Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-5442547-20130319195443/@comment-1209840-20130401025021

When the writer of a show tells us that it's not part of the DWU, it's not part of the DWU.

Yeah, I don't buy that. If Neil Gaiman had a fit of dementia and told everyone that he didn't consider The Doctor's Wife to be in continuity, I'm pretty sure no one would listen to him. Ultimately the decision is the BBC's. Of course, Neil Gaiman isn't the copyright holder in that instance, despite being the primary writer. So that may be a bad example. But it applies as well to, for example, someone discovering a lost interview in which Terry Nation denounces Genesis of the Daleks or Douglas Adams tearfully begs everyone to please ignore The Pirate Planet.

I don't really think "other fans will laugh at us" is a particularly coherent criterion. I'm not saying it's completely invalid, just that it's very subjective and hard to quantify. Perhaps not as subjective as your secondary meaning of "parody," but pretty bad. Rich Morris, for example, is a fairly prominent Doctor Who fan who considers that awful, awful charity episode to be canon. So you could comfort yourself in the knowledge that he, at least, would keep his snickers pointed in another direction.

''I think we're at a point where you have to ask yourself whether Dimensions in Time is really something you want to keep fighting for, or if there might not be other things you want to do on the wiki. ''

Obviously you underestimate how little I value my time. There are any number of things I could be doing that would be more useful than this. And yet here I am, arguing about how a wiki chooses to label a story I hated. Really, you'll be doing me a favor to close this thread, or possibly ban my account from editing anything ever again.