Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-5442547-20130319195443/@comment-188432-20130401030922

No rule is perfect. But this is a pretty good one. It doesn't depend on judging the quality of the work. It doesn't depend on whether you or I feel the narrative elements clash with other stories. It only depends on assessing authorial intent. The question, "Did the BBC or the copyright holder intend for the work to be a part of the continuity or not?" is a perfectly fair question that helps establish whether we should allow something into our articles that are written from an in-universe perspective. It works in most cases, and it certainly works in the case of DiT.

Remember, we're not Wikipedia. Our articles about narrative elements are not written from a real world perspective. They are written as if the DWU were a real place. That means we have the burden of deciding first what the DWU is.

Now I don't personally like this situation. It would be much easier to write from a different perspective. But that's not how we started, and it would be a lot of non-automated work to change now. Plus, a lot of our editors enjoy writing from a slightly fictional point of view. The cost, however, is that we must define what the DWU means for our work to have any sort of meaning whatsoever.

Using our four little rules is hardly imposing some great barrier to admission. It still lets in all but <.01% of all stories ever produced or licensed by the BBC.