User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-33695797-20200828040941/@comment-45692830-20200828195909

Now that Scrooge has commented, let's see what little I can add to this thread.

On the status of Trak Nar
So, User:Trak Nar was not an admin at the time. This can be seen by looking at her edits, she asks User:Tangerineduel to do admin work both in November of 2008 and February of 2009. If she were an admin, she would have been an admin for an exceedingly short period of time.

Ease of Use
Epsilon is referring to this exchange here, where User:CzechOut does indeed say that, as the following:

"Not sure what your alternative would be. You'd actually require the admin staff of this wiki to look at every single book ever made and decide on a case-by-case basis? That's completely unreasonable, I think you'd agree. After discussing the matter since 2005, it became abundantly clear that we need a rule that was simple to administer — and that didn't require our administrative staff to outlay huge amounts of cash [...] [O]ur rule that "only stories count" is immensely practical. It's something we can enforce without having to buy and sit in judgement upon every single release.[...] But I can't think of anything less fun in the whole world than looking at every single scrap of "non-narrative-but-in-character" writing and judging the validity of each one, individually. So we're not doing that. Nor are we inventing some kinda halfway house of "tie-in material" — whatever that's supposed to mean. It's either valid or it's not. Period. All rules of the wiki have to be clear and easy to administer."

- User:CzechOut

I'll come back to this, but it's not exactly a ruling, rather, an admin talking and allegedly explaining the origin of policy to a normal user.

On the idea of "Three Little Rules"
Interestingly, there originally was only three little rules. This edit was added in two days after the new Valid Sources page was created, showing that this wasn't seen as an obvious demarcation or obvious rule needed at first.

Ease of Use
In the prior discussion between Czech and Vultraz Nuva, Vultraz said, concerning Wookiepedia, "reference works are treated as valid sources depending on their content--in-universe or behind-the-scenes. The aforementioned books contain both". In effect here Vultraz mentions three types of works. Those that are entirely bts reference works (AHistory would count here, but also something like About Time), those that are entirely in-universe (The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic :>), and those that contain both (The Brilliant Book 2011). Czech responds by dealing with two of the three, ignoring those that are entirely in-universe. That is to say, even if his reasoning is correct, and the reasoning given for excluding The Brilliant Book 2011 is correct, that same reasoning doesn't necessarily translate to The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic. The only reasoning that can be found against these types of "fully in universe reference works" is the doxa that narrative sources are better.

It's usually quite easy to tell when there's a fully fictional reference source, and even if it isn't, do admins actually buy every piece of Doctor Who merchandise asked about on the forums? (I'm unaware, this isn't rhetorical) This argument just doesn't seem to hold up.

Let me note here that even if someone is hesitant to fully accept the main proposal or Scrooge's proposal, I think I compromise position can be worked out, wherein a non-narrative fictional work is valid if the entire text it's published in is fictional. So this would discount The Brilliant Book 2011 but would include some of the old Dalek Annuals.

"Nothing is lost"
A common refrain you might hear from people who are in favor of the current state of affairs is that nothing is lost by the way things are - we can just put the information in the behind the scenes section and move on with our lives. First of all, one issue has already been mentioned, the lack of continuity for invalid stories. Next, do we really believe that most users who read a page also read the behind the scenes section for that page? Simply by upholding this dichotomy you've made these sources second class. Which, as we can see by the history, appears to be the intent. And finally, just to see an example of how the wiki might very well be harmed by a source being ruled invalid, look at Thread:280332 and Yssgaroth. The information from Cosmology has been quite well incorporated into the body of the article, and imagine how the article would flow if it was removed and placed in the BTS. The article becomes actively worse if this occurs, but because I truly believe this source is non-narrative, and the rules of this wiki means that makes it invalid, that seems like what's going to happen.