User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20170306172600/@comment-6032121-20200505124116

If we add any final nails to this coffin it's going to look like a bloody Varga plant. But all the same:

I have been rooting around the old forums and old policy decisions to find more data to show that it is in full accordance with our validity policies for sequels to works considered invalid to be valid if there is no independent rationale for their specific invalidity.

Firstly, here is admin User:Josiah Rowe at Tardis talk:Canon policy/Archive 2, defending and explaining the switch from the old canon policy to the current "valid sources" system. "Now, you can say that by abandoning the word "canon" and shifting to a valid sources policy, we're trying to have it both ways: we don't make canonical claims, but we still get to draw lines about what does and doesn't "count". But that's just an inevitable part of the game we're playing here, trying to make a single coherent fictional universe out of nearly 50 years of stories by hundreds of different writers. When we list valid sources here, we're not making any claim about Doctor Who as a whole. You can still say that the Master and the Monk were the same person if you like. We're just saying which sources we're going to use here."

- Source

Here, Rowe puts in words what I and others have referred to several times in the course of this debate, namely the fundamental different between "invalid" and any concept of "non-canonical": a story being invalid means we can't cite it as evidence that X happened in the DWU. However, it doesn't mean that we can say X didn't happen.

With the specific "Master = Monk may still be true for all we know, it's just not stated in any valid source" example, the post references one of the great über-invalid works of licensed Doctor Who fiction, namely The Doctor Who Role Playing Game. It too is interest because it was pointed out as "non-canonical" already in the most prehistoric state of Tardis:Canon policy (back when it acted as the ancestor of Tardis:Valid sources, rather than the explanation of "Doctor Who does not have a canon" that it is now). And even back then, it was taken as read that this should have no incidence on the "canonicity" of stories which then reference events and facts from this invalid material. "Some material from the FASA game was incorporated into Virgin Publishing's Missing and New Adventures series. Such info should be cited to the NAs/MAs in which they appear, rather than the FASA materials."

- Ye Olde Canon Policie

In other words, even though concerns about "canon" are just about the only viable reason to disallow sequels to invalid stories (so long, of course, as they pass Rule 1 — that is to say, make sense as complete stories in their own right without needing to have experienced the original), the Wiki already considered references to invalid material perfectly okay even back when it thought the DWU had a canon.

And of course, even though Storm in a Tikka and a handful of its bedfellows were eventually made invalid in contradiction with this earlier status-quo, it is worth noting that the Wiki certainly didn't apply this "new decision" to the example cited in the old canon policies, namely references made to FASA material in the VNAs and Missing Adventures. I don't think there has ever been — nor should there be — a serious proposal to make Lords of the Storm invalid for relying on the FASA game's backstory for the Sontarans, or indeed for Genesis of Evil to be invalidated by its being in large part a retread of elements from The Dalek Dictionary.

This thread is nearing its third anniversary. I hope I have made clear the extent to which I know our Admins & Caretakers are busy people, but three years is three years, and while the final call remains an admin's to make, I see little room for doubt left.
 * 1) invalid stories being referenced, as if they had "happened", by later stories, does not make the sequel/prequel invalid by the spirit of Tardis:Valid sources, and that this has been the case from the earliest days of our validity policies;
 * 2) Storm in a Tikka, Fixing a Hole and Rescue are, even now, the exception and not the rule on the Wiki in being doomed to invalidity by their references to stories which aren't even invalid because of Rule 4, but rather because of Rule 1 or Rule 2.