User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-45314928-20200610043202/@comment-6032121-20200610183035

The thing is, User:Shambala108's closure of the validity debate was that since Harness called it "discarded", it was to be considered invalid. Non-validity is a distinct status from ✅ ucedness, and usually applies to things the Wiki recognises as officially-released stories. It is perfectly possible to interpret Shambala's closing post as meaning that whether or not it was written as a short story, the short story's contents have been called part of a "discarded" narrative by their author, and thus fail Rule 4 of T:VS. That is certainly how I understood it, as well as how I understood the fact that we're having this discussion right now instead of Shambala having performed a rename to the "(novelisation)" dab term at the same time she closed the thread.

It was also objectively "officially released" (Rule 3). It was released by its author to the public, and for free at that. The question is rather whether that release was licensed (that's Rule 2), and again, Shambala closing the inclusion debate with invalidity rather than deletion suggests she didn't hold your arguments about it not being licensed to be convincing, any more than she held my arguments for Rule-4-passing-ness to be substantial.

Neither of us got our exact preferred outcome in that thread's closure, which comes across as essentially a compromise based on the hard facts of the case (what Harness has said about his story, rather than the truthfulness or lack thereof of said statements). Nothing is gained by either of our "sides" in the former debate acting as though we got what we wanted.