Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1272640-20161223201024/@comment-28349479-20161224064117

SOTO wrote: We've never discussed this? I see nothing new here at all. Scream of the Shalka's unquestionable invalidity as a source was already established in Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?, for example. It's kind of surreal to read that inclusion debate. It's pretty obvious that the four little rules hadn't been formalized then - the word "canon" is even thrown around willy-nilly! If we're reevaluating Shalka based on the rules currently formalized in the Valid Sources policy, it seems to fit: it's clearly licensed; it's an officially released story (twice or three times over, nonetheless); and by all accounts, the Shalka Doctor was clearly intended to become the new Ninth Doctor ... before RTD went ahead and got the TV license and chose to ignore it. As a result, the publisher has retroactively described it as being in a different universe, and that seems to be the grounds for its exclusion.

But I don't think that sort of retroactive justification counts nowadays. If Moffat comes out and declares that he thinks the EDAs are noncanon, would we declare them nonvalid? Remember that one of the main reasons for excluding Death Comes to Time was how the author knew about the Eighth Doctor and was deliberately choosing to cut him out of continuity. But didn't RTD do exactly the same thing with NuWho by excluding Shalka? Just something interesting to consider.

Do we really need to open discussions on everything we've ever slapped the tag on (or, as it were)?

I think the reason a lot of old decisions are being questioned is that we have the four little rules now, and they're clearly defined, and they have repercussions that reflect backwards pretty strongly on some of the older, less-formally-justified decisions, which are very disorganized and often self-contradictory to begin with. It's not really a bad thing in the growth of the wiki.

That said, you raise a very fair point that the pace needs to seriously slow down. No new material is being released about the Shalka Doctor, and most of it is currently covered under the "invalid" tag anyway, so if there were a list of inclusion debate priorities, this would be near the absolute bottom. I propose that instead, some of this energy should be channeled into making actual articles and edits. Shalka is already allowed on this wiki, if not as a completely valid source: if one wants to make an article about something in the Shalka stories, they freely can, as long as it follows the invalid naming and tagging conventions.

In contrast, more thoroughly debated series like Senor 105 and Faction Paradox are currently completely excluded. Right now, I see 13 open inclusion debates, just from the last week; at this pace, if and when a bureaucrat wanders through, they won't even know where to start. And what does that achieve? Do we really want to focus on stories that are already covered, where no one has anything new to add to the articles, at the expense of stories currently uncovered and full of potential? Patience might be hard, but it's necessary, and picking a dozen little fights won't possibly give any help the big ones. Just food for thought for OP and others.