Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-906873-20151103171157/@comment-188432-20151103212832

Howdy Eric :)

Thanks for joining us! We're glad you're here.

This whole issue of what is or is not "to be counted" takes on a different meaning at a wiki than it might when you're down at the pub with your friends. And it's one that we've debated exhaustively.

Basically, we have a mission here to create an encyclopedia, which means we need to know which sources to use in order to write our articles. If we're not agreed on those sources, our articles can take on all different dimensions.

What we've chosen over the decade we've been around is to be more inclusive than exclusive. We appreciate that some users believe only the TV show counts — but that's not us. And it would be a matter of unimaginable difficulty to untangle things now.

So, instead, we've created polices, mainly at T:CAN and T:VS, to explain where we are on the matter of what things can be used to write articles and which can't.

In a nutshell, we allow anything that's 1) a story 2) that's been released 3) by the appropriate copyright holders and 4) is not parodic or deliberately stated by the owner to be set outside the DWU. That's what we call our four little rules.

It's not a perfect system, and we realise that there are some, like you, who feel it's too inclusive and others, who feel it's too restrictive. But because we occasionally get people on both sides, it's probably a good compromise between the two factions of fandom.

We absolutely won't be using this "two-tabbed" system that Wookieepedia do, because Star Wars does have a canon, and that canon was radically altered by the Disney buyout. There is no analogue for that in Doctor Who. If anything the current production team has been very specific about saying that there is no such thing as canon. And so we basically echo them.

We may never change your mind here about what "counts" in Doctor Who. And that's okay. We hope you'll find that our site at lest offers you something interesting to read.

But consider this. One of the reasons that you say you dislike non-televised Doctor Who as a source is that it's contradictory of televised Doctor Who. The problem is that televised Doctor Who is contradictory of itself. Contradiction is simply a part of being a Doctor Who fan, we feel. Also, most users here would probably take issue with your assertion that "Doctor Who is first and foremost a television show". This is easily disproved by the fact that there are more audios than television stories. And there are more books now. (In fact Doctor Who has more books than any other book series based on a television show.) And don't even get us started counting the number of comic stories!

Doctor Who is a multi-media franchise. Excepting a minuscule number of controversial stories, we choose to celebrate it all.

You're of course welcome to stay and contribute, as long as you understand that we do allow non-televised sources. But please bear in mind that you can't name call as you've done upthread. Please in future attack the point, not the person.