Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-6032121-20190907162921

Here we go again with the matter of offensive content in stories.

Look, again, rules of validity shouldn't be based on what we editors wish was, or wasn't, a part of the Doctor Who universe. And as a matter of fact, tons of stories deemed offensive, or downright malevolent, by many (or even most) critics are obviously valid because they're part of the TV series; or are you suggesting Talons of Weng-Chiang or The Unquiet Dead should be declared invalid?

You say we shouldn't have to investigate the copyright status every time. Why not? It's not like new publishing companies are going to spring up every day and start churning out DW spin-offs, whether hateful ones or not. It's perfectly viable to give it a look and ask for some proof as needed every time it happens, because every time is realistically going to be something like "once a year at most".

As an aside, I think the justification for having the David Burton page is that his claims were discussed (though not confirmed) by DWM, making him of relevance to the history of "official" Doctor Who whether that relevance is as "the almost-Eighth Doctor" or as "the fraud who almost made DWM believe he could have been the Eighth Doctor" or as "the alternate timeline detected by the DWM's timey-wimey scanner" or whatever one chooses to believe. I certainly don't think, all else being equal, that we would have the page if this reference in DWM didn't exist.