User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20170618182814/@comment-28349479-20170618232050

Amorkuz wrote: It is a long-standing policy of this wiki to give all media equal weight. In other words, novels, short stories and audio stories carry as much weight as TV stories and comic stories.

Policies are not written to "primarily" accommodate the shortcomings of the "visual medium", and pages most definitely should not be written in a way that discriminates against the non-visual media in any way. I completely agree! As someone who's primarily a fan of the novels, it really peeves me when people pretend the TV show and/or Big Finish audios are "more official" or "more canon" than the book spinoffs.

That said, I don't think the OP - which is merely clarifying part of a policy that has been in effect for years - counts as anything close to "discriminatory" against non-visual media. The policy being discussed is just common sense. If a few episodes back we saw a key on the Doctor's desk, but it was never mentioned, would it be fit to mention it on Key? Absolutely! Because it's a common object, so we can identify it based on sight alone. I argue that the exact same thing can be said about Martin Luther King Jr. This isn't a statement about his birthdates, or his status in the civil rights movement, or anything about him besides his image; all that still absolutely falls under T:NO RW. But every man, woman, and child watching Lie of the Land recognized the image on the screen as Martin Luther King, and it's almost self-defeatist to neglect that fact.

Countless editors (and admins, per the above quotes) have understood this and kept this subtlety in mind when adding to the wiki in the past; I don't see why we can't do the same here.