Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-5692737-20180206150757/@comment-24894325-20180208012010

This attempt to revert the results of the original Vienna inclusion debate is an example of both bad timing and bad judgment. Let me first explain to those who, like myself, did not pay attention to the original debate (or wasn't here yet), why this attempt is harmful and why no leniency should be shown in immediate closing of this thread. To do this I have to explain the history of the question.

History
On 25 March 2013, CzechOut posted a notification of a routine deletion of a story (The Memory Box) that violated Rule 4 of Tardis:Valid sources policy. Little did he know that this notification will turn into a sprawling debate that would last for almost 3.5 years, collect impressive 170 posts, include at least 5 admin taking opposing sides, with the 6th one finally closing the thread in August 2016. The debates got heated, so heated in fact, that it was seemingly suggested by one admin that another admin was anti-community. The suggestion had to be retracted/denied/explained. At the time, I still had the luxury of not taking part in all this, but now the OP forced me to read the whole debate and I did not enjoy it. Given that the explanation above strongly suggests that the OP himself did not read the original debate, and certainly did not read it carefully, I really do not appreciate being forced to do it myself.

Given how unpleasant it was to read it and given that, partly bruised and almost universally unhappy on both sides, the editors finally reached a truce thanks to PicassoAndPringles braving a thankless and tedious job of reaching the conclusion, there is no reason in the world to go through all this again, unless there is an ironclad new proof of validity (or one enjoys seeing people quarrel).

Modern history
This thread was opened twice, the first attempt having been deleted due to T:SPOIL. So I had a strong suspicion that the real motivation behind this thread was what originally made it violate T:SPOIL. Several of the quotes from the OP were clearly present in the original debate. But good faith is to be assumed and I gave the OP the chance to point out this new evidence that would give him the right to open this thread and risk the established truce. I did not even set a specific time for the answer, knowing that the thread is long and may require some research. Unfortunately, after my clear explanation of the Tardis:Do not disrupt this wiki to prove a point policy as regards this case, the OP did not even try to pretend to have something new.

Rather incredibly, the last link in the OP is https://www.bigfinish.com/news/range/vienna/perpage:24, i.e., the page collecting all BF news about Vienna series. The OP gives this link in support of Vienna being a "spin-off". Given that the word "spin" is not present at the link, I'm not sure if this should be considered an insult to editors' intelligence or merely a sign of disrespect, but what this link did provide was the ability to at least fish out some new quote from all these news items as a fig leaf against the potential T:POINT violation already hanging over this thread. I will provide such a quote below. The OP chose not to. So be it.

Nothing new in the OP
Several editors were pretty vocally in favour of the inclusion in the original debate, at Thread:125464. And, rest assured, they found every quote they could in their support, including all the quotes provided in the OP. Here are direct links to the respective posts: Almost 7 months passed between the latest of these quotes making an appearance in the original thread and the thread's closure. So the OP's claim there was barely any discussion, so the thread was closed should properly be read: after these new claims were brought in in the 3rd year of the discussion, admin waited for almost 7 more months for further opinions and, finally, closed the thread. The OP's suggestion that the thread was closed without regard of these quotes is his assumption of bad faith towards the closing admin, and I think an apology towards the closing admin is here in order. Needless to say, T:POINT directly prohibits reopening the discussion based solely on the OP's belief that some arguments were proposed but ignored by the closing admin.
 * 1) the first quote by David Richardson can be found at Thread:125464, posted by CzechOut in an extended form with more context and followed by 146 further posts;
 * 2) the second quote by BF can be found at Thread:125464, posted by TheChampionOfTime and followed by 13 further posts;
 * 3) the third quote by Richardson can be found at Thread:125464, posted by Mewiet and followed by 11 further posts.
 * 4) the fourth quote by the late Paul Spragg can be found at Thread:125464, posted by CzechOut in its complete form, without omissions, and followed by 127 further posts.
 * 5) the final fifth quote by Jonathan Morris can be found at Thread:125464, except for the first sentence, posted by JagoAndLitefoot and followed by 40 further posts.

Mischaracterisation by omitting the context

 * The OP's statement Why the decision was made to exclude the series because of a comment from one person involved in production is arguably not factually incorrect, but is quite misleading. Richardson is not "one person involved in production". He is the line producer of the Vienna range, who has overseen every single release of the Vienna range and who has created it, according to Chase Masterson: "And major thanks to the brilliant David Richardson, whose idea it was to spin Vienna off – he saw the potential in this show and championed it from day one." (VOR 108) So, unless one wants to debate inclusion on a story-by-story basis, Richardson (plus the wider BF leadership and marketing team signing off on everything) is the author of the series. Jonathan Morris did create the character (in a story whose validity was never in question), but he only wrote 4 out of 13 BF stories about Vienna (for the record, 3 of these are considered valid, one from the Main Range and two from The Worlds of Big Finish). But, according to BF website, Morris has not had anything to do with Vienna since February 2015. His name is nowhere in the credits after this. Incidentally, his (alleged) quote in the OP originates from November 2015. (In the interests of full disclosure, the alleged Jonathan Morris from the forum this quote is taken from, who only has 2 posts there, claims in the other post that he was the script editor/showrunner of the Vienna series. We may speculate why BF did not credit him. But, in the spirit of T:NO SELF REF, we cannot accept this statement unless confirmed by BF.)


 * The OP's claim The previous discussion was held mainly in 2013 is highly dubious. What does "mainly" mean? If it is understood as 50% + 1 post, well, it is mathematically correct. But with 53 of 170 posts (roughly a third) of the thread taking place after 2013, it would be fallacious to draw any conclusions regarding post-2013 information being neglected, as indeed demonstrated in detail above.


 * The OP's claim statements from Big Finish, where Vienna is openly called a spin-off, didn't exist skips the subtlety of the subject, which was discussed in detail in the original thread, as evidenced by the word "spin-off" appearing there at least 111 times. Indeed, quite early in the original discussion, already in March 2013 (see Thread:125464), Revanvolatrelundar provided the exact description of the range by BF, which survives unchanged till this day: "Impossibly glamorous bounty hunter Vienna Salvatori (Chase Masterson) takes on the galaxy's toughest cases and most vile villains in this brand new spin-off from the Doctor Who main range adventure The Shadow Heart." The question was and is whether a spin-off from the "Doctor Who main range adventure" equals a Doctor Who spin-off. This has been debated in the original thread. Again, nothing new to be gained.


 * The fourth quote is presented in the OP as There was one comment from Paul Spragg in 2013. What the OP omits here is that this "one comment" was, in fact, the official email response by Paul Spragg to CzechOut, regarding the question of whether Vienna is part of DWU. This is the only official comment of BF directly on the subject matter of this discussion, as opposed to, say, the quote of alleged Morris, which was posted on some 3rd-party forum and anyways has him explicitly say that he cannot comment in an "official" capacity.

Outright false statement

 * Thus, the OP's statement Currently Vienna considered invalid because of a single comment made by producer David Richardson in the christmas edition of The Big Finish Podcast in 2012. is simply false. The wiki actively sought to obtain a clarifying statement from BF but never received a clear answer, as eventually agreed in the original discussion. PicassoAndPringles wrote in her final closing post: "David Richardson's comments stood out to me the most", after explicitly stating that she went through 3-years-worth of the discussion carefully considering both sides. To interpret this as the comment being the only reason for invalidity is a gross misrepresentation of the difficult task performed by PnP.
 * Another clearly false statement is And in the previous thread there wasn't any mention of the fact, that producer's statement, where he did not see it as a Doctor Who spin-off, contradicts his another statement, where he calls it a spin-off!. Here is just one of several posts by CzechOut, where this very problem of Richardson contradicting himself was addressed: Thread:125464. I believe this calls for an apology to CzechOut for falsely accusing him of arguing his position without addressing an evident problem.

Conclusion
Because the original debate was contentious, I did not want to dismiss this thread out of hand and carefully checked every single piece of info provided by the OP and every claim about alleged omissions in the original debate. The clear conclusion is: '''The community was thorough in both fact finding and arguing the finer points. All facts mentioned by the OP are present in the original debate, and all supposed omissions have been discussed in sufficient detail and sophistication and for as long as editors had the slightest interest in the topic.''' Thus, this post is in clear violation of T:POINT. This thread is closed. There is no reason to change validity of any Vienna stories.

PostScript
As the icing on the cake, let me add my two cents about the authorial intent. The quote by alleged Jonathan Morris has, unfortunately, been cut off both times. Let me present it in full in the proper context: "Nov 13, 2015 at 2:43am omega said:

Well that would for the admins at TARDIS Wikia to reconsider their approach towards Vienna. Can we get a definitive answer as to whether or not her spin-off is still in the Whoniverse?

Last Edit: Nov 13, 2015 at 11:48am by jonnymorris:

Well, not from me, I'm afraid I'm not in a position to make any official statement. My feeling is that canonically she exists in the same sort of hinterland as Bernice Summerfield or the Graceless girls, if that helps (it probably doesn't). The character is owned by Big Finish, not the BBC, so legally speaking she's not from 'The Worlds of Doctor Who'. With the three series, my approach has been to establish the character in her own right, so (since 'The Memory Box') there haven't been any references to Doctor Who. But are the stories set in the same universe as 'The Shadow Heart'? In my opinion, yes."

In other words, after claiming to be the showrunner of the range, the alleged Morris was directly asked about Vienna being set in DWU for the purposes of applying it to the wiki. And the part of the answer omitted before is where he flat-out refuses to give a "definitive answer". This calls into question the insistence on considering this answer as definitive, especially given that he clearly states in the same quote that the character is owned by Big Finish. If it is owned by Big Finish, then it is only Big Finish who can issue official statements. That's what Morris says himself. And the only official statement from Big Finish at this time is that of Paul Spragg.

I also promised to provide a new quote. It is part of the promotional news item and can be found at the link for the second OP quote: "'It's a very colourful universe,' says Jonathan [Morris], 'it's not particularly dark or grim. It's a wild thing with lots of aliens, spaceships, robots and visiting strange alien planets – all the things I love about science-fiction, but with a slightly more psychological story running through it'."

- Have you heard Vienna?

This is the creator of Vienna explaining the universe of the range to Big Finish listeners. It's not the ambiguous "world" anymore. Straight up: "universe". And the idea that this might be a description of DWU to the listeners of BF, which is primarily known for DW, is simply beyond the realm of possible. It has aliens, spaceships, robots---things well known of DWU and requiring no mention there. But above all, it is based on science-fiction. Thus, at least when speaking in his official capacity, Morris describes the universe of Vienna as a generic science-fiction universe, making no connections to DWU. This fits perfectly with the marketing stance of David Richardson in particular and BF in general that this is intentionally not tied to DWU for the purpose of attracting other listeners, such as Chase Masterson's Star Trek fans, which are expressly mentioned by Paul Spragg in his official response but for some reason cut out of it in the OP's quote.