Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20121212231649/@comment-188432-20121227013804

OttselSpy25 wrote: "We don't" does not mean "We don't care about this story", "We don't consider this an actual story" or "this is less of a story than any other".

"We don't" essentially means "For one reason or another, this story is not within our perception of the DWU". It's not logical to say "Because we do not consider it to be within the DWU, let's remove all this important and useful info. You are twisting the meaning of a very simple sentence. We write our articles from an in-universe perspective.  If we don't consider something a part of that universe, then it necessarily means that we cannot use that source to write our articles.  Therefore, there is no "important or useful info" — according to what is important or useful to this wiki — left to be had.  So there is no difficulty in removing the information.

It's not like we're depriving the world of the info. There's still. There's still the DW Reference Guide. There's still Shannon Sullivan's site. There are still any number of sites out there that will give you all you want to know about Dimensions in Time.

But we have a right as a wiki to an editorial viewpoint. And it is, on the basis of many, many discussions which happened both while you were an active editor and long before it, that we will write our articles as if there is such thing as the DWU. We will pretend that the DWU is real, and that we're looking back on it from a time when that universe no longer exists.

We must therefore know what comprises that universe. And we have decided that this universe is created by stories that are officially released by the appropriate copyright holders. Over 99% of all such stories are valid here, but there are less than 1% which fall foul of a set of other criteria — mostly requiring the story not be parodic or unfinished.

These we don't cover.

We don't allege that they have some sort of connection with other DWU stories, because it is our editorial choice to do so. And that's an end to it, really. It is simply a choice. There are other ways to build a wiki, but the inexorable march of our inclusion debates has tended to move in the direction of excluding the parodic, the unfinished, and the deliberately extra-continuous.