User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-6032121-20190830190237/@comment-6032121-20200719102145

Lots to unpack in this post, @User:Najawin. While I'm in broad agreement with you, I wish to stress that while we might also want to reconsider the specifics of Rule 1 of T:VS, this is not in any way codependent with the main proposal to stop confusing "non-narrative" and "non-fiction", regardless of whether we continue to call "non-narrative" stuff invalid.

But for what's it's worth, I have given a thread such as you propose such serious thought that I have already carried out the historical research you begun in the post directly above mine. A draft of an OP for such a thread sits in my Google Docs already. Let us not confuse this thread with these only partially-related matters; rest assured that a thread such as you are proposing will happen someday, 'cause I'm already working on it.

(For your personal information, the actual origins of Rule 1 are, as best I can fathom, a series of admin decisions at Forum:Canonicity of Dalek Annuals and Forum:Canon policy: Items on which policy is unclear; the former by User:Trak Nar, who acknowledge that "features" in Dalek annuals were something different from reference works but unilaterally decided they shouldn't be covered as "canon" because the information in them was too silly by modern standards… which surely runs afoul of T:NPOV; and the latter by User:CzechOut who "explains" his reasoning with "I can't see the rationale for including the Technical Manual's ideas of what makes the sonic screwdriver tick in the main body of sonic screwdriver. Primacy must be given to narrative works on in-universe pages.", which is circular reasoning at its finest. Only stories count because… only stoires count??…

I don’t mean any insult towards any of the participants in those early conversations, but surely, in hindsight, we can all see that this isn’t exactly sensible policymaking behaviour. This isn’t a solid base on which to write the first of the four most important rules’’ of this Wiki’s validity policies! But again, that is a thread for another day.)