User:Najawin/Sandbox 10

Introduction
So, like, what even is validity?

Wait, no, come back, I promise this is important.

Validity isn't canon. It's not something given to us from on high by The BBC. It's also not really a thing that exists out there in the general fanbase, like, we don't poll the overall Doctor Who community to see what should be a valid source for articles on this wiki. We have Dr. Men as valid, and for the longest time didn't have P.S. as valid. I think anyone would say this is the wrong way 'round. We don't smash atoms together to find out what validity is, it's not a platonic form floating out there in the ether. It's not really a natural kind and probably not a social kind. It is socially constructed though, it's constructed by the actions of the editors of the wiki. I've opined before that we could, tomorrow, if we so decided, make it so that only Summer Falls is valid on this wiki. That's what validity becomes. It just becomes a fundamentally worthless concept. We're not factually incorrect to do so. It's just a bad idea.

Ultimately, and I do want to stress this fact, the users of this wiki can just decide to make something valid or invalid by sheer fiat, regardless of logical consistency, regardless of argument, regardless of strength of evidence or whether the rules we've written down elsewhere say otherwise. If we want to encode some sort of exception to the rest of our validity practices that mean any story that begins with "q" and doesn't immediately follow it up with "u" or "i" is valid, we can do this. It's a, forgive me, insane rule, but we can do it. So you all absolutely can simply reject the argument I'm going to present in this thread. But I don't think that this is a good idea. (Well, of course I would say that.)

But what does it mean for our validity rules to be good or bad?

Well. This is obviously a truly massive topic for discussion and not really something that I think anyone is prepared to discuss in full here. In part because I don't think anyone is fully cognizant of their own motivations! The specific reasoning that you or I have towards certain policies will be a subtle interplay of conscious and unconscious factors. I don't expect anyone here to have a completely fleshed out philosophy of what our validity rules would look like were they to be written from scratch - I certainly don't. But I have thought about some general principles that I think any change to T:VS should try to hew towards.


 * Ease of explanation
 * Ease of enforcement
 * Continuity; in 2 senses
 * Continuity with past policy interpretation
 * Continuity with prior forum rulings
 * Consistency of reasoning

Now, there are others, of course, such as maintaining that Summer Falls - that pure, pristine bastion of innocence - is valid, but I bring these up because I think we have a problem with a recent rule change that violates these specific four(five) principles. That rule change is, of course, Rule 4 by Proxy (hereafter "R4bp"), as detailed at Forum:Temporary forums/An update to T:VS, as those of you who know me are aware. I'll admit that in my crusade against this rule change I have at times sympathized with the following quote:

"William James said that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant. Once a current of thought is under way, trying to oppose it with argument is like trying to plant a stick in a river to alter its course: "round your obstacle flows the water and 'gets there just the same'". […] Planting a stick in this water is probably futile, but having done so before I shall do so again, and-who knows?-enough sticks may make a dam, and the waters of error may subside."

- Simon Blackburn

I too may be shoving forward sticks futilely in an attempt to provide guidance to a torrent of water. But unlike Blackburn I think there might be a more optimistic route forward. While many sticks may make a dam - so too may they make a water wheel, and we can harness the tides of change towards something constructive. I think both options are possible outcomes from the reasoning this thread will present. The choice is up to you.

So what's this R4bp thing anyhow?
Well, as stated, the relevant thread is Forum:Temporary forums/An update to T:VS. The original proposal is that we "accept the retroactive validity of Rule-4-breakers which are later explicitly referenced in valid sources in a manner which seeks to "bring them into continuity" in one way or another". The proposal was met with open arms and an outpouring of praise from everyone except myself and User:Tangerineduel. With that said, I don't think it's particularly uncharitable to say that at least part of the reason why this proposal was so popular was due to the particular historical circumstances we found ourselves in. This was during the Forum:Temporary forums, when we only had six slots to discuss things, and as noted at the very beginning of the thread,


 * Within hours of Tardis:Temporary forums being activated, it began filling up with suggestions that we redeem all sorts of things from Scream of the Shalka to Vienna from  status.

Seriously, go look at the situation if you've forgotten or were unaware.

The policy could be characterized as a blunt instrument to save everyone time, if one were feeling truly uncharitable. I don't think this is accurate, I think User:Scrooge MacDuck truly thought about this problem as a disconnect between the users of the wiki and our validity rules and attempted to slice through the particularly tricky Gordian Knot. But I don't think this view of the situation is accurate. I don't think the reason why people were so frustrated with, say, Dimensions in Time being invalid is because Storm in a Tikka referenced it. Thread:211495 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 mentions it once, and not as motivation. Certainly some threads bring up narrative connections, either as an attempt to use it as procedurally required new evidence (Thread:267931, ibid) or by a new user in reference to a thread that could be construed as doing something similar (Thread:240617, ibid). I'm rather convinced that the frustrations with the various stories listed are that often there were perfectly good threads that argued in favor of validity and certain people just shut their ears. Most infamously Vienna, of course, but there was a Death Comes to Time thread not too long before the forums closed. (In the effort of full disclosure, Thread:179549 and Thread:207499 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1 do seem to have these concerns. But these are the only ones I can find. (Well, I think another Shalka one might.) They're outliers.)

Now, perhaps it doesn't matter ultimately that this isn't what people thought, even if it's explicitly stated to be part of the motivation in the thread. But, you know, imagine I put some pretentious comment here about the different sword strokes you could make while cutting a knot and how it's dangerous, as well as maybe how you might just want to untie it, yada yada Sword of Damocles. You get it.

Now, the reasoning presented for why we should accept this reinterpretation, aside from solving so many problems all at once - because what the people arguing about these things in threads really care about is continuity and not authorial intent - is that if we accept the fundamental premise before, that the majority, or even a substantial number, of these discussions kept coming up because of continuity concerns, and then that we even cared that people made these discussions rather than just ignoring them and kept ruling them invalid, this overall methodology was sound because narrative continuity was evidence of intent. Specifically,
 * as I see it, in-story continuity serves as (sometimes strong) circumstantial evidence of intent-of-continuity, without meaning that one is reducible to the other in all cases. What else could Rule 4 mean, save something like intent-of-continuity-with-some-prior-DWU-source? It cannot sanely be divorced from some concept of "continuity", lest it turn into an arbitrary tag pertaining only and exclusively to a story's status under T:VS itself (and that would be a terrible thing, as it would mean that decades' worth of now-dead writers simply weren't in a position to have any opinions on the matter!) or, at best, some kind of question of "branding"

Cards on the table, I straightforwardly reject this. I think the "arbitrary tag" formulation is largely correct, in that there's a "DWU" as the wiki understands the term, and then a "DWU" as every individual author understands the term and for R4 statements we do some translation between the two. (Indeed, this is just a logical consequence of my view above on what validity is along with our article on Doctor Who universe making clear that for the purposes of the wiki we mean something very specific and technical.) I rather assume that no author understands the term quite like the wiki does, though Scrooge, Nate, or a few others might if they really wanted to put their editor hats on while writing. For the wiki I think it's simply a label and doesn't refer to continuity in the slightest. As I think you'll see later, I'm far from the only user to have said similar sentiments in the past.

I could say more, but I don't want to rehash old discussions, as that absolutely would be in violation of T:POINT and this is just meant as a summary for those who either weren't present or have forgotten. The thread was closed in favor of the policy, noting that
 * In general, it is safe to assume that, if information presented within a source pulls another source into the DWU, that is sufficient for validity under rule 4 by proxy as presented by Scrooge MacDuck. While it is often possible to find quotes about the "DWU-ness" of a source as a whole, I feel that it is much less practical to expect to find quotes affirming the "DWU-ness" of separate stories that an author happened to reference.

With this context in mind, let's turn now to the ways in which R4bp might fail to meet the principles I've laid out above, and how we might solve these problems.

Explanation
It is my contention that we both want our validity rules to be easy to understand for new editors to this website and that R4bp fails to meet this mark. I mean this not in the sense that new editors won't understand the reasoning, we'll touch on that briefly later, but that the rule itself seems poorly worded and ambiguous at first glance. Let's take each of these things in turn.

First, why would we want our validity rules to be easy for new editors to understand? This, I think, is trivial. So that new editors can swiftly begin having input in our discussions surrounding whether certain sources are valid. Indeed, not only new editors, but people outside the wiki community should, ideally, be able to understand our validity rules. I think this is probably impossible to ever get to, especially on the more technical issues like what to do when an entirely new form of media springs up for us to cover - our wiki just has too many moving parts - but you know, it's a nice ideal. Indeed, many other people have felt the same, while User:CzechOut noted in Thread:207499 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1
 * The four little rules "chart", for lack of a better word, was never intended as the be-all, end-all of validity on the wiki. It was meant to be a simplified guide to the whole page of text at T:VS.

the 2020 rewrite of T:VS greatly simplified things so that everything referred back to the 4 rules, making it much easier for new editors to onboard. Most recently there was the decrying of the idea of a "secret rule 5" at Forum:The Daft Dimension and Doctor Who? as parallel universes. Easily accessible validity rules are something that many people profess to want.

How does R4bp fail to meet this mark? Well, the official standard given in T:VS is
 * a later story makes an effort to bring an otherwise invalid story back into the DWU [...] [i]n general, in-story evidence may be used for this purpose

This is literally so vague as to be meaningless. Look at our page on Doctor Who universe.
 * Much like the related term of canon, its scope is somewhat debated by fans. Fans often disagree about whether some stories and series are considered part of the Doctor Who universe, and some dispute the concept's meaning or utility altogether.


 * This wiki has established rules about what is and is not part of the Doctor Who universe for its own purposes (see our valid source policy for more information), but this wiki has no authority beyond its borders.

What does it mean to make efforts to bring stories back into the DWU? Does the fact that our wiki has rules for what constitutes the DWU impact what it means to "bring a story into the DWU"? Would it mean something else if we weren't considering the wiki rules? Does this distinction matter to R4bp? None of this would be remotely comprehensible to a new editor. You're only making them more confused.

So let's try another tactic.

We return once more to the thread that enshrined R4bp and see instead that the original proposal that passed is that
 * we accept the retroactive validity of Rule-4-breakers which are later explicitly referenced in valid sources in a manner which seeks to "bring them into continuity" in one way or another

Well, what does "bring them into continuity" mean? (Putting aside the notion of intent here.) I'm certainly not confident that a new editor will understand this. The standard given in Forum:Temporary forums/Trailers ties this directly to the wiki notion of continuity.
 * [we have] a lot of precedent about what we as a Wiki call "continuity": the continuity sections we have on all our pages.

Now, I personally find this a little difficult to square with how continuity is used in the original R4bp thread, but ultimately it doesn't seem too far afield. I'm slightly more concerned about two other areas. One is an issue of enforcement, so we'll touch on it later. But fundamentally I don't think new editors are all that clear about the difference between continuity and references. Hell. I'm not, even as people try to explain it to me.

Now, I know, I know, some of you think I'm tilting at windmills here. But I'm just fundamentally not. See Forum:References and continuity: what exactly is the difference?, Forum:DWU, Canon, Continuity and References - rename them, and Thread:117229 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I. In the first thread we have one admin and one of the rare users granted rollback rights express their lack of understanding of the system. In the second it's still the same fundamental confusion and we have our longtime bureaucrat User:Tangerineduel seriously propose tying the words "canon" and "continuity" together for the section. In the last thread User:Shambala108, who would later go on to become an admin, proposed the same. This last thread never had a clear resolution that I can see, but dear lord, just read it. There's no consensus. There are people like Shambala or User:OttselSpy25 who say they just intuitively understand the difference, but also users like User:Mewiet and Czech who fundamentally don't. Quite frankly, I find the arguments presented in this thread by Czech and User:SOTO to be foundationally damning to the difference between references and continuity and I can't see any coherent way to separate them consistently. (Note also that User:Amorkuz, who would go on to become an admin, would later express the same confusion later on at Thread:195859 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Reference Desk. Shambala says that she plans on doing a post discussing the difference, but no post ever materialized.)

But that's not the point. The point is that if we have admins who can't agree on the definition of continuity as we use it on our pages, if there's never any resolution to these threads and experienced users are truly confused, it's certainly reasonable to expect that a reasonable amount of new editors will encounter the same problems and simply be unable to truly understand the policy when it's first presented to them. No matter who here thinks it's obvious and trivial, the fact remains that there's strong evidence that experienced editors have struggled with these concepts!

Enforcement
It's an occasionally repeated line on this wiki that
 * All rules of the wiki have to be clear and easy to administer.

With not only Czech holding this, but other users occasionally repeating similar sentiments. Is this a good standard?

I think so, even aside from the reasons for onboarding new users. First and most obviously it reduces workload on admins and editors, this is a wiki with >100k pages, it could easily take up an admin's life and it's trivial that there's always more work to do. Next, if rules become heavily bogged down in minutiae and byzantine procedural steps that it's hard to work with it can easily cause users who are already present on the wiki to feel put off from editing - like the things they do on the wiki are valued less, that their views are being dismissed out of hand, that they aren't having due process, etc etc, and can lead to diminished user base. Indeed, we've seen this in the past. I think most everyone here can remember it. Finally if the lack of clarity extends to a fundamental ambiguity, if the rules are, in fact, guidelines, this actually can cause existential damage to the wiki. Replacing due process and rules with purely community discussions, as some may wish to do, will slowly undermine whatever trust the larger community has in us. Would we ever do something as insane as invalidating a BBC Wales episode? Likely not. But if we constantly rule by diktat, with any semblance of firm policy thrown to the wind, these worries will emerge. Now, the slope is only slightly slippery, and we haven't truly begun to go down it yet at all, but it's worth being aware of all the same, if only as motivation for why consistency matters.

So where do the worries emerge with R4bp?

As stated above, I think the criticisms of SOTO and Czech in Thread:117229 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I are fundamentally damning to any clear distinction between continuity and references from the perspective from this wiki. As such, I don't see a way in which policy can be meaningfully based on one of them (and not the other). Now, perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there's only one potential way for R4bp to maneuver around this, as it explicitly denies the necessity of statements of authorial intent, and it's the second issue I referenced above. At Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy we're told
 * R4BP applies when the natural assumption is that the validating story is making a continuity reference to the validated story.

Perhaps we could make these assumptions so clear, so unambiguous, that nobody could dispute that they're continuity references. But the statement made is decidedly unclear yet again. Is this truly what "natural assumption" means in this context? Is "continuity" here referring to the wiki's (incoherent) usage of the term, or some other? It's tea leaf reading and subjective interpretation all the way down. And this is without getting into the metaphysical and linguistic ambiguities of what it means for a "story" to "refer" to "another story". (I'd make a joke here about how the ambiguities make me want to cosplay as Neurath, but I think that ship has sailed. /Groans from the audience/)

Consider the following example, of SOTO's comments at Thread:117229
 * the Doctor saying he once had an android boyfriend in Time. That's not a reference to any specific story from a real-world perspective, but it's still a reference to something in the DWU

And then consider Thread:207499 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1
 * The Eleventh Doctor mentions having an android boyfriend, and the creators of the webcast have stated that, yes, the "Shalka Doctor" and the Master were a couple.

What to one person is a reference is to another continuity. Is this clearly trying to bring Shalka into continuity? Who knows? The only options available to us are to attempt to divine Steven Moffat's mental state, given that he's close friends with Paul Cornell. But even this doesn't guarantee that this is an intentional continuity reference to that story rather than a fun gag that happens to resemble that story, given how notoriously forgetful Moffat is (dude literally forgot an entire story he wrote, as well as that he created the Memory worm). There is simply no way to determine intended continuity references when they look like this without explicit statements of intent. And even if you insist that it's too big a coincidence given Moffat's friendship with Cornell, consider the hypothetical where another writer wrote this. It's such a vague statement - which is why SOTO saw it as a reference rather than as continuity. Can this ever be a "natural assumption"? I dunno. I think some people think it's obvious, and others clearly won't. Just as is the case for every discussion of references v. continuity linked above.

So far from being a way around the issues referenced by SOTO and Czech, appeals to "natural assumptions" that a work contains "continuity references" to another only serve to underline just how damaging these criticisms are to this proposed framing of R4bp.

What's the difference between policy interpretation and forum threads?
So for me, the difference is pretty obvious, but, as stated before, what's obvious for one isn't always obvious for another. If we have written, codified policy, like T:VS, but there's ambiguity in how to interpret clauses in it, so long as these ambiguities are not resolved in a closing post to a forum thread that comes under the head of policy interpretation. Generally we care about admin interpretation, as they're the ones who write policy. However, prominent dissenting interpretations that find favor among the rest of the editor base are also relevant to what I'm going to be considering here.

One caveat in the effort of full disclosure, usually policy interpretation of this type is found either on talk pages or on forum posts that aren't closing comments. However, there are so many talk pages on this wiki and this post is ever so slightly rushed that this area in particular will be fundamentally incomplete. I can't do the due diligence I would like to on this particular issue in regards to talk pages. I'm relatively confident in the research elsewhere in this thread. But talk pages are the big blind spot, and they should really only impact this section.

So why should we care about continuity of either type? Well, notice that I say continuity and not consistency. I don't want to insist that the wiki be static, never changing, that everything we do in the present must 100% line up with what we've done in the past. Far from it. But we shouldn't make dramatic changes that lack precedent in either prior policy decisions or don't have strong basis in prior interpretations of policy at the drop of a hat. Why's this? Again, at least part of this is, in the extreme example, for the sake of the broader community we serve. If our rules constantly change and it doesn't appear to have consistent rhyme or reason to an outside observer, we lose their trust. But in a less extreme example, it's for returning editors, if someone comes back and finds our policies have deviated massively over a short or medium period of time based on discussions and opinions that fundamentally have no precedent in our wiki's history, they're probably going to feel a little put off. And while one particular change that lacks continuity isn't an issue, a barrage of them will potentially effect active editors as well, as it doesn't allow them time to readjust to the new status quo. There is, of course, also the issue of Chesterton's fence, but I personally take a more nuanced view on that topic. Worth bringing up, not instantly disqualifying.