Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-6032121-20190830190237/@comment-45692830-20200719091228

I apologize in advance for the wall of text, I did a fair bit of digging through old threads and paraphrasing for users who might come to this thread.

Okay. So this thread was mentioned in Thread:277798 and it piqued my interest. For a variety of reasons. I wholeheartedly agree with this split, and also think, after this split is done, a reconsideration of the validity of "non-narrative" works might be warranted, but that's outside the scope of this thread. So the thread has further context for anyone else who wants to discuss it, I went digging to see what information I could find on the current wording and history of our fiction/non-fiction/rule 1/narrative/non-narrative splits. I've found some stuff, but it's not actually something that seemed to be well documented or thought out, and searching forums is awful.

Forum:The_original_inclusion_debates has some small references to things that might be useful, related to discussion around merchandising and suchlike, but this really predates our current view of how to approach the subject.

What really starts becoming relevant are the following threads.

Forum:Inclusion_debate:_Death_Comes_to_Time

Josiah Rowe mentions that CzechOut has been working on the new valid sources policy, which had just recently been implemented, and expresses his view that the entire project is futile. Czech then responds saying the same thing, and how frustrating the task has been.

CzechOut wrote: I strongly resent the implication that the process of fomulating a valid sources policy is a "game" or that it in any way is done "for the amusement of admin". This is the least enjoyable thing I've ever done on the wiki.

And what stands out to me is this. I haven't been able to find a discussion about the original choice of validity rules. I don't think there ever was one. The comments here suggest, though I've been told not to interpret other user's comments, that there wasn't one. Now, I'm not criticizing CzechOut for going ahead and writing the validity rules as he did. Clearly it was needed, it was a tremendous effort, and it's had great success on the whole. But the history of "narrative" vs "non-narrative in-universe content" on this wiki seems to be a bit odd.

This edit on the valid sources page added in rule 1, 2 days after the page was created, meaning that it wasn't immediately seen as an obvious demarcation.

Later that year, Vultraz Nuva asked about rule 1 at Tardis talk:Valid sources, saying that at Wookiepedia, "reference works are treated as valid sources depending on their content--in-universe or behind-the-scenes. The aforementioned books contain both".

CzechOut then went on to argue against all non-narrative works being valid by addressing only two of the three, and saying the rule should be simple for admins to rule on without having to buy the books. Which again doesn't necessarily apply to the third one he left out, it might be deeply ambiguous as to whether or not it's narrative. See Thread:277798. Or how even an admin was confused about whether The Book of the War (novel) was narrative. Another user 2 years later pointed out that Wookiepedia didn't have the solution Czech thought it did and they still had to vote on some issues, and was ignored (not blaming anyone for this, stuff gets lost, but it would be wrong to ignore it).

He brings up specifically The Doctor Who Technical Manual and Brilliant Books, and the relevant threads for those are Forum:Brilliant_Book_2011:_a_valid_source?, and Forum:Canon_policy:_Items_on_which_policy_is_unclear.

We then have, in 2018, Scrooge come in to Tardis talk:Canon policy, and ask about the distinction, pointing out it's pretty porous and asking for the thread where it was decided, and a then admin tells him to read T:BOUND.

As stated above, such discussion does not appear to have existed, based on comments made. I don't think it's interpretation to say that. Again, this isn't inherently a bad thing. But it is something we should bear in mind if we discuss this thread.

Now, lastly, and most relevant to this thread, concerns the non-fiction template. Specifically this edit. This is the very first edit after creating the page, and it moved the RefWork template to the NonFiction template. Indeed, the documentation page still says it's predominantly for reference works.

So to recap, I've not been able to find a community discussion on the place of non narrative in universe works, some original discussions concerning them certainly happened without community discussion, people who have asked about them in the past have either had some of their points ignored or have been told that the matter was settled and to stop asking about it, and the template used for "non fiction works" (applied both in and out of universe) was explicitly a reskin of the "reference works" template (applied out of universe). All of the original decisions here are fine, but looking through the history of the issue, it seems to be this odd game of telephone, where people just assumed that there was a serious discussion of these issues in the past, and doesn't seem to have been.

Regardless of your stance on this issue, I think the historical evidence is compelling that there's more than enough reason to open a serious discussion on the place of non-narrative in-universe content within this wiki. This thread is a good first step in doing so.