User talk:Conscious Obsession

Welcome to the wiki
Hi, on behalf of the admin team, welcome to the wiki. We hope you stay and contribute and become a wisened wiki veteran (wikiran?). It is also my firm opinion that there's nothing better to be obsessed with than Doctor Who.

In the meantime, I hope you wouldn't be terribly surprised that there are a lot of rules and policies and tricks to editing. The best way to learn about them is beforehand, of course. So I'll go ahead and try to provide you with the best editor experience as best I can. I'll base my comments on your introduction (thank you for posting it by the way: it is ever so helpful to see the person rather than a user). And before I start listing all the policies that talk about the issues you care about, let me premise all that by saying that in no way do I criticise or disagree with your positions regarding Doctor Who. It's a free wiki and everyone is entitled to their favourite corner of Doctor Who universe, or DWU for short, and their particular angle of looking (or not looking) at the Doctor. What we are not allowed to do is to let our personal preferences influence editing of pages. For instance, I myself do not internally believe the Doctor to be half-human. But I am not allowed to edit this information away from any pages because that is stated in a story. On the other hand, no one can force me to edit that information onto, say, Ninth Doctor page because I am not aware of Christopher Eccleston stories where it came up. I hope you see what I'm saying.

So let me parse your thoughts and guide you which of them should not be used for editing and which are spot on.
 * You are in complete agreement with the policies that there is no canon: T:CANON says as much. The most important consequence of this is that no global continuity among all stories exists or can be expected. There is plenty of stuff that just bluntly contradicts other stuff because different writers in different media at different times didn't and in many cases couldn't coordinate. How did the Second Doctor arrive at Space Station Camera? The story page The Two Doctors (TV story) provides two alternative and probably mutually incompatible explanations in the first bullet point of the continuity section. That's what we do when facing discontinuity: "according to one account" and "according to another account". We should not try to reconcile the two accounts by inventing some clever trick. Speculation is not allowed on content pages. We report, we do not invent.
 * Having said all that, there are stories we can report from and other stories that must be disregarded. The separation is neither arbitrary nor completely trivial. All stories are divided into valid and invalid. As the name suggests, only the former can be used on content pages (outside the "Behind the scenes" section). The governing policy here is Tardis:Valid sources and it is worth reading in your spare time. Boundary cases are debated in Board:Inclusion debates. After such a debate is closed by an admin, a consensus decision becomes the law of the land.
 * So regarding your personal canon (aka head canon), here is what we do here at the wiki.
 * Big Finish Unbound range was indeed invalid for a long time. But with the cross-over with The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield and ensuing discussions, it was eventually decided here that all Unbound stories are valid. Once again, you don't have to edit about them, but please respect their validity.
 * The Infinity Doctors have long been decided to be valid and also take place in an alternative universe T:VS. This universe has a page at The Infinity Doctors universe.
 * There is nothing wrong with TV Comic, TV Action and Countdown, or TV21 as far as the four little rules of validity are concerned. If you'd like to work on these, you are very welcome. And no one will ever tell you they're not canon here on the wiki. (If they do, please send them to me or any other admin for pep talk.)

So enjoy improving pages that you care about, engage in projects. There are of course smaller things regarding formatting, but maybe another time. (For me the best way of learning to format was by observing how others do it.) Happy editing. Amorkuz ☎  22:31, June 12, 2017 (UTC)