User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-26285319-20170104192003/@comment-5918438-20170305211921

Consensus often has little to do with a majority vote. It's in fact greatly encouraged within our group of admins for someone who has not participated in a forum thread to do the closing of it, for an unbiased conclusion based on all evidence presented. And we know well the failures of a simple majority vote, recently in the US and in the UK.

We have rules and policies, carefully worded as best as we could manage, but that doesn't mean we will simply allow users to disrupt the wiki by poking holes in our chosen wording, finding loopholes, and trying to change the landscape of our coverage entirely. For the most part, as a wiki, we want to move forward, not constantly look back and have the same discussions over and over, over validity. For the most part, without exceptional new evidence being brought to the forefront, all that is currently deemed invalid will likely stay that way. There was a thought process behind all those decisions we've already made.

Now recently, towards the end of 2016, that most joyous of years (note the sarcasm), people have been trying to push our rules, and our justifications, to their limits, and so we might, in the end, have to go back on a few recent decisions, for instance with Vince Cosmos, to keep the peace and maintain some sort of order here.

I don't think many of us are prepared to open the floodgate and let in the spin-off of a spin-off in which one story references some element introduced in a story featuring a character who once met someone from a Doctor Who spin-off, who themselves maybe met the Doctor himself once in a DWU story proper. Maybe we do need to consider some sort of degree-of-separation guideline, wherein it's not covered here once you get too many steps away from the Doctor himself, or, as has also been suggested by Amorkuz, from actual stories bearing the Doctor Who logo, and licensed as such.

And yeah, I think there's a good point to be had about whether a story starts out as "this is set in the Doctor Who/Iris Wildthyme/K9/ universe", or if it simply uses a character/location which exists in a story we deem valid. Vince Cosmos isn't necessarily a "DWU character", anymore than the Fantastic Four are, for meeting Death's Head. I don't know that Paul Magrs set out to write a "DWU story" when he chose to re-use a character that he himself had created. So it gets to the point where we have to ask: do we cover these stories that are tangentially related, or do we simply mention in the BTS that Vince got a spin-off, give a little bit of info, and then link off to some off-site source (perhaps a different wiki) for more? I mean, where do the bounds of the DWU end, and when do we start to get into Tommy Westphall hypothesis territory?