Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-31010985-20180428165444/@comment-4028641-20191214013106

Scrooge MacDuck wrote: To my mind it's very different to wholly split canons as you have been proposing — whether through a separate class of pages on this Wiki, or through a potential Dalek Movies Wiki —, compared to acknowledging the Cushing version as a different, valid take on the DWU, albeit one whose differences and complicated BTS circumstances would mean we would rarely link to on the main page. In one case one is essentially creating a new subsection within the "Invalid" framework, while in the other one is bringing the stories from invalidity into a form of validity.

This is not true at all. We're not creating a new subsection within invalid framework, we're creating a new understanding of how to expand these stories into validity. For instance, if The Master (The Curse of Fatal Death) and The Master (Scream of the Shalka) were valid in some way, then The Master could discuss them in some sort of "alternate universes" sub-section. The only issue is that the page probably couldn't say "Alternate universe" or "alternate timeline," because those imply narrative confirmation. "Alternative validity," as someone suggested above, sounds damn good.

All of the stories which would be effected by this policy change feature incarnations of the Doctor which contradict the 13 we know today. This incudes the Cushing films, which are intended to be a different version of the Doctor than the one on-screen. Furthermore, this would effect stories outside of the "Cushingverse" so the new contept would not be named after or based around what you have suggested.

Your stance here is without precedent, and your comparisons imply a conclusion which you then do not come to. If the Cushing films are novelisations, they don't get seperate pages. If the novelisation, the TV show, and the movie are just all different versions and you can "pick whichever you like" as a fan, then the character's in them only get one page. As simple as that. Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks) gets deleted, the info gets awkwardly dumped into First Doctor in weird parts. That's the conclusion you're leading up to and then jumping off from, you can't argue 99% for that stance and then trail off into some other tangent without any real precedent.

What you're arguing is semantics, "Did Whattaker understand the concept of what a reboot was?" is such a weird argument, because the conclusion it comes to is explicitly not the conclusion you want us to see. "Did Whittaker understand Multi-Verse theory?" is even more insulting.

Your interprentation, as far as I can read it, is this: You want us to act as if the Dr. Who films and the Doctor Who episodes they are relative to are seperate events with different characters... But that both take place within the same universe. That's not a thing. Susan English and Susan Foreman remain as one page.

To me, it seems like is another easier solution but one which still leaves all these lingering pages with the exact same problem, and it's also a solution that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's saying "instead of fixing this systemic issue, let's find a really weird loophole for this one story right now."

Your quote at the end brings up a good point about why this simple interprentation of policy doesn't make sense: "Authorial intent at time of release" seemingly would mean that the Unbound stories should all still be invalid. Sure, later they were retconned to alternate universes. But do we have proof that was the intention at the tiiiiime? The answer is that this policy isn't really based on authorial intentions, it's based on fan theories and trying to burrow canon and continuity a place on the wiki long after those words were essentially banned.