Tardis:Valid sources

When you write an article on our wiki, you need to cite your statements. Knowing which sources are valid is therefore crucial to the writing — and reading! — process. Without a clear sense of what stories will be discussed here — and which will not — your writing may be considered untrustworthy.

Therefore, only valid stories can be used to describe an "in-universe" topic. For instance, if we were writing about Sarah Jane Smith's experience of the country of Italy, we could use anything within The Masque of Mandragora or even The Ghosts of N-Space. But we could not use something from a 1986 fanzine in which Sarah Jane was described as having visited Florence.

For our real world articles — that is, articles about behind the scenes personnel and other things tagged with — it's equally important to know what sources you can use. After all, some girl in South Dakota writing on ilovetennant.blogspot.com shouldn't be considered a valid source for our article about David Tennant.

In-universe sources
The Doctor Who universe is a tricky place when it comes to defining what should "count" and what shouldn't. You should make sure you understand why the DWU isn't like other franchises before you go on. Suffice it to say here that any reference guide about the DWU must, of necessity, make certain choices about what to include – and what to kick off the farm. Our methods have long stressed the need to include as many different tales as possible, even if they are in explicit narrative contradiction. We specifically do not consider the quality of the narrative when deciding whether to exclude a story. 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. Except in the most obvious of cases, community discussion is required to declare a story invalid. In these discussions, sufficient evidence must be provided that that the story either doesn't have permission from all relevant copyright holders, or that there are solid non-narrative reasons to believe the story does not occur in the DWU.

The main rule
It is important that we as a community work to a common understanding of what "counts" and what doesn't. Otherwise, our articles will gradually become "muddied" over time, with some people viewing certain stories as "okay" and other people thinking the opposite. Over the course of several debates in our forums, one concept has emerged as central to this wiki's day-to-day operations. We believe that only stories that "count" are those officially licensed by the relevant copyright holder — usually, the BBC.

This guideline is super-easy to apply:

Is a televised episode of Doctor Who licensed by the BBC? Obviously. Is a Torchwood book that you find at your local bookstore licensed by the BBC? Clearly it is. Is an SJA audiobook that you've downloaded from AudioGO a properly licensed story? Most assuredly. Most of the time you're safe if the story bears a logo of one of our shows and the phrase "© BBC".

Things broadly allowed by this rule
For people who like to have these things explicitly laid out, here's a list of ranges that we view as valid sources for in-universe articles:

Trickier stuff
Our simple little rule works to help you understand what stories "count" on this wiki well over 90% of the time. The rest of this document is concerned with the other 10% — the marginal cases that are a little less clear.

When the licensor isn't the BBC
The wrinkle that is difficult to understand for those who are new to the world of Doctor Who is the phenomenon of the author-owned character. Copyright for individual stories of Doctor Who has long resided in the individual writer, unless the British Broadcasting Corporation made other arrangements. This meant that a lot of characters — particularly species — were owned by individuals, not the BBC. Clever publishers were therefore able to release stories connected to Doctor Who without having to ask for the BBC's permission. Stories licensed by an individual author are generally allowed here. Click here for a detailed list of these kind of stories produced by BBV Productions, the major publisher of them. The major publisher of this kind of story was BBV Productions. Typically, they would approach people like Robert Holmes (or, more precisely, his estate) and get permission to write, say, a Sontaran story that didn't involve other characters from the DWU. They then ended up with a story that was, in effect, fully licensed, because they got permission from the owner of the DWU element, and then they created wholly new characters around that copyrighted element.

Our approach is to generally allow these sorts of stories. A rose by any other name is not as sweet. If the story consistently uses alternate names for DWU characters, places and situations, it's probably not allowed. The big exception to this is the story that contains analogous elements. As a general rule, if something is an approximation of something else in the DWU, then we don't fool with it. The classic example is the independently-published Faction Paradox stories that are not a part of the BBC Books range. Because writer Lawrence Miles does not have a license to DWU elements other than the Faction Paradox organisation itself, he must resort to using "code names" for Gallifrey, the Doctor, TARDISes, the Master and any number of the basic building blocks of the universe. Moreover, his "Faction Paradox universe" is an explicit reaction against the Faction Paradox narrative seen in BBC Books. It's therefore not the DWU at all. In early 2012, after a year of debate, we put Faction Paradox outside our fences.

When the licensor is the BBC
to be added