Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20121212231649/@comment-188432-20121218214300

At this point, OttselSpy25, I have to tell you that I basically don't understand your positions at all.

Here are but a few of my problems with your assertions:


 * Earlier in the thread, you were arguing that stories had continuity like any other stories.  Now you're saying that maybe that continuity isn't precisely the same.  Maybe for these stories it's about some sort of connection between similar stories, as between the two Dalek movies.  In order that our readers not be confused, I would argue that if you're going to include a continuity section, then it must mean the same thing across all pages.
 * "... there are quite a few non-narrative stories ..." What?  Seriously, what?  Could you please define a "non-narrative story"?
 * "We shouldn't segregate stories by how many there are." Again, what does this mean?
 * "We don't even call it cannon [sic], we call it coverage." You keep making this assertion, and it's wrong. It's just flat out, totally wrong.  In no way does the administrative staff of this wiki equate canon with coverage.  We are very up front about it.  We don't assert canon.  We only say, for practical reasons, "these stories can be used to write articles here, and these can't."  That's it.  I'll say it as many times as necessary: Doctor Who has no canon.    There is a meaningful difference between "canon" and "coverage".


 * Let me try explaining with an example. Let's say that I wanted to have a wiki about Batman.  I could make that wiki about all versions of Batman.  I could make it only about the ones that are in the so-called DC Animated Universe.  I could make it only about live action versions.  I could make it only about the Adam West Batman.  There are a lot of options I could choose from.  But none of those choices would be wrong.  It's just that if I wanted to edit about the Adam West Batman on a site that was only devoted to the DCAU Kevin Conroy Batman, I'd be outta luck.  The admin there would simply say, "Sorry that's not what we do here."


 * And that's all we're saying here. We've made a choice — after long, long debate, mind you —  that there are certain criteria we're going to use to determine which of those very few BBC-released stories we won't use to write our articles.


 * "Keeping important info from readers about the subject is wrong." Again, the entirety of P.S. appears on our site. We're not keeping anything from anyone.  The whole scene is right there in the infobox.
 * So deleting any useful information by someone who does consider it canon is insane. You must agree that some sort of boundaries must be set. I mean, if some person came in here and said that Doctor Who was a part of the Knight Rider universe because in one episode, a Knight Rider character dressed up as Captain Jack, you'd probably quietly delete that information and move on.  Yet, in doing so, you're trampling on their personal canon.  And this is the difference between canon and valid sources. If we were to try to edit this wiki on the basis of some created canon, we'd never get anywhere.  The DWU is so amorphous, so without definition, you could never really write any article if you depended upon some notion of "canon".  So our policies have nothing to do with canon.  They have to do with what's valid (according to these four little rules) and what's not. By sticking to those four rules, rather than some perceived "canonicity", we are able to define the DWU in a way that people can look at a story and immediately know whether it belongs on this site  without having to resort to opinion.
 * "...stubbing the pages..." Removing the continuity section does not convert this article into a stub, according to our definition of a stub.