User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-1272640-20161223201024/@comment-188432-20161228193554

Bwburke94 wrote: @CzechOut: Where in Rule 4 is the copyright holder mentioned, even by implication? The four little rules "chart", for lack of a better word, was never intended as the be-all, end-all of validity on the wiki. It was meant to be a simplified guide to the whole page of text at T:VS. "Authorial intent" has always been intertwined with copyright, because this is the nature of the frankly weird legal situation in which DWU stories are told.

From the section "In-universe sources":
 * "Instead we are guided by the legal status of a work as well as the authorial intent. Those things which don't have the permission of all relevant copyright holders, or those which were never meant to be continuous with the established DWU, are excluded."

I think the reason that "authorial intent" has come to mean actual writers in some contexts is because many of the books are copyrighted to their authors. So the legal author of the work is in fact the person who wrote it. However, in terms of most performed stories, like Shalka, the legal author is not Paul Cornell, but the BBC, who owns the copyright to the main structure of Doctor Who itself.

So when we say, "What was the authorial intent behind Shalka at the time of publication?", we cannot justifiably say that it was to be truly continuous with the main Doctor Who narrative. Lorraine Heggessey and her production team made that abundantly clear through their public actions in September 2003, as well as stories that appeared in each DWM thereafter.

One more point. The body of T:VS says:
 * Except in the most obvious of cases, community discussion is required to declare a story invalid.

It has been mentioned upthread that there needed to have been some validity discussion on this matter in the past. There's even the hint that there's something improper or "fishy" about the fact that there wasn't a specific discussion about it.

But it was perfectly obvious in 2003, when Shalka was released, that Grant wasn't going to be the Doctor "for real" and that the RTD series was the genuine article. So when the wiki was set up in 2005, the memory of all this was fresh in the minds of everyone who was here. It didn't occur to anyone to suggest that somehow REG was "legitimate". Later, once we had more formalised rules about validity, there was no need to hold a discussion about it. It just was patently obvious that Eccleston was the Ninth Doctor and REG was, as Wikipedia still has it, only the "Shalka Doctor".