User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130325173913/@comment-188432-20130413220316

Trebligoniqua wrote: As I said before, using terms like "common sense" and "dead cert" doesn't make them so. You are not addressing the ambiguity everyone else sees and saying there is no ambiguity. Given Revanvolatrelundar, presumably an admin, restored the page, it's not even a consensus among the Admins. That's why I asked what your position in the hierarchy was; was it somehow greater than that of other admins. Do I have a higher position on the wiki than Revan? Nominally. I am a bureaucrat and he is an admin. But this is not an hierarchical issue. I do not feel myself superior to Revan or Josiah or indeed you.

I think that, by virtue of the fact that virtually no one has waded into the choppy waters of actually writing policy, I have a unique outlook on this problem. It must be satisfied. This cannot be decided on the basis of how many people agree with me. It only matters whether the policy which emerges from this debate is clear, simple, and easily understandable.

We went into this debate with a policy that said, "The existence of narrative continuity is not the basis by which a story is considered valid on this wiki. What matters is whether its makers intended it be set in the DWU.  If there is doubt on that matter, then it cannot be a valid source here."

The statements by Big Finish do make this an easy case, even if you dislike the certainty with which I express it. With respect, you haven't been here for past debates. You don't really know how comparatively clear this is. There's no reading of tea leaves necessary here. Richardson and Spragg have made this extraordinarily clear by saying four times "this is not a spin-off of Doctor Who".

It seems to me that the majority of the thread are looking at this case in isolation. I'm looking at it as one of a series of inclusion debates we've had and assessing it as a comparative dead cert. … you have not addressed the new "fact" that the investigation would reveal if you are correct: The Shadow Heart takes place in an alternate timeline/reality. How do you address this? Should all characters that appeared in that story now be said to be inhabiting a parallel reality? Again, I haven't listened to it or Burning Price or Acheron Pulse, but if there is a story thread across, does that mean those two stories take place in the same alternate reality? To the contrary, I've addressed this in every post. This sort of messiness is precisely why the existence of narrative continuity is not used to determine validity. The whole virtue of T:VS is that it doesn't matter what the continuity is. What matters is what the makers/copyright holders have said about it. And they've said that Vienna is not a spin-off of Doctor Who.