Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-28349479-20161216221639/@comment-188432-20161228091815

Hey guys :) I hope everyone's holiday season is going well. :)

Lemme start by saying that this thread is remarkable. It's been great seeing long-absent friends, which is an appropriate thing for the holidays. I have tried at several points to jump in; my reply has been growing locally on my computer for over a week. But we're getting close to the point where some people's computers will have problems loading the page, and lots of people have now had the opportunity to respond. So it's time to bite the bullet and close the thread.

Obviously I'm not going to be able to respond to every point made, no matter how brilliant many of them are. Most of what I'm going to talk about are, I'm afraid, those pesky old technical realities that usually are my playground.

Technical and legal issues
One of the things that's sometimes hard to grasp are the differences between a wiki — whose technicalities aren't that familiar to many of our users — and books, which we all pretty much understand. Because Doctor Who has so much printed material, we sometimes try to view the wiki as if it were a book, with all the limitations (and freedoms!) that this would allow. One of the most obvious involves the contraction or reduction of the number of pages within. If we want to lose chapter 7 of a book, fine, it's gone. If we decide years later we want to add it back in for the fifth edition, we dust off the old pages and ship 'em off to the publisher. No sweat.

And so some people think wikis are the same. Many wrongly believe that wikis are simply electronic books with linkable text. That belief engenders the the notion that we can just put Humpty Dumpty together again, and the Faction Paradox Wiki will again be one with Tardis. But that doesn't explain the situation in which we genuinely find ourselves.

Protecting your copyright
Once a decision has been taken to split off a wiki from another, re-merging — especially after all this time — presents daunting technical problems, as well as a clear opportunity:


 * Wikis are published under licenses that have specific requirements
 * The underpinning MediaWiki or Fandom code has limitations that sometimes get in the way of what you want to do
 * At Fandom, the distinctions between individual wikis are not as great as between two separate books. It's all one network.

Though there are other differences, it's really the first two of these points that is a genuine barrier to the question of merging FP wiki content back into Tardis. The third explains why that's not such a horrible thing.

See, our copyright license requires that we have a clear list of contributors for each article. Right now, that list is very clear. When I moved the articles over there, I included full revision histories for every article. You don't have to follow a link. You don't have to go on some big hunt. it's just there under the History button.

Copying and pasting the articles back here would not bring with it the full revision history of each article.

More worrying, the use of MediaWiki's import feature is unpredictable when you're trying to re-merge into an article that already exists or was deleted. The results are often unsatisfactory, with some people's contributions getting conflated with others.

As should be recognised by the number of authors we have contributing to this thread, copyright is important. Everyone who contributes to a wiki deserves the right to easily demonstrate what, exactly, they wrote.

That's simple to do with the current split, and it outweighs any other consideration. We at Tardis really can't sanction a move that would muddy your ability to easily note those revisions which are, after all, your copyright.

More admin-y, more manual than you think
Several people upthread have offered to help with the re-merge, and I love the enthusiasm of that! I wish it were that simple. I'm sure there are others, but these are a few that spring easily to mind. The point I'm trying to make is that, though the wikis are similar in structure, they're not completely interoperable.
 * Users have limited ability to actually help with the merge, if the goal is to preserve copyright under our current license. Special:Import can only be used by admin.
 * Image merging can't be done through Special:Import, so these would have to be done by hand.
 * FP's templates, including some infoboxes, date from the time of the split, and — in some cases — the version used at FP is not compatible with the version now used here. This difference could cause display issues, and would be tedious to correct. (In fact, I've recently tried to simplify the CSS over there'll but there are still some CSS classes unique to FP that would land with a thud over here.)
 * The same is true of the category structure. Some categories are unique to FP or Tardis, and it would require manual investigation to correct.

Why it's no big deal to remain apart
At Fandom, it's so easy to link from one wiki to another. And we've gone beyond the typical Fandom setup to make it even easier. Templates allow for prominent linking at the bottom of articles on both wikis. Inline links are also simple. If you're writing an article at FP and you want to mention something that's covered well over here, you just type. Easy.

Indeed, one of the factors in deciding to do the split was precisely that it did no harm to one's ability to write a well-linked article. We at Tardis are so lucky in this regard — far luckier than than most other wikis — because we're old enough to have our own interwiki prefix. If you wanna make a link to the Jump Ryu article at the Boku No Hero Academia Wiki, here's the most common way to do that: Jump Ryu If that article were at Tardis, here's what it would be: tardis:Jump Ryu But we made it even easier to make a link to the FP Wiki. All you have to do is use.

So while there are legitimate technical barriers to re-integration, there's no reason why you can't make a great, well-linked article over there. A re-merge isn't, in itself, a magic wand that's going to suddenly make the FP content grow.

Fact is, we do have experience with exactly the question of whether FP content attracts editors. And it wasn't a great one. Most of those articles were skimpy when they were here originally. So it's reasonable to rhetorically ask, “Why would we want these low quality articles back? What guarantee do we have that if we pull all this material back, people will edit it?” Judging by what's actually happened at FP, the answer isn't terribly encouraging.

Two for the road
While I think the technical points overwhelm other considerations, I don't want to leave before addressing a couple of other points.

The great balancing act
It has also postulated that we wish to create some sort of “canon”. Nothing could be further from the truth. T:CAN makes our canon-is-impossible position very clear, and it's been the gradual work of several admin from almost the dawn of this wiki. If you read back through the older forum discussions, you may see us using the word “canon”, but of course this wiki predates by several years the attempt of Paul Cornell, RTD and Steven Moffat to erase that from fans' vocabulary.

We don't create any sort of canon of here. But we do try to find the limits of what we will cover. I think most people would see the need to exclude, for instance, BBV's The Stranger and some other parts of the BBV catalogue. But is there a need to excise Iris Wildthyme material? I dunno, and that's why we try to look at things on a case-by-case basis.

It's tricky, and admin are sometimes caught in the middle of two compelling arguments. That's the case here, because there have been numerous other discussions over the years that have argued that we should be less inclusionary. And you hear it amongst fan leaders, like the boys at Radio Free Skaro, who regularly have a hard time accepting things like books, comics and some Big Finish material a part of the universe.

Like these guys, there are plenty who dislike the fact that we have gone beyond television — much less that we cover some BBV and FP stuff. As admin it's important to remember those arguments, as well as the compelling ones in this thread. If by keeping the FP stuff on another wiki it demonstrates to the more exclusionary amongst us that we are not just going to automatically include anything that has a whiff of Doctor Who about it — and doesn't stop those who like FP from contributing as a closely-related wiki, then that seems a reasonable threading of the needle. Particularly as there are genuine technical concerns afoot, as well.

If that means we are sometimes, in your view, inconsistent, it's not because of some nefarious desire to exclude your favourite stuff. It's because there's a long-established practice of taking each item individually and trying to do our best. In this case, unlike some other ranges that have been mentioned, that path had us making a decision that put some material on another wiki.

Authorial intent
Throughout this thread you hear this phrase “authorial intent”, something that has spread to other inclusion debates started this holiday season. And I'm afraid it's not really being used as intended. I think that what's happened is that people went to the Vienna thread, saw that we sent an email to Big Finish about Vienna, and decided to try to do something that was only similar.

So let me just clarify that what's happened with authors in this thread wasn't what was going on with the Vienna email to BF. See, we weren't talking to the author. We were never even trying to. We wanted clarification about their marketing, which was contradictory and confusing. In that thread, “authorial intent” referred to the author being Big Finish itself, as a company. We were primarily concerned with what Vienna's producer was saying, not its actual scribes. And we were using email, where we could be more assured that we were dealing with Big Finish due to email headers and the like. (That said, the answer clarified nothing, and so we never moved on to the question of what to do with the answer. In all likelihood, we wouldn't have been able to use it, anyway.)

In this thread, it has become fashionable to have authors come here to directly say whether their work was meant to be in the DWU or not.

In fact, direct statements by authors to Tardis are not to be used.
 * It's hard, if not impossible, to absolutely verify identity, particularly if a person is using an IP address, which is all we really have to go on whether the person has registered an account or not.
 * T:RW SOURCES clearly applies. Even if we absolutely determined identity, Tardis is not a source for itself. Things posted to our own forums, like these authors' statements, aren't valid real world sources. It's a bedrock principle of the wiki that “user-editable sources such as . . . this very wiki are to be avoided.”

Summing up
Now, of course, we want the FP content on Fandom in general to grow. It's important to cover it. But of the options provided by several people upthread, including the original poster, the most realistic is to build the FP Wiki. As has been pointed out, we need to try to get an active administrative staff in there. We've been waiting for years for someone else to notice that, too. So please feel free to contact me over at and tell me why you'd make a great admin.

Until then, thanks to everyone who participated in this thread — and I hope you've enjoyed the Doctor Who Christmas Special! :)