Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20180417160500/@comment-188432-20180417190420

Excising a few points and reposting essentially the same thing is a violation of T:POINT. It's also not feasible or required for admin to respond to every single point you make in a post — especially when the original proposal was over 3000 words long.

It is exceedingly unfair to say, "Oh, you didn't address my specific points a, b and c, so your closure was invalid, and I'm just going to float the idea again."

Nevertheless, I'll add a few more thoughts this time.

Your lack of understanding of the nature of what it means to be an "invalid" story, which is still evident in this post, nullifies your proposal. I have no idea whom you're quoting when you say things like:
 * NOTVALID stories are "too far outside of regular continuity and thus the universe"
 * "...stories currently placed in the 'Not-valid' category for discrepancies with continuity..."

None of that is true, so your proposal is reacting against a condition that doesn't exist on the wiki.

We say something isn't valid around here not because of continuity issues, but because we've made a good-faith effort to ascertain what those who made it (and/or owned it) intended, or what the controlling creatives subsequently said.

That process is imperfect for any number of reasons. Maybe the author said different things to different interviewers. Maybe the production company for Doctor Who has changed hands, and the new regime is singing a different tune to the preceding one. Or maybe the person quoted, like Steven Moffat and RTD, have an interest in (or joy of) misleading people. But we still try to make a judgment based upon something completely different than your proposal believes.

The whole point of T:VS is to divorce ourselves from trying to make a subjective assessment of narrative continuity.

Changing from a rendering of "invalid" to "alternate universe" is a fundamental shift in what we've been trying to accomplish here for this whole decade. Your proposal would seek to supplant our current system that stresses production realities with something based on subjective analysis of the narrative.

And we've tried that before, ending up with a wiki that was literally strewn with the most marginal material. We may hate that the occasional property — like, say, Vienna — launches us into a multi-year debate, but the notion of invalidity that is actually present on the wiki has done a lot to clarify what we're about, as opposed to where we were at the top of the decade.

And it should also be pointed out that there is nothing stopping any content from invalid stories being placed within the behind the scenes section of any relevant page. Calling a story "invalid" doesn't mean you lose interesting tidbits from it. Rather, it merely forces that information into the BTS section of a page.

Finally, our current solution of adding "not-valid" tags is better in our increasingly cross-platform world. Now, again, I completely disagree that "not-valid" has anything to do with continuity. So your examples of Doctor Ovi Kintoboor over at Sonic and the 2017 Rangers movie over at Rangers Wiki are not great examples. The messages they display do not convey in any way what our not-valid tag means.

But, as a purely technical matter, our solution is better. By just having a li'l image with a couple of words we're able to convey a message on all platforms. In both your examples, their long tophat messages don't show up on mobile devices, so it's impractical as a means to deliver a message for all (or even most of) our readers. For the benefit of our wider readership, solutions which fail mobile, fail period.

With that, I again close up this proposal for the second time. Please do not re-open it.