Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-30881616-20190904062302

I do strongly believe, to paraphrase a post earlier in this thread, that not everything in this case has been discussed—specifically, I would like to bring attention to a number of apparent fallacies of both matter and reasoning that, so far, have not been commented on.

A community discussion should take place at Board:Inclusion_debates before stories are added to the wiki, not after. Granted, we do not discuss every story or series there. However, for stories from a new series and from a new source, which constitute a crossover with few individually owned elements of a non-licensed spin-off to Doctor Who and which shares no elements with Doctor Who proper, such discussion was quite pertinent. [. . .]

But, correct me if I somehow missed it, no such inclusion debate took place. Nor could I see any admin consulted on whether this was indeed such a open-and-shut case, on par with Series 12 (Doctor Who), that no inclusion debate was necessary. Without a community discussion in favour of inclusion, no such discussion need be held for deletion.

This extract is from the post at User talk:Borisashton reproduced earlier on this thread (emphasis original) justifying the deletion without community discussion of the articles covering the 10,000 Dawns crossovers in question; providing reasons is literally its whole purpose. But how can we assess the validity of its reasoning? I propose we use the simple and straightforward device of the syllogism—"All men are mortal beings, Sokrates is a man, therefore Sokrates is a mortal being" is, after all, literally a textbook example of logical argumentation.

So what, exactly, is the key feature of the case that justifies such a conclusion, according to this post? Perhaps it is the "no such inclusion debate took place" part. Now, the post does acknowledge that while community discussions are not required for all stories, but it qualifies the matter by stating that these discussions happen to be “quite pertinent” for a specific class of stories to which these 10,000 Dawns crossovers belong. In other words, the argument can be put in proper syllogistic form as:
 * Major premise: "For stories from a new series and from a new source, which constitute a crossover with few individually owned elements of a non-licensed spin-off to Doctor Who and which shares no elements with Doctor Who proper, such discussion was quite pertinent."
 * Minor premise: These particular stories belong to the class defined above, but no such community discussion had taken place for them.
 * Conclusion: These particular stories are to have their articles deleted without a community discussion.

Here is the problem though—what does "such discussion was quite pertinent" actually mean? If “pertinent” somehow has the meaning of unnecessary then yes, one could expect this to work as a premise for an argument about why a community discussion was unnecessary when deciding on the inclusion of these stories. But that is not how pertinent is commonly defined (cf. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “pertinent, adj. and n.” [online entry, fully revised December 2005]); given these premises one would thus expect the line of argument to be instead:
 * Major premise: For stories belonging to so-and-so class, community discussion is quite pertinent.
 * Minor premise: These particular stories belong to the class defined above, but are without a community discussion in favour of inclusion.
 * Conclusion: For these stories, a community discussion is quite pertinent.

Logically then, someone operating from these premises should have ended up initiating a community discussion, not acted as if a discussion was not needed—and I do not see any steps included in the original post to lead from here to its actual conclusion.

So for the argument of “without a community discussion in favour of inclusion, no such discussion need be held for deletion” to work, what major premise would be needed? So far we have:
 * Major premise: [. . .]
 * Minor premise: These particular stories belong to so-and-so class, but are “without a community discussion in favour of inclusion.”
 * Conclusion: “No such discussion need be held for deletion” of articles covering these particular stories.

Put it this way, I do think it’s obvious that the missing premise here should be something along the lines of For stories of so-and-so class, only those with a prior community discussion in favour of inclusion need to have a community discussion held for deletion of their articles. But the problem is that there’s no such policy on the Wiki—inclusion on this Wiki is regulated by T:VALID, and here is what T:VALID has to say about community discussions: "Except in the most obvious of cases, community discussion is required to declare a story invalid. In these discussions, sufficient evidence must be provided that that the story either doesn't have permission from all relevant copyright holders, or that there are solid non-narrative reasons to believe the story does not occur in the DWU."

In its current form, T:VALID makes no distinction whether or not something is a crossover; the clause quoted above applies to this case no less than it does to Series 12 (Doctor Who). Any claim otherwise would simply be factually inaccurate. The argument of “without a community discussion in favour of inclusion, no such discussion need be held for deletion” is thus fallacious; furthermore, these stories must be considered valid in-universe sources, in accordance with T:VALID, unless/until their lack of validity has become evident.

Perhaps, then, the key point here is, unlike what the post at User talk:Borisashton suggests, not the lack of community discussion after all, but rather that these 10,000 Dawns crossovers constitute one of those “most obvious of cases” mentioned in T:VALID. Elsewhere in this post, as well as in other posts on this very thread, the argument has indeed been made that these 10,000 Dawns crossovers are certainly invalid sources. In that case, the first thing I’d like to note that the focus on the absence of a prior inclusion debate in this post is misleading, forming a presumably-unintentional red herring that distracts from the main point.

Nevertheless, let us move on then to examine the evidence offered for the exclusion of these stories.

1/ As already stated above, this online release came in a form of a webpage and a pdf. However, neither mentions anywhere that this is a publication of Arcbeatle Press. The pdf contains the website address (jameswylder.com), states the copyright as James Wylder, and states that 10,000 Dawns is available from Arcbeatle Press.

So I would like to ask, in which sense is this story released by Arcbeatle Press on 8 December 2017 if Arcbeatle Press is not mentioned as the publisher anywhere?

As we can all see, this post from earlier on this very discussion thread alleges that the 8 December 2017 online release of Rachel Survived (short story) “states that 10,000 Dawns is available from Arcbeatle Press” (emphasis original) while, at the same time, “Arcbeatle Press is not mentioned as the publisher anywhere” in this online release. In other words, we have here a premise, and a conclusion:
 * Major premise: the online release contains only one mention of Arcbeatle Press.
 * Minor premise: [. . .]
 * Conclusion: This online release does not identify Arcbeatle Press as its publisher anywhere.

Logically, these two claims can both be true only if there is a minor premise of The lone mention of Arcbeatle Press in the online release does not indicate that Arcbeatle Press is its publisher.

Now, I must confess that the description “the pdf contains the website address (jameswylder.com), states the copyright as James Wylder, and states that 10,000 Dawns is available from Arcbeatle Press” does make it sound like this publication contains a bunch of random elements not necessarily connected to itself. I looked up the actual text of the publication though, and it turned out this sole mention of Arcbeatle Press is far from random, but occurs as part of a distinct section of legal info at the end of the publication, clearly separated from the narrative-text: "Rachel_Survived_-_copyright_page.png"

As we can all see, this section contains four lines: The first describes the copyright status of Rachel Survived (short story) itself, the second describes the copyright status of the character Rachel Edwards and how she appears in this publication with permission, while the third describes the publication status of the work this Rachel Edwards originated from. So now the line of reasoning here is:
 * Major premise: the online release contains only one mention of Arcbeatle Press, in the section that contains legal info concerning its own publication.
 * Minor premise: the online release’s lone mention of Arcbeatle Press in the section that contains legal info concerning its own publication cannot be understood as having any relevance to its own publication.
 * Conclusion: This online release does not identify Arcbeatle Press as its publisher anywhere.

If anybody knows any case of a publication that randomly name-drops a completely unrelated publisher in the middle of its own legal info section, please enlighten me. Furthermore, if anyone can offer evidence that Rachel Survived (short story) is not, in fact, part of 10,000 Dawns, I’d very much like to see it too.

2/ The blog post that is allegedly the release of the story does not mention Arcbeatle Press either. Instead here are excerpts from the description of this release:
 * "I love it, and I wanted to do something to share that love with my readers"
 * "I’ve gotten permission from a Faction Paradox author to write a story"
 * "So thank you to Andrew Hickey for trusting me with his creation"
 * "Thank you as well to all my backers on Patreon who make this weird stuff possible."

This should make it clear why this was deemed to be fan fiction. The author is mentioned multiple times but no statement is made about any kind of publisher. And the express purpose of posting this story is to share it with other fans (which was also expressed by Wylder upthread), a hallmark of fan fiction.

This is another extract from the same post on this thread quoted just above in section #1 (emphasis original). I must confess I’m not sure what the argument here even is, however. The post offers up four quotes as evidence for its conclusions. The first one clearly shows Mr Wylder stating that he wanted to share his love [for Faction Paradox] with his readers—in fact I see nothing here or elsewhere on the blog post in question about “[sharing] with other fans.” The second and third sentences talk about reaching out with the relevant copyright holder to acquire permission before distributing the story, and the fourth explicitly identifies this as a commercial project—neither of which is currently a hallmark of fanfiction. So the four pieces of evidence offered all seem to be the opposite of what the conclusion alleges them to be.

3/ "As for the actual content of your inquiry, T:NOT states, 'We are not a place to post fan fiction, information relating to fan fiction, or fan-produced titles of any kind.' In particular, stories posted by someone on their blog here, here and here are not covered by this wiki. That this is a blog can be clearly determined from the word 'blog' as part of the web address."

This extract is from a post at User talk:NateBumber (reproduced earlier on this thread); elsewhere on this thread the author of this post again characterises the online venue of publication of these 10,000 Dawns crossovers as a “personal blog.” Now, etymologically speaking the word “blog” is a shortening of weblog (OED, 3rd ed., s.v. “blog, n.” [online entry, first published March 2003]), so the root elements of the word specify the medium (the World Wide Web) and the format (log-style, with entries arranged according to some chronological schema), but say nothing specific about a “personal” purpose. In terms of common usage, a quick Google search turns up the official blogs for such companies and franchises as YouTube, Microsoft, or, indeed, Doctor Who—none of which is a person and thus by default cannot post any personal content. And with jameswylder.com, following the URL does lead me to a website where a “10,000 Dawns” button is clearly marked as a key feature on its header menu, and clicking on that button leads me to sections where 10,000 Dawns stories can be found—including works from other persons than Mr Wylder, such as this Michael Robertson story. So to conclude that jameswylder.com is a but “personal” repository for fanfictions, I believe, would be to insist on a particular interpretation of the word blog in a way not justified by the etymology of the word, or the common usage, or the actual facts of the website itself.

To summarise: the case for the 10,000 Dawns crossovers’ exclusion, rather than being too obvious to require discussions, is instead built on several instances of fallacious reasoning and/or factual inaccuracy—I have tried to represent the facts of the case as best as possible (hence the abundance of direct quotes), and if I’ve got anything wrong please do correct me, but I do believe I have made the logic of my arguments very clear. And the laws of logic don’t lie.

⁂

So far I have stuck to addressing the arguments themselves, with no reference to who made them. At this point, however, I believe it is pertinent to mention the source of the arguments. Let us go back to the post at User talk:Borisashton quoted above: "And, unlike the inclusion, the decision to remove these stories from the wiki was taken jointly by three admin. I was simply assigned to implement this decision. Hope this clarifies things. Amorkuz ☎ 07:36, August 27, 2019 (UTC)"

These lines follow directly from the section I quoted earlier. Here User:Amorkuz, the author of the post, states that the decision to consider these 10,000 Dawns crossovers invalid was made jointly by “three admin [sic]” (indeed, these lines are rather ambiguous on whether User:Amorkuz was one of these three admins, or just the person implementing their decision). In any case, none of the other admins involved in this decision has so far publicly expressed their views, and the arguments for the exclusions of these stories that I have addressed all came from posts written by User:Amorkuz.

This is very unfortunate, because while I do believe in assuming good faith, and personally think that it would be unfair to criticise the three (two?) other admins involved without even knowing for sure what they have to say, someone with less scruples than me can easily point to this case as evidence for some sort of conspiracy of admins, which operates without transparency and deletes articles without regard for either the fact of the case, or the actual clauses of T:VALID. If we don’t resolve this properly, the reputation of the Wiki may be in danger.

As the saying goes, there is no crying over spilt milk. I’m certainly not delusional enough to be demanding User:Amorkuz or any of the other admins to go back in time and change what has happened—just because the Wiki has “TARDIS DATA CORE” as a header on every page doesn’t mean its administration has access to trans-temporal technology. I would merely like to request that the other admins in this case make their voices heard, even if only to confirm they have been represented correctly, and confirm their support for the arguments conveyed to us by User:Amorkuz—if nothing else, that would stop User:Amorkuz as an individual from having to be the lone representative of a joint decision.