Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20121212231649/@comment-188432-20121213051503

OttselSpy25 wrote: Our definition of "Not canon" is 'something we don't cover'. Our definition of "Continuity" is 'references to other material in the DWU'. You can have continuity without having canon.

If you don't want to use the word "Continuity", then change it to something else. But don't go around turning perfectly good pages into stubs and removing perfectly fine sections over an argument over the meaning of a word. Can someone please kill me now? Tangerineduel get over here with that gun. How many times do I have to write this?


 * 'Our canon policy is, wait for it, there is no canon''.

We're not playing a semantic game here. The phrases "something we cover" "that which counts" and "valid source" are not euphemisms for canon. There absolutely, positively, is no such damned thing as canon in Doctor Who. We're not telling you or any other user what you must believe is canon.

But this wiki can and — in order to function, must —decide what it will allow as valid sources for the writing of our articles. This is mainly because we write our articles from an in-universe perspective — something that's hard to do unless we make some decisions about what the shape of that universe is.

So we decided on four little rules to help us decide which stories were in, and which were out.

P.S was eliminated on the basis of rule 4, primarily. It is a deleted scene, something that was long ago decided by community consensus to be a disqualifier.

And that's the rub. How can a deleted scene have continuity? The act of cancelling a project is the ultimate discontinuity, because the producers have themselves relegated it. For us to have continuity notes on what amounts to a publicly released animatic is nonsensical.

Is there continuity between Dr. Who and the Daleks and season 1? No, obviously not. Is there actual continuity between The Curse of Fatal Death and the Eleventh Doctor? How could there be? Equally, if a scene gets deleted — which is what happened to P.S. — it absolutely has no continuity with the television series, because the producers explicitly severed its continuity.

The real danger of a continuity section on a story that is declared invalid is that editors naturally use the same style as they do on other pages. Namely, they write their continuity notes as if the story "counts". In so doing, they make statements they could not make on in-universe pages. This creates confusion for our readers, because the story page could say one thing, while the character page could say another.

Look at this statement that used to reside at the P.S. continuity section:
 * Amy and Rory are the second and third former companions shown to have adopted children, after Sarah Jane Smith. (TV: Invasion of the Bane, Sky) Ben Jackson and Polly Wright were said to have operated an orphanage in India. (TV: Death of the Doctor)

You just couldn't say this on the page Amy Pond, because P.S. is not a valid source. Plus, this editor is relating P.S. to an SJA story or three, for heaven's sake! How could that be right, when the producers deleted this scene and released it in a substantially unfinished form?

It's sufficient to write a solid lead, a good plot section, and then try to source the video. Since P.S. and The Curse of Fatal Death both legally contain the entirety of their respective narratives, the continuity section is redundant anyway. The reader can just watch the piece in less time than it would take her to read our own confused ramblings..