Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130325173913/@comment-188432-20130413153730

You are kind of mistaken. My "position in terms of the hierarchy of the wiki" is that I am one of the principal authors and executors of policy on the wiki. This means that I have to have read the hundreds of forum discussions that have taken place already, and then synthesise them into policies that are as simple and easy-to-follow as is possible. This not only respects the work of people who've come before, but it hopefully stops a lot of needless debates by including points that have already been raised.

In terms of past inclusion debates — for which most of this thread's participants were not around — the decision to delete The Memory Box is an absolute dead cert as I mentioned, but was sort of ridiculed for, above. In a number of earlier inclusion debates, it was easily accepted that if we'd had as clear a statement as the one we got here from Spragg and Richardson, the matter would have been definitively settled.

That is why the debate started with the tone of notification. I reasonably believed, based on past inclusion debates, that this thread was merely technically required by the text of T:VS, and that there would not be any significant resistance to it.

Instead, people have raised objections that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to incorporate into current policy. From the perspective of someone who maintains and administers policy, it is not at all clear how policy can be written which is based on a number of the objections that have been raised here. I do not see a way to write a single, clear, simple, understandable policy that, among other things:
 * includes the Vienna universe, but excludes the Marvel Universe, given that both include one visit by the same incarnation of the Doctor
 * allows situational meaning for the phrase "not a spin-off of Doctor Who
 * respects the functional difference between BBV/RP stuff and Vienna. In the case of the BBV stuff that we allow, the producer is absolutely saying that P.R.O.B.E. and Downtime and the like are set in the DWU but just don't involve the Doctor himself. Here the producers are using a character that existed in an adventure with the Doctor—just like those in P.R.O.B.E. and Downtime — but they are explicitly saying that it's not set in the DWU. We have to treat the two cases differently.
 * stresses the importance of using out-of-universe rationale for disqualifying stories, but, in this one case, requires that we consider the narrative
 * doesn't contort the meaning of ordinary words, like universe and world, to such a degree that they can't be commonly understood.  The skill set required to write articles here, in which we very carefully parse words to determine exactly what a character said, is not the same that's required to write good policy.  In policy writing, we're looking for simple, ordinary, likely meanings — not technically-possible-but-unlikely meanings.  Policy cannot concern it self with a Clinton-eseque search for the definition of is.  Or universe, for that matter.

So, yes, the bar really is whether I believe it. Because if I can't believe it, I can't write it or execute it. And I just can't conceive of a way to allow in Vienna that respects past inclusion debates.

I also am very much interested in finding a mechanism that will drastically reduce the time admin have to spend on these inclusion debates. Dig enough around here and you will find pages and pages of material where various admin go through days and days of debate over individual stories. THat's time we could have been spending on actually making the wiki a better environment for other users.

We have a simple mechanism before us that will largely turn inclusion debates into inclusion notices. Does the producer/writer/copyright holder say the story is not set in the DWU? If they do, then we don't cover it. Simple. Easy. Elegant. That question frees us as admin from having to relitigate the fundamentals of the policy every time some publisher tries to attract a few thousand Doctor Who fans people to a project they can't legally say is related to Doctor Who. Best of all, it's based upon the previous work of the community as a whole. This simple litmus test isn't my invention, so much as the logical distillation of what a number of users have said through the years.