Forum:More canon questions

I'm not trying to re-raise the "what should be canon" discussion, and I'm taking the "video games are secondary" from the other thread as "Word of God".

The issue here is that we now have a pretty solid policy, but it's not accurately described anywhere.

Tardis:Canon policy attempts to give a complete list of what counts as a primary resource, but it's nowhere near complete. For example, Short Trips, the Torchwood novels, and the IDW comics aren't mentioned. Also, it says that, e.g., _all_ BF audio dramas are primary resources, which would include Unbound and even completely non-Whoniverse stories (not that they have any, but BBV has non-Whoniverse videos).

Trying to complete this list isn't just a matter of adding more things. For example, it seems pretty clear that Decalogs 1-3 are valid, but what about Decalog 5?

It also includes "Doctor Who television stories", which links to a list that includes Graske and Spheres--and, even worse, A Fix with Sontarans, Search Out Space, Dimensions in Time, and The Curse of Fatal Death.

The Secondary Resources section has similar problems. For example, it gives a complete list of reference books, leaving out a large number of reference books that are of presumably similar status.

Meanwhile, the whole idea of Secondary Resources is a bit unclear. All that's said is that they "should not be the only resource of an article". So can they be the only resource for a fact within an article?

Also, there's generally a big difference between the kind of information in a Target novelisation or a game like City of the Daleks which is intended to be in-universe (even if we decide maybe it isn't) vs. the Cushing movies or something like Unbound or the later Iris books which are intended to be in another universe vs. a reference book which is intended to be out-of-universe.

In fact, the way things are written, we should have in-universe articles about "other universes", explicitly including things like the Cushing movies and Fatal Death, but there's nothing that can possibly count as primary resources for them.

Novelisations have a specific rule that where they contradict the TV story, they're apocryphal. Does this also apply to other secondary resources?

Also, is the contradiction rule really sufficient? If DWM hadn't contradicted the "Yrcanos as a wrestler" epilogue for Mindwarp, would we really have accepted that story as non-apocryphal?

Given the distinction between primary and secondary resources, describing the reference books with the Wikipedia jargon "primary sources" is potentially very misleading (especially as a justification for why they're secondary resources). --Falcotron 12:07, June 13, 2010 (UTC)