Board Thread:Tales from the Tardis/@comment-188432-20130325173913/@comment-188432-20130415130410

Josiah Rowe said: If a change in wording were needed to include Vienna (and, again, I'm not sure that it is), all we would need to do is make rule #4 say that we exclude a work if it is clearly intended to be set outside the DWU. Given that Big Finish itself is being equivocal on this subject, we could say that we allow Vienna because it's not clearly set outside the DWU. One word, if needed. I don't see how this works as a solution, Josiah, since this entire debate is over just how "clearly" BF have worded things. I think two of its top creatives saying four times, "this is not a DW spin-offs" is super, crystal clear. I additionally think that "not in the DW world at all" and "in a locked-off side-universe" are clearer than just about anything ever said about any other stories we've excluded. Apparently now Shambala108 finds that convincingly clear, too. SmallerOnTheOutside said:

I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing the author directly saying that the story doesn't happen in the normal DWU -- there's nothing "direct" about the responses we've been given. Really. You don't see anything direct in "not a Doctor Who spin-off? Uttered four times?   You don't see anything direct in, "This is not a part of the Doctor Who world at all?"  And how is the normal DWU possibly a "locked-off side-universe"?   Seriously, if that's not plain, simple, and direct, then there will never be a direct declaration ever made about anything.   Josiah Rowe said:

But if policy is meant to reflect community views, and not just what the people who enforce it think those views should be, we should respect the opinions given here. Policy is continuous. It's not just this debate that matters to the overall valid sources policy. T:VS emerges from the several debates we've had on it stretching all the way back to the beginning of the wiki. As I've said before, if we'd had such a clear statement as "not a DW spin-off" and "not in the DW world, at all" in other debates, that would have been it. Game over. Discussion ended.

And policy does not emerge simply from a head count. Could you assemble a majority of users to overturn, I dunno, T:HONOR? Probably. There are obviously a lot of people who see it as weird to type "Dr" instead of "Dr." There are any number of arbitrary policies that could go the other way, and so you could get a majority in a thread to vote for change. And then comes the important question: who is going to enact this policy change? And the motion is suddenly, quietly tabled.

Policy on a wiki must above all else be practicable, which the change to T:VS caused by allowing in Vienna would not be. Allowing in Vienna would render T:VS, rule 4, moot.

To my eyes, what's happening in this debate is that people have agreed that the colour of the sky is red. Fine, you have agreement on that issue, but that doesn't make the sky any less blue. There was once near universal agreement that the world was flat. Does that mean that those who said the world was round were wrong?

Guys, I've never seen a better case for a rule 4 exclusion. Again, that's why this thread was originally an announcement. I have often brought such matters before the community in a more solicitous way, inviting discussions that lasted for days. So it is not that I "tried to pull a fast one", as was indicated above or am "anti-community" as Josiah has I'm sure only unintentionally implied. It is that, after having participated in a ton of these debates over the years, I cannot imagine a dismissal that will ever be clearer.

If there were a poster child for Rule 4, this would be it.

So if this is allowed in, the policy wholly fails. Everything excluded under a rule 4 debate would have to be reviewed. And one little story isn't worth that.

The one thing we all agree on is that the language provided does allow us to exclude the story. You might think there's wiggle room to accept the story. But everyone seems to grant, however grudgingly, that the language does present the opportunity to dismiss.

So that's where the consensus is, it seems to me. I think we can all agree on the notion that Richardson and Spragg have cast doubt on whether this is a part of the normal DWU and whether it is a genuine spin-off of Doctor Who.

And, look, if someone in this thread has a love for Vienna that burns white hot, we can always create w:c:vienna. The URL is available. I'll help you provide prominent links and even give you whatever templates you want to set up over there. Excluding Vienna from this wiki does not mean, as Josiah claimed, the destruction of information. It just means, at most, the repackaging of it elsewhere — an "elsewhere" that can be fully linked here. We could put the Vienna Wiki in exactly the same sort of "locked off little side-universe" that Spragg enjoins us to put the audios.