User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-45314928-20200707131140/@comment-6032121-20200707135702

Thread:240280 saw admins affirm (to my personal displeasure, but it is what it is) that we do not cover pure charity works, even if all the characters in them were licensed. A Panopticon thread would be needed to change this policy from the ground up, before any individual stories can be discussed with this kind of rationale.

Additionally, I feel like what everyone is overlooking is that The School of Doom, for one, also features the Eighth Doctor and the Master. Even if Parkin retained the theoretical commercial rights to the text, which is possible, this particular story would still be ruled out on Rule 2 grounds, because it clearly isn't licensed by the BBC. I have not read the other two stories yet, but I'm pretty sure they also include BBC-owned content. Precedents like When Times Change… (short story) show that T:NO FANFIC applies even for stories which licensed one character, but egregiously fail to license others.

(Which makes sense — we can't just give every copyright owner listed at List of recurring Doctor Who concepts not owned by the BBC a free pass to write valid stories about the Thirteenth Doctor or the Daleks, just because they happen to own Adrienne Kramer!)

It is true that "The Caterpillar Room is a direct sequel to The Year of Intelligent Tigers", and similar that School of Doom bridges an important gap in the history of the post-War universe. The fact is that by most metrics which would seek to define such things, these stories are by all appearances "canonical". But see, that's the thing: canon is not the same as validity. There are tons of things which supposedly take place in the DWU, and have a credible claim in the eyes of most fans, which we do not cover as DWU, just like there are many stories we call valid which many would call "non-canonical". We don't cover Gene Genius, for example, even though it has Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor; we don't cover Time Rift even though it's important background for Vampire Science; we don't even cover the finished Devious even though the BBC released a trailer for it.

Yes, School of Doom and many other charity publications are, more likely than not, "canon". But that doesn't mean they deserve coverage here.