Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130325173913/@comment-188432-20130408144222

Cult Of Skaro wrote: But even so, in this case, the head of BF unambiguously said this is 'the same' version of Vienna from The Shadow Heart. Yeah, this is the point that a lot of people don't understand about our inclusion policy. A thing can have narrative connections to the DWU and yet still be excluded from the wiki.

I mean, after all, fan fiction has narrative connection to the DWU. What's the point of fan fiction unless it's totally hooked into what you see on TV? If it's not narratively connected to the DWU, then it's no longer fan fiction but original fiction.

Therefore, inclusion debates are always settled by out-of-universe, real world, behind-the-scenes factors. This is the very point of our four little rules. Does the author have a right to tell her story? Are the characters being used legally? If not, it's fan fiction, no matter how "good" the narrative is.

Likewise, when a producer tells us they don't mean for something to be set in the DWU — as both Richardson and Spragg have said — that's it. Game over. There's no wiggle room.

If we relied on narrative continuity to make these decisions, the wiki would become absolutely unworkable, because so much of the narrative contradicts itself. If we instead went on the notion that narrative links were the basis of inclusion, we would then start excluding a ton of things that were meant, at the time of publication, to be taken as a legitimate extension of the DWU, like the John and Gillian era of the comics. We'd also have a really hard time with television stories, such as the fundamental incompatibility between the vision of the mid-late 21st century given in The Seeds of Death versus that seen in The Waters of Mars.

Assessing authorial intent allows us to keep in many more narratives than some subjective assessment of narrative worth. Yes, in this case, the way we do things means that we're not covering something you possibly have bought and are enjoying. But it's an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good of the wiki.

At the end of the day, we now know that Richardson did not misspeak in December. He did mean to say that this product is not set in what we call on this wiki "the DWU". The producers have made it clear that they do not intend this as a Doctor Who spin-off, so the website—written by other BF employees—is advertising contrary to their stated marketing intent.

So that's it. That's all we need to know to exclude it. On the scale of the various inclusion debates that this wiki has had over the years, this one is a slam dunk. We rarely have such a clear explanation from a producer/copyright holder. In fact, I'd say his is the very model of the "rule 4" exclusion.

(Please note that to stop the back and forth on removing the tag on the page, I've re-deleted the page. There's no doubt that at least a  tag is justified, so the removal of that tag is vandalism and specifically contrary to T:DELETE.  Thus the best course of action is simply return to the phase of this process where the article was simply deleted on the basis of reasonable administrative interpretation of existing policy. It's more useful to think of this as an "undelete discussion" or a "review of administrative action" than as a discussion of whether to delete.)