Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-5442547-20130319195443/@comment-4139960-20130319202731

Nitpick: this wiki makes no assumption on what "is" canon, and I'm pretty sure the BBC have deliberately stepped aside from establishing one.

We base what "counts" as a valid source on how a story or the characters are licensed, or whether the creators and producers place it outside of the DWU's continuity (the latter was how Death Comes to Time was disqualified).

I've found this out-of-universe reason from User:CzechOut on Tardis talk:Canon policy: The truth is, it's not even a fully licensed story. It's probably the only televised story which has no reasonable claim of being fully licensed.

See, it was produced in such a way that no one fully owns it. It was a one-time-only, for-charity-only thing, so none of the actors gave permission for a repeat airing. This means that the likenesses of the various Doctors and companions are no longer legally licensed from the copyright holders (i.e., the actors themselves). The same is true of the "hit parade of monsters and aliens". This thing has the interests of tons of writers, from Pip and Jane Baker to Terry Nation to Robert Holmes, and none of that remains under license (if such was every specifically obtained). So, DIT is ruled out of bounds because it's a charity event. It is not a BBC-licensed story; it was the conduit by which a lot of individual actors appeared on Children in Need. It's a very different legal situation than that which obtained with Time-Crash, where the production as a whole was copyright the BBC, who then gave the video in toto over to CIN, but retained rebroadcast and home video rights.

[...] We're not ruling DIT out of bounds because it's crap. If being poorly aligned with other stories was the determinative factor for us, then John and Gillian, Attack of the Cybermen, Lungbarrow and a ton of other stuff would be out of bounds.

The only sane policy for determining valid sources is one firmly based on out-of-universe considerations only.


 * Is it properly licensed?
 * Has the BBC or the copyright holder indicated that they don't believe the story is a part of the mainstream continuity?
 * Is it obviously parodic?

These are the sort of questions that lead to a story being declared invalid around here. Let me say it one more time: We don't declare stories invalid just because they're difficult to place within continuity.

Now, I'll admit that I've skimmed that archive and not looked at the full discussion, but the point I found there has nothing specifically to do with EastEnders' fiction/non-fiction nature.