Forum:How do we best include Faction Paradox on the wiki?

Pursuant somewhat to the conversation at Forum:BBV and canon policy and Talk:Handramit there arises a need to now define better the ways in which we can use material from the Faction Paradox spin-off series created and edited by Lawrence Miles. Because it is not at all a BBC series, but it arises from some material introduced by Miles to the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, its status is ... confusing, to say the least.

The series posits the creation of a so-called "Faction Paradox universe", which came into being when Miles was unhappy with the climax given to the faction Paradox arc in the books. From a narrative standpoint, this created an alternate reality. From what I gather, Faction Paradox is therefore something we cover because it's an alternate reality of the main DWU.

The problem with this stance is that Miles has no ability to use actual BBC concepts within his books. Thus, he can't openly speak of "Gallifrey" in his books, but must instead use the code word "the Homeworld". And there are many other "code worlds" throughout the FP texts.

The question for me is whether the events in the FP spin-off have any bearing on the DWU whatsoever. Can we just slap a redirect on, for example, the Homeworld to Gallifrey? I don't think we can. Miles is writing about a different universe, not just the same universe with different names.

I can see that we should cover FP here — it's a related universe to the DWU, and we can even trace the point of origin of that universe from the DWU side of events — but I'm thinking that FP information shouldn't be mixed with regular, in-universe information. Either we should leave coverage entirely up to the Faction Paradox Wiki, or we should in some way wall that information off on this wiki. It wouldn't be inappropriate, in my view, to put up nc on FP-centric pages — or to create a special FP banner, or possibly even to create an FP namespace.

It just really makes me squirm when I see an article that say things like:


 * Handramit was a Time Lord from House Mirraflex, who left Gallifrey when he was young. He settled on Onesia, becoming a naturalised subject of the Onesian Emirate. (FP: Of the City of the Saved...)

because you can search that book all you want, but you'll never find the words "Time Lord" or "Gallifrey" in it.

Just to be clear, I know this is a trap that I've fallen into myself. I'm sure I added material to Naples, for instance, from a FP source. But now that I think about it, it doesn't make any sense that I did. The Naples of the FP universe isn't the Naples of the DWU, so they shouldn't be on the same page. I think it would simply be much clearer for readers if we integrated more tightly with the FP Wiki, or if we created a FP namepsace, and then put a link on a page like Naples to either FP:Naples or w:c:factionparadox:Naples. That way, it would be very obvious to readers that there is a distinction between the DWU and the FPU. Cause, y'know, there is a distinction between the two.

Thoughts? 19:53:59 Mon 30 May 2011


 * Does this apply to the various Bernice Summerfield series produced after the BBC licence ran out? They're sort of in the same boat; integrated at one point, now not. I agree that, if it doesn't bluntly state it (which it doesn't), you shouldn't apply DWU terms to FP.Skittles the hog-- Talk 20:03, May 30, 2011 (UTC)


 * I think we should cover FP here on this wiki. In this case I don't think shopping it out to another wiki will maintain the integrity of information and style that we've established here.
 * I think the information can exist side by side, see for instance Nine Homeworlds and Nine Gallifreys.
 * I agree with Skittles, we shouldn't be applying DWU terms to FP universe stuff. I think the problem will be sorting out the explicit from the implicit. Where will our cut off point for DWU and FP stuff? How will we read the implied from the explicitly separate or linked?
 * However bluntly stating stuff vs implication/drawing conclusions is something of an issue as well as earlier this year we got into an argument over that very subject (Howling Halls).
 * I'm somewhat unsure of the best way forward; a banner like the nc or a namespace. Both seem like different sorts of overkill. I think a banner and disambigging FP stuff with (FPU) on the end of all articles in the FPU (Faction Paradox Universe) would be the better from an editing/linking POV, as a change in namespace more signals a definitive shift to a different part of the wiki. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:31, May 31, 2011 (UTC)

Faction Paradox revisited
I'm reviving this topic because I just added some details on the FP short story "Now or Thereabouts", which features a character who is almost certainly meant to be Kelsey Hooper from "SJA: Invasion of the Bane joining Faction Paradox. What's our policy on things like this? Can we add information from this story and Category:Faction Paradox members to Kelsey Hooper? Do we need some sort of official source confirming that Ceol is Kelsey and Maria is Maria Jackson? (I'm Facebook friends with Stuart Douglas, who edited this short story collection, and could probably get him to confirm if we wanted or needed that.) Were any of the suggestions above about a FP namespace or banner ever implemented? Should they be? —Josiah Rowe talk to me 02:48, April 27, 2012 (UTC)


 * As I've stated over on the [[Forum:BBV and canon policy] my perspective the Faction Paradox stories has shifted following the discussion over on that thread.
 * Namespace wise we're limited to a certain number of namespaces that we can utilise for various purposes and I don't think it wise to use them for this purpose. There is the Faction Paradox Wiki where this Faction specific information can go.
 * Policy wise if it's not in the narrative then it can't go in the body of an in-universe article.
 * I read the continuity section of the Now or Thereabouts short story and it's a fairly long bow to draw. --Tangerineduel / talk 16:48, April 27, 2012 (UTC)

[edit conflict]
 * Sorry, this question was asked in several different places, and we only came to resolution last month on it. By all rights, this topic should've been archived.


 * Here's the skinny: in the time since the wiki started, an actual FP wiki has since arisen at w:c:factionparadox.  Thus, the initial 2005/6 decision to accept FP material is deemed to no longer apply since it was based on us being the only possible Wikia home for FP coverage.  Thus we took another look at things over the course of the past two years.


 * We've decided at Forum:BBV and canon policy that


 * a) there is a thing called the FPU
 * b) it is a separate universe, created in deliberate opposition to the DWU.


 * Larry Miles might have the copyright to "Faction Paradox" in general, but he doesn't have copyright to any DWU elements. So everything has a different name, a new "code word" that the audience is supposed to interpret as being a certain BBC-owned element.  But the secret decoder ring ain't in the text. So the analogies are entirely out-of-universe.  Miles (and his stable of FP writers) are definitively not writing about Gallifrey, the Doctor or, as you've alluded, Kelsey Hooper and Maria Jackson.  In order to make these equivalencies, we would have to treat FPU material differenty than DWU material by allowing the introduction of OOU sources, like getting your writer friend to say "X DWU char=X FPU char".  And that ain't happenin'.


 * Therefore, as Tangerineduel put it, "we should excise the Faction Paradox series". It's not the same universe nor can it logically be interpreted as an alternate DWU universe, since Miles is operating without a BBC license of any kind.


 * The only question, really, is how to weed the info out.


 * An initial theory was that maybe we could keep it on the wiki, but moove it to its own namespace. The problem with that turned out to be that we have only a limited number of custom namespaces available to us, and it seems ill-advised to use it on somethin' that, at present, draws very scant attention by readers.  FP is linked only about 120 times in the main namespace, and fewer times than that in in-universe articles.  That's not really worth wasting a namespace on.  Moreover, we'd end up having to have separate articles.  You'd end up with FP:Houses of Parliament and Houses of Parliament, which is immediately confusing.


 * For the sake of clear presentation, adding an external link to the existing FP wiki is therefore the primary way we now need to indicate "this topic is touched upon in the FPU". If there is no equivalent article at w:c:factionparadox, then start it over there.  Scrub the in-universe portions of our wiki of FPU information.  Tangerinduel has olso reasonably suggested that information about FPU "changes" to DWU elements can also be placed within brief notes added to the "behind the scenes" sections of our articles.  And indeed in some cases, as with the more important FP characters and locations, it might be justified to be a concise note in a bts section saying, "This character/place/thing is known as in the FPU.".  However, I would think it's much more relevant to the FP wiki that certain of their characters are analogues of DWU characters than the reverse.  I mean, why do we care what's happening in a franchise that was created to deliberately get around BBC copyright?  FP is actually in a more tenuous position than the BBV Video stuff.  At least BBV were unambiguosuly using actual characters from the DWU rather than analogues.  16:50: Fri 27 Apr 2012

[/edit conflict]

Thanks, fellas. Hope you don't blame me for not realising that decisions about Faction Paradox had been made in a discussion on BBV. The line still seems a bit fuzzy to me: for example, some of the Faction Paradox audios contain things like the Sontarans and Sutekh, which are properly licensed from the estate of Robert Holmes, so should they be included or not?

I agree that from a licensing/copyright standpoint it's cleanest to say that once the shift is made from talking about TARDISes and Gallifrey to timeships and the Homeworld, we're not in the DWU any more. But there are so many characters and concepts from the novel lines which continue to appear in FP fiction that I feel that we should at least acknowledge their licensed appearances and "further adventures" here, even if it's not in the main body text. So on that ground, we wouldn't put Kelsey Hooper in Category: Faction Paradox members, but we could put a note about Ceol in, say, an "Apocrypha" section.

There's also a lot of material from FP books, especially The Book of the War, liberally scattered throughout the wiki. Look at Morbius, for example; a lot of the information on that page is, properly speaking, about the Imperator President, not Morbius. If we're going to go through and excise all that material, we should decide whether it all goes into the trash, or whether some of it could be kept in some other format. Memory Alpha sometimes acknowledges material that's outside their TV/film only remit by an indented paragraph in italics; do we/could we have anything like that? Or do we really want to delete it all, with only a link to the relevant parallel page on the FP wiki to indicate the extraneous details? —Josiah Rowe talk to me 19:43, April 27, 2012 (UTC)


 * No, it's we should be sorry for the thread name confusion. You've returned to us as we're emerging from a very long and detailed process of examining our canon policy, so we've not woven together these threads into a single, readable document yet.  The reason the BBV thread got the final decision on FP is simply because BBV published some FP stuff, and it was the last part of BBV output to be examined.  And I'd made some effort to separate out the FP discussion to its own threads (like this one), but we always kept returning to the BBV thread, just because that one had a kind of story list that we could tick off as we progressed.


 * And there's no doubt there's still detritus from the past to be found on the wiki.  The final decision to excise this material was only made about a month ago, so it's not been fully actioned yet.  It won't be the world's hardest task, however.  You're saying there's a "liberal" amount of this FP stuff on the wiki, but in truth there are a max of about 100 pages that are affected by it, excluding the out-of-universe pages on the books/short stories themselves.  The cleanup task is therefore probably not one that'll take acres of time.  We just haven't gotten around to it.


 * And the decision was generally for excision, with occasional allowances for brief mentions in BTS sections. I'm not at all in favor of building in a section called "Apocrypha" or a practice of the indented FP explanation.  Either method would be easily, easily abused.  I know there are some pages where you'll find a weird section called "Possibly apocryphal information", but such sections were never discussed here in the forums, so far as I'm aware, and they unnecessarily complicate the situation.  For simplicity, in-universe pages should only have two sections: the main in-universe body, and the BTS explanation. We've never established that apocrypha exists conceptually, because it would be too hard to explain what counts as apocrypha.  It's better to clearly define the borders of what we think of as canon — pushing everything else firmly outside the universe, and thus into the BTS "area".  Your Star Trek example doesn't fit comfortably in my mind, because Paramount's definition of canon is very much clearer than the BBC's.  Apocrypha works best as a term when there is an authority actually telling you what canon is.  We're not an "authority"; we're just trying to make our li'l wiki's boundaries easier for first-time users to see.  14:25: Sat 28 Apr 2012
 * Oh, didn't answer your first question. No, the presence of Sutekh and Sontarans doesn't improve FP's position with us.   Robert Holmes' estate was licensing the characters for use in another fictional universe entirely.  It's all about the central conceit of the narrative, not about the characters who appear.  There's no effort in much of BBV's output to establish a different universe.  Auton 2: Sentinel is still the DWU; we're just not seeing what the Doctor or other characters are up to.  The FPU is quite different to that.  It's an explicitly different universe.  The fact that there are "Sontarans" and "Osirans" in it means nothing to us.  There are humans in the Star Wars galaxy.  Does that mean that  the SWG is a part of the DWU?  (Jar Jar Binks notwithstanding, of course.)


 * We have to think in terms of administration though. What's easier?  Gettin' rid of everything FPU, or making a loophole for those stories which have Robert Holmes-licensed characters?  The whole thing is so tenuously related to the DWU, an exception simply isn't worth it.  I'm not even sure how you could possibly word it in a way that someone unfamiliar with FP could use it.


 * At the end of the day, all of this comes down to the fact that there is a FP wiki, which we prominently advertise on our front page. Let them handle all this stuff.  Let them deal with all the subtext.  Let them explain, in the context of their own universe, what's going on with all these analogous characters.  That's sorta their remit.  All we need to do is link to their content, and help them create some content based on what we excise.  14:41: Sat 28 Apr 2012


 * I can certainly understand why you'd reach that conclusion, and I'm happy to respect it. Similarly, I accept your argument about "apocrypha" requiring a clear canon against which to be contrasted (perhaps "deuterocanonical" would be a closer fit?), and restricting FP-only material to BTS is quite acceptable. But to my mind, even though the world of Faction Paradox is deliberately distinct from the Doctor Who universe, it owes so much to its roots in Doctor Who that it casts interesting light on its parent. Also, if Sutekh, the Sontarans, and Iris Wildthyme all show up in the FP Universe, then surely the relationship between that universe and the "mainstream" DWU hasn't been completely severed. (The analogy with humans in Star Wars is a bit forced — the reason for that is, obviously, that both Doctor Who and Star Wars are created by humans, for humans. If there were, say, Wookiees in Torchwood, the argument would hold a bit more water.)


 * As an aside, there's an excellent essay which touches on the contradictions between FP and the various Doctor Who lines here (starting on p. 28); it suggests the very broad ways in which, despite surface contradictions, the FP universe and the Doctor Who universe(s) can be seen as part of the same over-story. But perhaps the scope of such a story is too large for a wiki like this to handle. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 02:44, April 29, 2012 (UTC)