Frequently active administrator" at Tardis:Administrators, and moved my name to the "Currently inactive administrators" part, as that's more accurate.) For what little it's worth (which is very little indeed) I'm also listed as a "helpful user" over at w:c:factionparadox:Paradox:Administrators, which more or less means that CzechOut asked me nearly 5 years ago whether I wanted to be an admin there and I said thanks, but I didn't have time.

Anyway, looking at this discussion and the Four Little Rules, I do think that the preponderance of evidence supports including FP here, and re-integrating the material from the FP wiki (which I agree is in an appalling state) back here, as suggested above.

The one remaining conflict I see is the section of T:VALID that talks about "analogous elements", which I think is still in conflict with FP. But that section seems, in retrospect, to be a somewhat clumsy kludge justifying the decision made at Forum:BBV and canon policy, which in turn is based on a misinterpretation of Faction Paradox and Lawrence Miles' intent. That discussion, although it tries to avoid basing decisions on the c-word (which we were still using at that point, IIRC), continually returns to questions of whether the FP material can be reconciled with Doctor Who material. For example, here's CzechOut:

"Things happen to, for instance, the London of the FPU that don't happen to the London of the DWU. It's a different universe. .... FP is not a crossover; it's a totally different universe that derives from rights held by an author who once wrote in the DWU. It's confusing to us, because FP is a concept that exists in the DWU, but all of the FP-only books exist in explicit contradiction to events that occurred in BBC licensed fiction."

I think that NateBumber and the FP authors in this thread have shown that "explicit contradiction" is not correct — or, at least, that FP is not "contradicted" by Doctor Who material any more than The Next Doctor is contradicted by Flesh and Stone. But that's not even the point. If we're looking at whether there is a way to put FP material into The Complete Story of the Doctor Who Universe, we're asking the wrong question. As T:VALID's discussion of Rule 4 says, "a story cannot be ruled invalid simply because it is narratively discontinuous with other stories."

I think we would do well to re-integrate Faction Paradox into the wiki, and remove the paragraph about "analogous elements" from T:VALID.