User:Najawin/Sandbox 5

Threads to be created when the forums are back
Please note that anyone is more than free to edit this, it'll allow us to coordinate, just make a new section with your username.

Other users can feel free to take on some of these later threads if they want, these are roughly arranged in the order I plan on doing them

 * Validity of Can I Help You?
 * Dabbing Doctor Who (N-Space) stories, see Talk:The Woman Who Lived, or, more generally, discussing making (N-space) the generic dab term for "out-of-universe elements that exist in the DWU", see Talk: Give-a-Show Projector (N-Space)
 * Validity of Author biographies in The Book of the Enemy (see talk page)
 * Faction Paradox N-Space vs just Faction Paradox in popular culture and mythology. (see Talk:Doctor Who (N-Space))
 * Reopening Thread:232143 due to Talk:Petronella_Osgood%27s_sister.
 * The big one; Czech has asked that the discussion on Curse of Fatal Death be reopened because he has nondescript new evidence. User:Najawin has also remembered an old comment from Eruditorum suggesting that Moffat said something on rec.arts that might weigh against validity. I found it. Oof. (Further rec.arts comments, though not the original one mentioned at Eruditorum, can be found here, here, here, here and here.)
 * (Conversely, DWM 560, released since the closure of the thread, adds new evidence to the valid side by seeing a BBC-sanctioned publication doing a whole dossier on Curse which treats it as DWU to the point of including speculation as to how it connects to other elements of continuity. This recent interview with Moffat also has him looking back on Curse as potentially canonical, "as much as The Doctor (The Brain of Morbius)".)
 * Really, really dodgy topic, potentially opening discussion on When Times Change..., will need to do a lot more research into this. (See Talk:Legacies (short story), for instance, there is almost certainly more elsewhere, but I have no idea where.)

Epsilon

 * One Born Every Minute inclusion debate.
 * Verity - need a statement from James Goss though. (Asked him twice, no response. Bugger.)
 * A change to T:VALID that will stop "decide your destiny" type stories being flat-out invalid, as a precedent has been set by Flip-Flop for handling stories with alternating narratives. [Note from Najawin: A recent change to T:VALID might make this hard to argue. I don't know how you want to proceed, just noting this though.]
 * A clause to be added to T:NO RW, so that details from obscured props can instead be used from the real world prop. If that makes sense. This could be handled in the already open Thread:272817 though.
 * Various other threads/inclusion debates that I do not want to disclose information on.
 * I too also want to reopen Thread:232143.
 * A thread to allow invalid stories to go in lists of appearances, seeing as lists of appearances aren't in-universe.
 * Explaining why in-universe versions of Doctor Who episodes, etc, will be nigh-on impossible to dab with any sense. (This Wiki encapsulates nearly 60 years worth of content, so things will not always be easy to understand. Hence why I've put behind the scenes notes making it absolutely clear that these are in-universe counterparts.)

Chubby Potato

 * Inclusion debate for the narrative portion of The Making of Doctor Who (The Trial of Doctor Who/The Travels of Doctor Who)– It passes the four rules, but has been discounted because the rest of the book is a reference book and/or because it says the Doctor's name is ∂³Σx². Also how to handle the fact that the Table of Contents splits it into two even though it isn't.
 * How to handle The Doctor: His Lives and Times (although, this should probably wait until the outcome of the actual non-narrative fiction discussion, which I very much hope comes back soon.)
 * Disambiguation terms – T:DAB TERM needs more/better dab terms. Not all existing ones are covered there, and not every narrative work of literature is a short story or a novel.

Scrooge MacDuck

 * T:DAB STORY should apply to all fiction. The rule that stories don't automatically get dab terms serves no practical purpose and just leads to inconsistent dabbing (since a number of invalid stories do need to be dabbed anyway to prevent ambiguity). This should also apply to non-narrative fiction: the dab term "(feature)" should be universalised.
 * The AAiT&S story Infidel's Comet was deemed outside the Wiki's bounds due to the mistaken belief that it merely considered a brief allusion to a Sontaran, akin to a cultural reference to Who. However, BV are advertising it on the basis of the appearance by a Sontaran, with a "#DoctorWho" tag, and, having listened to it, it actually also features a Zygon in a non-trivial role and a cameo by an Auton. The explosive cobalt blue, from the Sontaran story Old Soldiers, is central to the plot of Infidel's Comet. This is clearly licensed spin-off territory. A thread will be needed to determine whether it's valid or an invalid story in Rule 4 term, but I can't imagine it'll stay off the Wiki wholesale based on these new developments. (EDIT: …Okay, now they've literally said "it is set in the Doctor Who universe in so many words. Yowzah.)

RadMatter
OTOH, while it would make some amount of sense, we're really never going to deem an out-and-out fanfilm like Time Rift a valid source. But we could stand to give it a real-world, invalid page similar to our 'coverage' of the Audio Visuals.]
 * There should be a discussion in regards to retroactive coverage/validation. Stories such as the the Cyberon home-video and audios Cyber-Hunt and Cybergeddon should be covered on this site, despite having no preexisting DWU concepts at the time of their release, due to the fact that their characters and concepts were originally intended for DW and have subsequently appeared several times in valid releases. Another release that should be discussed in regards to retroactive coverage is the fan-film Time Rift which introduced the recurring character of Adrienne Kramer.
 * [Note by User:Scrooge MacDuck: I'd support the first proposal with the caveat that the story still needs to pass Rule 4: i.e. it needs to have been intended all along to be set in the DWU. Without that criterion, we'd end up having to cover Star Trek and most Marvel Comics!
 * [Note by User:Bongolium500: I believe Phoenix Court should also be included for similar reasons as it introduced Iris Wildthyme and has been confirmed by Paul Magrs that the Iris in this series is the same person as in the DWU. This would fail under User:Scrooge MacDuck's above stipulation. However, if that were to be changed to be that stories can be retroactively included into the DWU, that would allow this series in while still stopping us from having to cover Star Trek and Marvel Comics.]
 * [Note by User:Epsilon the Eternal: same goes for Magrs' other novels such as Exchange, Hands Up, and The Ninnies, etc, as characters and concepts from these were prominently used in his stories covered by the Wiki.]
 * […User:Scrooge MacDuck again, and my admin note was not an invitation to turn this thing into a forum-thread-by-any-other-name, you know. But for the record, Magrs "views everything he writes as being set in the same universe", so by definition, if at any point he has identified that universe with the DWU, all his stories would pass my standard too. Don't worry.]