User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-6032121-20190827234848

Woah, woah. You're right in identifying that an inclusion debate full of authors is kind of an odd situation, though you appear to have overlooked my non-authorial (well, non-Doctor Who authorial) contribution. But:

Amorkuz wrote: So what will happen if these three stories, which, according to Wylder, are "[s]et in the same universe as [Wylder's] popular novel 10,000 Dawns" (= not in DWU), what will happen if they become valid? Apparently, anyone will be able to get their story on the wiki by asking Wylder to borrow his character.

No, no, no, no. From the start, what has been proposed is to treat the short stories in question as crossovers. For the purposes of these stories, and theses stories alone, the DWU and the "Dawns Universe" become synonymous; but that association ends with the licenses involved. In much the same way that for the length of Assimilation^2, the narrative exists in both the DWU and in the Star Trek universe, but this does not mean we cover subsequent stories about Picard which treat his Assimilation^2 experiences as having happened to him. For that matter, this is the reasoning that invalidated The Body in Question: it clearly considers that Death's Head's DWU experiences happened to him, but it no longer has licensed DWU elements, so we don't cover it.

As such, your entire argument that Mr Wylder's authorization for anyone to use his 10,000 Dawns characters become rather null and void. It is these three short stories that are in question, and them only.

Moving beyond that, I find your assertions about what does and doesn't count as a publication extremely specious. Again, we already do cover free online PDF releases as "publications", so long as they were officially licensed. They were, of course, released by "reputable" sources such as the BBC or Candy Jar, but so what? A PDF's a PDF.

Rowling's endorsement of all Harry Potter fanfiction is quite a different matter to any of this. Rowling has kindly stated "I won't sue anyone for publishing online Harry Potter stories so long as you do it for free", not granted her readers a specific commercial license as it is Wylder's claim that Parkin & Co. have done for him.

In the usage of basically everyone ever, fanfiction is defined not by being self-published, but being unlicensed. (Heck, different medium, but is some of BBV's output really different from Wylder hypothetically selling his self-printed books at conventions? For a given value of "self-published", it too is self-published, since Bill Baggs also directed a lot of it. And as for budget, it's no secret that the whole thing was usually done rather on the cheap)

So… I don't think Tardis has ever needed to define what is meant in policy by "fanfiction", but I'll wager that few people thought it meant "self-published fiction, regardless of whether commercial licenses were obtained". You may wish to redefine fanfiction as far as Tardis's policies are concerned, but I think that's an entirely different kettle of rulemaking. You're pulling a new definition of "fanfiction" out of your hat, and using it to make policy say very strange things.