Forum:Rule 4 by Proxy and its ramifications: considered in the light of the forum archives

Introduction
(Note, this is a very, very long opening post. While you absolutely should read the whole thing before engaging in discussion with it, and probably all the linked threads too, it's structured so preliminary thoughts can probably be given if you just read the introduction and concluding section.)

So, like, what even is validity?

Wait, no, come back, I promise this is important.

Validity isn't canon. It's not something given to us from on high by The BBC. It's also not really a thing that exists out there in the general fanbase, like, we don't poll the overall Doctor Who community to see what should be a valid source for articles on this wiki. We have Dr. Men as valid, and for the longest time didn't have P.S. as valid. I think anyone would say this is the wrong way 'round. We don't smash atoms together to find out what validity is, it's not a platonic form floating out there in the ether. It's not really a natural kind and probably not a social kind. It is socially constructed though, it's constructed by the actions of the editors of the wiki. I've opined before that we could, tomorrow, if we so decided, make it so that only Summer Falls is valid on this wiki. That's what validity becomes. It just becomes a fundamentally worthless concept. We're not factually incorrect to do so. It's just a bad idea.

Ultimately, and I do want to stress this fact, the users of this wiki can just decide to make something valid or invalid by sheer fiat, regardless of logical consistency, regardless of argument, regardless of strength of evidence or whether the rules we've written down elsewhere say otherwise. If we want to encode some sort of exception to the rest of our validity practices that mean any story that begins with "q" and doesn't immediately follow it up with "u" or "i" is valid, we can do this. It's a, forgive me, insane rule, but we can do it. So you all absolutely can simply reject the argument I'm going to present in this thread. But I don't think that this is a good idea. (Well, of course I would say that.)

But what does it mean for our validity rules to be good or bad?

Well. This is obviously a truly massive topic for discussion and not really something that I think anyone is prepared to discuss in full here. In part because I don't think anyone is fully cognizant of their own motivations! The specific reasoning that you or I have towards certain policies will be a subtle interplay of conscious and unconscious factors. I don't expect anyone here to have a completely fleshed out philosophy of what our validity rules would look like were they to be written from scratch - I certainly don't. But I have thought about some general principles that I think any change to T:VS should try to hew towards.


 * Ease of explanation
 * Ease of enforcement
 * Continuity; in 2 senses
 * Continuity with past policy interpretation
 * Continuity with prior forum rulings
 * Consistency of reasoning

Now, there are others, of course, such as maintaining that Summer Falls - that pure, pristine bastion of innocence - is valid, but I bring these up because I think we have a problem with a recent rule change that violates these specific four(five) principles. That rule change is, of course, Rule 4 by Proxy (hereafter "R4bp"), as detailed at Forum:Temporary forums/An update to T:VS, as those of you who know me are aware. I'll admit that in my crusade against this rule change I have at times sympathized with the following quote:

"William James said that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant. Once a current of thought is under way, trying to oppose it with argument is like trying to plant a stick in a river to alter its course: "round your obstacle flows the water and 'gets there just the same'". […] Planting a stick in this water is probably futile, but having done so before I shall do so again, and-who knows?-enough sticks may make a dam, and the waters of error may subside."

- Simon Blackburn

I too may be shoving forward sticks futilely in an attempt to provide guidance to a torrent of water. But unlike Blackburn I think there might be a more optimistic route forward. While many sticks may make a dam - so too may they make a water wheel, and we can harness the tides of change towards something constructive. I think both options are possible outcomes from the reasoning this thread will present. The choice is up to all of you.

So what's this R4bp thing anyhow?
Well, as stated, the relevant thread is Forum:Temporary forums/An update to T:VS. The original proposal is that we "accept the retroactive validity of Rule-4-breakers which are later explicitly referenced in valid sources in a manner which seeks to "bring them into continuity" in one way or another". The proposal was met with open arms and an outpouring of praise from everyone except myself and User:Tangerineduel. With that said, I don't think it's particularly uncharitable to say that at least part of the reason why this proposal was so popular was due to the particular historical circumstances we found ourselves in. This was during the Forum:Temporary forums, when we only had six slots to discuss things, and as noted at the very beginning of the thread,


 * Within hours of Tardis:Temporary forums being activated, it began filling up with suggestions that we redeem all sorts of things from Scream of the Shalka to Vienna from  status.

Seriously, go look at the situation if you've forgotten or were unaware.

The policy could be characterized as a blunt instrument to save everyone time, if one were feeling truly uncharitable. I don't think this is accurate, I think User:Scrooge MacDuck truly thought about this problem as a disconnect between the users of the wiki and our validity rules and attempted to slice through the particularly tricky Gordian Knot. But I don't think this view of the situation is accurate. I don't think the reason why people were so frustrated with, say, Dimensions in Time being invalid is because Storm in a Tikka referenced it. It may or may not have made the issue worse, but this isn't the fundamental reason for why people care about this story. Thread:211495 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 mentions it once, and not as motivation. Certainly some threads bring up narrative connections, either as an attempt to use it as procedurally required new evidence (Thread:267931, ibid) or by a new user in reference to a thread that could be construed as doing something similar (Thread:240617, ibid). I'm rather convinced that the frustrations with the various stories listed are that often there were perfectly good threads that argued in favor of validity and certain people just shut their ears. Most infamously Vienna, of course, but there was a Death Comes to Time thread not too long before the forums closed. (In the effort of full disclosure, Thread:179549 and Thread:207499 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1 do seem to have these concerns, and there are some comments here and there that hint at the same idea. But this is very much not the standard perspective in the forum archives.)

Now, perhaps it doesn't matter ultimately that this isn't what people thought, even if it's explicitly stated to be part of the motivation in the thread. But, you know, imagine I put some pretentious comment here about the different sword strokes you could make while cutting a knot and how it's dangerous, as well as maybe how you might just want to untie it, yada yada Sword of Damocles. You get it.

Now, the reasoning presented for why we should accept this reinterpretation, aside from solving so many problems all at once - because what the people arguing about these things in threads really care about is continuity and not authorial intent - is that if we accept the fundamental premise before, that the majority, or even a substantial number, of these discussions kept coming up because of continuity concerns, and then that we even cared that people made these discussions rather than just ignoring them and kept ruling them invalid, this overall methodology was sound because narrative continuity was evidence of intent. Specifically,
 * as I see it, in-story continuity serves as (sometimes strong) circumstantial evidence of intent-of-continuity, without meaning that one is reducible to the other in all cases. What else could Rule 4 mean, save something like intent-of-continuity-with-some-prior-DWU-source? It cannot sanely be divorced from some concept of "continuity", lest it turn into an arbitrary tag pertaining only and exclusively to a story's status under T:VS itself (and that would be a terrible thing, as it would mean that decades' worth of now-dead writers simply weren't in a position to have any opinions on the matter!) or, at best, some kind of question of "branding"

Cards on the table, I straightforwardly reject this. I think the "arbitrary tag" formulation is largely correct, in that there's a "DWU" as the wiki understands the term, and then a "DWU" as every individual author understands the term and for R4 statements we do some translation between the two. (Indeed, this is just a logical consequence of my view above on what validity is along with our article on Doctor Who universe making clear that for the purposes of the wiki we mean something very specific and technical.) I rather assume that no author understands the term quite like the wiki does, though Scrooge, Nate, or a few others might if they really wanted to put their editor hats on while writing. For the wiki I think it's simply a label and doesn't refer to continuity in the slightest. As I think you'll see later, I'm far from the only user to have said similar sentiments in the past.

I could say more, but I don't want to rehash old discussions, as that absolutely would be in violation of T:POINT and this is just meant as a summary for those who either weren't present or have forgotten. The thread was closed in favor of the policy, noting that
 * In general, it is safe to assume that, if information presented within a source pulls another source into the DWU, that is sufficient for validity under rule 4 by proxy as presented by Scrooge MacDuck. While it is often possible to find quotes about the "DWU-ness" of a source as a whole, I feel that it is much less practical to expect to find quotes affirming the "DWU-ness" of separate stories that an author happened to reference.

With this context in mind, let's turn now to the ways in which R4bp might fail to meet the principles I've laid out above, and how we might solve these problems.

Explanation
It is my contention that we both want our validity rules to be easy to understand for new editors to this website and that R4bp fails to meet this mark. I mean this not in the sense that new editors won't understand the reasoning, we'll touch on that briefly later, but that the rule itself seems poorly worded and ambiguous at first glance. Let's take each of these things in turn.

First, why would we want our validity rules to be easy for new editors to understand? This, I think, is trivial. So that new editors can swiftly begin having input in our discussions surrounding whether certain sources are valid. Indeed, not only new editors, but people outside the wiki community should, ideally, be able to understand our validity rules. I think this is probably impossible to ever get to, especially on the more technical issues like what to do when an entirely new form of media springs up for us to cover - our wiki just has too many moving parts - but you know, it's a nice ideal. Indeed, many other people have felt the same, while User:CzechOut noted in Thread:207499 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1
 * The four little rules "chart", for lack of a better word, was never intended as the be-all, end-all of validity on the wiki. It was meant to be a simplified guide to the whole page of text at T:VS.

the 2020 rewrite of T:VS greatly simplified things so that everything referred back to the 4 rules, making it much easier for new editors to onboard. Most recently there was the decrying of the idea of a "secret rule 5" at Forum:The Daft Dimension and Doctor Who? as parallel universes. Easily accessible validity rules are something that many people profess to want.

How does R4bp fail to meet this mark? Well, the official standard given in T:VS is
 * a later story makes an effort to bring an otherwise invalid story back into the DWU [...] [i]n general, in-story evidence may be used for this purpose

This is literally so vague as to be meaningless. Look at our page on Doctor Who universe.
 * Much like the related term of canon, its scope is somewhat debated by fans. Fans often disagree about whether some stories and series are considered part of the Doctor Who universe, and some dispute the concept's meaning or utility altogether.


 * This wiki has established rules about what is and is not part of the Doctor Who universe for its own purposes (see our valid source policy for more information), but this wiki has no authority beyond its borders.

What does it mean to make efforts to bring stories back into the DWU? Does the fact that our wiki has rules for what constitutes the DWU impact what it means to "bring a story into the DWU"? Would it mean something else if we weren't considering the wiki rules? Does this distinction matter to R4bp? None of this would be remotely comprehensible to a new editor. You're only making them more confused.

So let's try another tactic.

We return once more to the thread that enshrined R4bp and see instead that the original proposal that passed is that
 * we accept the retroactive validity of Rule-4-breakers which are later explicitly referenced in valid sources in a manner which seeks to "bring them into continuity" in one way or another

Well, what does "bring them into continuity" mean? (Putting aside the notion of intent here.) I'm certainly not confident that a new editor will understand this. The standard given in Forum:Temporary forums/Trailers ties this directly to the wiki notion of continuity.
 * [we have] a lot of precedent about what we as a Wiki call "continuity": the continuity sections we have on all our pages.

Now, I personally find this a little difficult to square with how continuity is used in the original R4bp thread, but ultimately it doesn't seem too far afield. I'm slightly more concerned about two other areas. One is an issue of enforcement, so we'll touch on it later. But fundamentally I don't think new editors are all that clear about the difference between continuity and references. Hell. I'm not, even as people try to explain it to me.

Now, I know, I know, some of you think I'm tilting at windmills here. But I'm just fundamentally not. See Forum:References and continuity: what exactly is the difference?, Forum:DWU, Canon, Continuity and References - rename them, and Thread:117229 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I. In the first thread we have one admin and one of the rare users granted rollback rights express their lack of understanding of the system. In the second it's still the same fundamental confusion and we have our longtime bureaucrat User:Tangerineduel seriously propose tying the words "canon" and "continuity" together for the section. In the last thread User:Shambala108, who would later go on to become an admin, proposed the same. This last thread never had a clear resolution that I can see, but dear lord, just read it. There's no consensus. There are people like Shambala or User:OttselSpy25 who say they just intuitively understand the difference, but also users like User:Mewiet and Czech who fundamentally don't. Quite frankly, I find the arguments presented in this thread by Czech and User:SOTO to be foundationally damning to the difference between references and continuity and I can't see any coherent way to separate them consistently. (Note also that User:Amorkuz, who would go on to become an admin, would later express the same confusion later on at Thread:195859 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Reference Desk. Shambala says that she plans on doing a post discussing the difference, but no post ever materialized.)

But that's not the point. The point is that if we have admins who can't agree on the definition of continuity as we use it on our pages, if there's never any resolution to these threads and experienced users are truly confused, it's certainly reasonable to expect that a reasonable amount of new editors will encounter the same problems and simply be unable to truly understand the policy when it's first presented to them. No matter who here thinks it's obvious and trivial, the fact remains that there's strong evidence that experienced editors have struggled with these concepts!

Enforcement
It's an occasionally repeated line on this wiki that
 * All rules of the wiki have to be clear and easy to administer.

With not only Czech holding this, but other users occasionally repeating similar sentiments. Is this a good standard?

I think so, even aside from the reasons for onboarding new users. First and most obviously it reduces workload on admins and editors, this is a wiki with >100k pages, it could easily take up an admin's life and it's trivial that there's always more work to do. Next, if rules become heavily bogged down in minutiae and byzantine procedural steps that it's hard to work with it can easily cause users who are already present on the wiki to feel put off from editing - like the things they do on the wiki are valued less, that their views are being dismissed out of hand, that they aren't having due process, etc etc, and can lead to diminished user base. Indeed, we've seen this in the past. I think most everyone here can remember it. Finally if the lack of clarity extends to a fundamental ambiguity, if the rules are, in fact, guidelines, this actually can cause existential damage to the wiki. Replacing due process and rules with purely community discussions, as some may wish to do, will slowly undermine whatever trust the larger community has in us. Would we ever do something as insane as invalidating a BBC Wales episode? Likely not. But if we constantly rule by diktat, with any semblance of firm policy thrown to the wind, these worries will emerge. Now, the slope is only slightly slippery, and we haven't truly begun to go down it yet at all, but it's worth being aware of all the same, if only as motivation for why consistency matters.

So where do the worries emerge with R4bp?

As stated above, I think the criticisms of SOTO and Czech in Thread:117229 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I are fundamentally damning to any clear distinction between continuity and references from the perspective from this wiki. As such, I don't see a way in which policy can be meaningfully based on one of them (and not the other). Now, perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there's only one potential way for R4bp to maneuver around this, as it explicitly denies the necessity of statements of authorial intent, and it's the second issue I referenced above. At Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy we're told
 * R4BP applies when the natural assumption is that the validating story is making a continuity reference to the validated story.

Perhaps we could make these assumptions so clear, so unambiguous, that nobody could dispute that they're continuity references. But the statement made is decidedly unclear yet again. Is this truly what "natural assumption" means in this context? Is "continuity" here referring to the wiki's (incoherent) usage of the term, or some other? It's tea leaf reading and subjective interpretation all the way down. And this is without getting into the metaphysical and linguistic ambiguities of what it means for a "story" to "refer" to "another story". (I'd make a joke here about how the ambiguities make me want to cosplay as Neurath, but I think that ship has sailed. /Groans from the audience/)

Consider the following example, of SOTO's comments at Thread:117229 (one again at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I)
 * the Doctor saying he once had an android boyfriend in Time. That's not a reference to any specific story from a real-world perspective, but it's still a reference to something in the DWU

And then consider Thread:207499 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1
 * The Eleventh Doctor mentions having an android boyfriend, and the creators of the webcast have stated that, yes, the "Shalka Doctor" and the Master were a couple.

What to one person is a reference is to another continuity. Is this clearly trying to bring Shalka into continuity? Who knows? The only options available to us are to attempt to divine Steven Moffat's mental state, given that he's close friends with Paul Cornell. But even this doesn't guarantee that this is an intentional continuity reference to that story rather than a fun gag that happens to resemble that story, given how notoriously forgetful Moffat is (dude literally forgot an entire story he wrote, as well as that he created the Memory worm). There is simply no way to determine intended continuity references when they look like this without explicit statements of intent. And even if you insist that it's too big a coincidence given Moffat's friendship with Cornell, consider the hypothetical where another writer wrote this. It's such a vague statement - which is why SOTO saw it as a reference rather than as continuity. Can this ever be a "natural assumption"? I dunno. I think some people think it's obvious, and others clearly won't. Just as is the case for every discussion of references v. continuity linked above. (And to those who think such a thing is a clear reference now that it's pointed out to them, it's not just SOTO who didn't see it if true. See Thread:148474 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2.)

So far from being a way around the issues referenced by SOTO and Czech, appeals to "natural assumptions" that a work contains "continuity references" to another only serve to underline just how damaging these criticisms are to this proposed framing of R4bp.

What's the difference between policy interpretation and forum threads?
So for me, the difference is pretty obvious, but, as stated before, what's obvious for one isn't always obvious for another. If we have written, codified policy, like T:VS, but there's ambiguity in how to interpret clauses in it, so long as these ambiguities are not resolved in a closing post to a forum thread that comes under the head of policy interpretation. Generally we care about admin interpretation, as they're the ones who write policy. However, prominent dissenting interpretations that find favor among the rest of the editor base are also relevant to what I'm going to be considering here.

One caveat in the effort of full disclosure, usually policy interpretation of this type is found either on talk pages or on forum posts that aren't closing comments. However, there are so many talk pages on this wiki and this post is ever so slightly rushed that this area in particular will be fundamentally incomplete. I can't do the due diligence I would like to on this particular issue in regards to talk pages. I'm relatively confident in the research elsewhere in this thread. But talk pages are the big blind spot, and they should really only impact this section.

So why should we care about continuity of either type? Well, notice that I say continuity and not consistency. I don't want to insist that the wiki be static, never changing, that everything we do in the present must 100% line up with what we've done in the past. Far from it. But we shouldn't make dramatic changes that lack precedent in either prior policy decisions or don't have strong basis in prior interpretations of policy at the drop of a hat. Why's this? Again, at least part of this is, in the extreme example, for the sake of the broader community we serve. If our rules constantly change and it doesn't appear to have consistent rhyme or reason to an outside observer, we lose their trust. But in a less extreme example, it's for returning editors, if someone comes back and finds our policies have deviated massively over a short or medium period of time based on discussions and opinions that fundamentally have no precedent in our wiki's history, they're probably going to feel a little put off. And while one particular change that lacks continuity isn't an issue, a barrage of them will potentially effect active editors as well, as it doesn't allow them time to readjust to the new status quo. There is, of course, also the issue of Chesterton's fence, but I personally take a more nuanced view on that topic. Worth bringing up, not instantly disqualifying.

So about those interpretations
I mean, let's just get the obvious ones out of the way, those of then admins commenting on the topic. (Some of these will be in closing posts, but they're merely stating what the going interpretation of T:VS is.)

From User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1

Thread:125464 in April 2013,
 * A thing can have narrative connections to the DWU and yet still be excluded from the wiki.


 * I mean, after all, fan fiction has narrative connection to the DWU. What's the point of fan fiction unless it's totally hooked into what you see on TV? If it's not narratively connected to the DWU, then it's no longer fan fiction but originalfiction.


 * Therefore, inclusion debates are always settled by out-of-universe, real world, behind-the-scenes factors. [...] If we relied on narrative continuity to make these decisions, the wiki would become absolutely unworkable, because so much of the narrative contradicts itself. If we instead went on the notion that narrative links were the basis of inclusion, we would then start excluding a ton of things that were meant, at the time of publication, to be taken as a legitimate extension of the DWU, like the John and Gillian era of the comics. [...] Assessing authorial intent allows us to keep in many more narratives than some subjective assessment of narrative worth. Yes, in this case, the way we do things means that we're not covering something you possibly have bought and are enjoying. But it's an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good of the wiki.


 * (Later comment) To the contrary, I've addressed this in every post. This sort of messiness is precisely why the existence of narrative continuity is not used to determine validity. The whole virtue of T:VS is that it doesn't matter what the continuity is.

Obviously a controversial thread, but, to note what the interpretation was at the time.

Thread:179549 in November 2016,
 * We don't, as a general practice, apply validity retroactively.

From Thread:208658 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon III in December 2016,
 * We do not consider stories invalid for purely narrative reasons, ever. Doctor Whohas been around for a long time, and there will always be narrative inconsistencies. What makes this one invalid is the real world intent.

From User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2

Thread:231309 and its sequel, Thread:231746 in April 2018,
 * 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.


 * 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 finally, only a few months before the forums went down, Thread:267931 in May 2020,
 * A novel written by someone else doesn't count as new evidence. We don't allow new works to make previous valid stories invalid, and we don't allow new works to make invalid stories valid.

Now, I find myself in an awkward position when it comes to statements from non admins during this time period. I have far too many quotes against the idea of using continuity to determine validity to cite all of them, and a good deal of the people who are today prominently supporting R4bp strongly condemned these notions in the past. Now, I want to stress that I'm not holding anyone to statements they made years ago - peoples views change and all of these archives are at least 2.5 years old. But it's certainly difficult ground for me to walk in representing these views as being present in the community given how easily they could be constructed as "gotcha"s, and how they seem to have either have changed or been substantially more nuanced than what was expressed at the time. I do feel the need to actually cite them and note who said them just to prove that it's actually users whose views we should actually care about, due to number of edits in the past, or because they're still around. (I don't think a comment from an editor with 5 edits in 2013 matters that much, tbh.)

Another nuanced point to make is that there are quite a few comments made throughout the forums arguing that various sources should be invalidated due to conflicts of continuity. Most often these comments were made by new, inexperienced editors who weren't aware of our policies who didn't stay editors for very long. There is one notable exception where a user who I am intentionally declining to name as they are still an editor attempted to argue that Husbands of River Song invalidated Last Night after being on the wiki for a year. Suffice it to say that I am not considering these examples. Why? Because the proponents of R4bp decry them. It's insisted upon that R4bp only broadens our scope as a wiki rather than restricting it, whereas these are arguments specifically about restricting it. As such, I'll be considering the comments made about whether we can broaden the wiki in this way continuity, or use continuity as a guide to validity in general.

This last bit has an even further wrinkle that points made talking about continuity generally, rather than unidirectionally, are at times made in a specific context that is about validating or invalidating things specifically. I'll do my best to relay this context, but at the end of the day I've spent so long agonizing about how to properly reference these older discussions. I've concluded that it's basically impossible to do so without the possibility of making a mistake on how I interpret a comment or lose some nuance or perhaps slightly misrepresent something. All of which aren't my intent, but are obviously a real possibility in a topic this complicated. The only way to avoid this would be to ask everyone to just go read the original threads. So this is the best I can do.

Anyhow, f it, we ball.

Thread:208658 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon III is a confused mess of a thread in the beginning (though it does develop into something quite interesting later on!), with the OP trying to say that T:VS was intended to get rid of discontinuous works and that people had been using authorial intent as a loophole to get around it, so they wanted to reword T:VS to be about continuity in a way that didn't actually solve the problem. But it does give us the following comments from User:NateBumber in two separate posts:
 * In other words, this entire line of discussion about "fitting in with continuity" is completely antithetical to the current rules of the Wiki, and I think it should be run away from at all costs.


 * This sounds dangerously close to saying that stories should be excluded if they disagree with continuity, which is entirely missing a point.

I do want to stress that these comments are at least in part about using narratives continuity to invalidate things. To me the first comment reads a little more subtly, and Nate goes on to be very skeptical about User:Amorkuz referring to the idea of treating continuity as a relatively good guide for the DWU generally - though explicitly phrasing it in terms of invalidating stories for being discontinuous. Because, well, Amorkuz, and they were discussing Paul Magrs.

Thread:194725 ibid is one of the threads that has views running counter to this idea, from User:DENCH-and-PALMER.
 * First Frontier + officially licensed source = Valid + States Dimensions in Time is a dream (valid) = Dimensions in Time is invalid.

Though this view is very much rejected by others in the thread. Except, interestingly enough, Nate, in two different posts.
 * I'd also like to note that Zagreus established Death Comes to Time as an alternate timeline.


 * And frankly, I agree that there's no major difference between being INVALID and being in an alternate universe. Especially in the light of things like 12 referencing Shalka's backstory as part of his past, or the David Warner Unbound Doctor boxset, the line is getting more blurred with every release. I think the entire policy should be rethought.

Nate has informed me that he believes these views were influenced by a sandbox/private discussion going around that presaged Thread:231309 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2. But it is important to note that at the time the thread originator, User:OttselSpy25, was saying things that didn't quite jive with his later post:
 * Again, us deciding to consider The Infinity Doctors as an alternate timeline/dimension didn't just come about because it was weird. It happened because we have out-of-universe confirmation that further stories would have confirmed this aspect of the book, stories which will never be made.


 * I don't think we can or should use this as a solid precedent to make every story that's *kinda weird* into an alternate dimension. We need more than that.

Again, I note this not to attempt to hold someone to any standard, but to trace how messy thought processes are and how I don't think there's a clear and consistent trend towards R4bp. Both of those threads are around the same basic time, the turn of 2016/2017, commencing within 2 months of each other.

Thread:214342 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 in early 2017 is an interesting beast. There's some discussion of it being discontinuous and thus maybe speaking to Moffat's intent of invalidity from User:Thefartydoctor, but this is rejected strongly by everyone else present. It's really more important for the actual ruling, but it does feature a prominent editor suggesting we use continuity as evidence of authorial intent.

In the beginning of 2020 we have User:Chubby Potato suggest the same at Thread:232095 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon IV
 * So, I propose we call stories like the Cushing movies what they are generally agreed on to be: an alternate continuity

However this view is strongly pushed back on by User:Scrooge MacDuck:
 * If we were dealing with an actually walled-off continuity I'd agree, but see my post directly above. The thing is that although no clear, consistent answer (whether a parallel universe or otherwise) has been given on how the Cushing movies "happened" in a way that impacts the mainstream universe, many sources say that they did.
 * Also, that "are generally agreed on to be" also irks me. It's long-standing policy on this Wiki that Rule-4-compliance (that is to say, whether something is intended to be set in the wider DWU) is determined strictly by authorial intent at time of release, not by later stories ignoring it, let alone by general public opinion. Without solid evidence that David Whitaker & Co. meant for the movies to be "an alternate continuity" back in the 1960's (as opposed to just fanciful retellings like the novelisations, or to a parallel universe), it is my belief that we can't go about making that kind of sweeping statement, especially as it'd only make it harder to cover the problem we originally started with: the many, many cases of references to "Cushingverse" media in mainstream Who.

The thread's a very nuanced and well thought out one, and I think it's a damn shame that the forums were closed without a resolution to it. If I can get on my soap box for a moment, going from that to "it's valid, R4bp" is, in my mind, an unimaginable downgrade.

Note also that a non prominent editor proposed a R4bp reason for validity in 2016 at Thread:205534 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1 and was completely ignored.

And then finally Thread:231309 and its sequel, Thread:231746 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 in April 2018, kinda suggest something like this, where we just approach everything like a parallel set of canons. These are... Intriguing threads, but premised on fundamental misconceptions, as Czech points out.

There are... Other comments that talk about continuity, but much like Nate's comments cited above, they're very context dependent and I'm deeply hesitant to include them. I'll be referencing a few of them below, as many of them come from one thread in particular, but I encourage people to actually read the thread, it has a fair bit of nuance. I personally don't see a clear and consistent trend from users towards there being an opposing viewpoint to T:VS across the history of the forum archives like Scrooge is suggesting. I see viewpoints that changed over time and thread to thread. (The one exception being User:Pluto2, who was so consistent in their view that continuity --> validity that they were accused of acting in bad faith when they tried to get Dirk Gently declared valid. I reject this in the strongest terms. They were doing nothing of the sort - they had the courage of their convictions. I support you Pluto2, even if I think your views are insane. Godspeed.)

With that said, this is ultimately somewhat subjective, and I admit that my view here comes from taking into account the entirety of the forum archives. The quotes I gave above may lead some to the opposite conclusion, since I intentionally tried to be as charitable as possible. I do not believe this section is necessary to my overall conclusion - even if people wanted to use continuity as a metric historically the other flaws discussed would cause re-evaluation of the project.

The elephant in the room
So perhaps the biggest issue we have to deal with here is that the community actually had a thread that touched on R4bp and explicitly voted against it and it simply wasn't addressed in the R4bp thread. No, I'm not joking.

The sequence of discussion can be traced at Talk:The Curse of Fatal Death (TV story), User talk:CzechOut/Archive 4, User Talk:Revanvolatrelundar/Archive 1, User talk:CzechOut/Archive 4, and, finally, Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon?. Now, by our standards today this thread isn't exactly up to snuff, but for the time it was a pretty well attended thread. And CoFD being validated explicitly through R4bp means was overwhelmingly rejected by the wiki. Indeed, the opening post explicitly criticizes the methodology being suggested.
 * I say we shouldn't be trying to make CoFD canonical based on what amounts to a sentence and a fragment. The average reader simply won't wear it. It's so counter-intuitive.

(Indeed, I thought about making a post against the validity of CoFD and arguing that R4bp couldn't be used for it because of this thread but that wasn't so much toeing the line of T:POINT as tap dancing on it.)

An interesting note about this is that it's actually at least partially what caused us to banish unlicensed stories (and Faction Paradox :P) as well! See Talk:Fred/Archive 1 leading to Forum:BBV and canon policy.

Now, I do want to stress, it's not that we can't overrule this old forum thread. We can. But surely it should give us pause that this was explicitly discussed and dismissed in the past during the build up to T:VS. While Czech was writing T:VS the editors at the time had this discussion about how they wanted to progress as a wiki and they explicitly rejected the pathway we've recently taken. It should also give us pause that nobody (and here I blame myself as well and it's one of the reasons why I've been trying to do my forum archaeology) actually noticed this during the R4bp thread and brought it up. The decision recently made is profoundly discontinuous with this historically important discussion - it, in fact, explicitly contradicts it.

It's important to note that User:Scrooge MacDuck has called to my attention that he was aware of this thread, but didn't think it imperative to discuss for his proposal so it slipped his mind. I think it's perhaps slightly more important than he does, but let's review the reasoning here.
 * the thing, is that a lot of Czech's argument relied on rather pedantic nitpicks about whether the text's descriptions were clear enough to state as fact that the text was even referring to Curse [...] This isn't to say that there were no other grounds for rejecting the proposal at the time, don't mistake me.


 * But still, between that and the usage of "canon", it just painted the whole thing as falling some ways short of still-live jurisprudence. The ruling was made under a foundational assumption of "we cannot identify a character as [X] in the main namespace unless they are explicitly, unambiguously, nominally [X]" that we abandoned long ago


 * [Another post] What I mean is that the thread was also predicated on an underlying assertion (a "présupposé", as we say in French) that the Tomorrow Windows references were too flimsy anyway. And I see two ways in which that's damning to the thread. First, this foundational assumption had ceased to be current practice by the time I made the R4BP thread, which calls into question whether the thread as a whole was standing policy at all, and either waycertainly justified a new thread based on new facts. And secondarily, in rhetorical terms I think spending so much of the OP on arguing that the would-be type-case for proto-R4BP was speculative on the merits, did an unfair disservice to the theory in terms of how it came across to the community at the time.

Again, I think we should have discussed this at the time even given Scrooge's views here, and I apologize for not having done the digging yet to be aware of it. It's something that at the very least would have informed our decision and could have cast things in a different light, even given the reasoning for one editor not thinking it relevant. With that said, I do emphasize that I don't think this thread is itself a slam dunk reason to dismiss R4bp out of hand - it's not, as we sometimes say, a defeater to the position - but it is reason that we might want to reconsider R4bp or at least think about it a bit more critically.

The hippopotamus in the room
While the former is a largely historical note, albeit one that speaks to how radical and abrupt this change truly is, this next thread speaks to a fundamental tension in how R4bp has been applied on this wiki. Namely, Thread:212365 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2. Also known as the "sequels to invalid stories" thread. Yes, the thread itself is full of interesting comments here,
 * No one on this wikia has cared about "continuity" in at-least half-a-decade.


 * if a valid story can't make another story valid by default by connecting to it, then surely an invalid story can't make another story invalid by default, either.


 * Let's have policies that are enforced across the board, policies which are measurable and scientifically consistent and are not based on dated fandom ideas of "canon."
 * Either all stories that reference or connect themselves to "invalid" stories are invalid by association, or this policy has no merit. Either Frozen Time and Storm in a Tikka are both equally valid adventures, or their coverage needs to be equally purged. There is no space in-between available.


 * The concept of "continuity" is a veiled comeback of "canon" and is not how the Tardis Wiki works, and the only justification for "invalid by association" cited thus far, that I could see, relies on the idea of continuity.

Now, again, these are all made in a somewhat specific context, but it should be striking how similar these comments are, either near word for word, to arguments one could make against R4bp, or arguments one could make if they just reversed the direction.

The thread is interesting in that OS25 begins it asking for sequels/prequels to R1-3 breaking stories to be made valid, so long as they don't fail any of the 4 rules. This is not quite the conclusion reached. The thread decided to apply the conclusion to invalid stories of all types, so long as their sequels don't suffer from the same problems.


 * References or connections to past stories which have been disqualified from validity for reasons which do not apply to the newer entry do not make them automaticallyinvalid.


 * (Equally, it should be noted, assertions made in valid stories do not retroactively change the rule 1/2/3/4 violations of past sources--outside very special cases in the forums, anyhow.) [Najawin note: We'll get to the case SOTO is referring to shortly.]


 * This is because validity is not primarily determined by continuity. Any illusion of having one easily traceable continuity for Doctor Who has long been shattered. Instead, our one rule to do with DWU continuity is about intention. Just as contradictions between stories mean little to these rulings, continuity nods to stories that don't count here don't swallow the rest of the narrative whole. If it can be established that the same problems don't plague the "sequel", and if it's not clear that the writer(s) of the newer work actually intended a non-DWU setting, then it should be considered on its own terms.


 * Remember, our determination of invalidity is external: we should not take it as given that authors share our same point of view, writing in a time before this site existed.

So what's the immediate problem here? Well, it's that sequels/prequels to invalid stories are explicitly marked as valid in this thread due to the wiki's insistence that continuity has no influence on validity. But we've just recently decided the opposite! This fundamentally undermines the reasoning present in the sequels/prequels thread, meaning that the very things that need to exist in order to reference these invalid stories and lift them into validity are on logically shaky ground, leading their validity to be questioned as well. Neurath's boat has been lit aflame as we sail.

Whenever we have a new source that enters the wiki, one that references both invalid and valid works, we're now presented with a choice. Is it meant to be valid and lift the thing it references up into validity? Or is it referencing an invalid work in order to showcase its own invalidity? There's simply no easy answer here.

I emphasize that I'm not the only person who sees this problem here. Many others did in the thread back in 2017-2020. The quotes given above are only a small sampling - continuity was actively decried in this thread.

The rhinoceros in the room
Now, there is one bit of precedent that might look R4bp-adjacent if you don't quite look close enough. The reclassification of "unbound" audios from invalid to valid was due to narrative evidence. One can certainly see some similarities here between this and the basic ideas behind R4bp, sure. But there's a twist as to why these two decisions aren't really comparable. To note, every thread is at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1, we want Thread:197392, Thread:197509, and Thread:207240.

In this situation we have clarification of original intent - as the term "alternate universe" was at least somewhat ambiguous. Moreover, the focus was on the nature of the range, and whether "what if?" --> "not DWU" from the perspective of Big Finish. We were clarifying the authorial intent of one of the parties involved by using the narrative of a later release of theirs. I find this... suspect, personally, but it is far less objectionable in my mind to what our current rule is. Indeed, others have suggested that this was their original reading of this policy! (Modulo the intent being from one of the original parties to the work, which is rather imperative for my taste.)
 * In this case, the reference to the story in another book is simply evidence that, yes, in this instance where there's a lack of certainty on the topic, we have clarification that these stories do take place in the DWU.

Ultimately I don't consider these two policies particularly similar. Indeed, I'd find the one used to validate Unbound being applied with a broader brush to be something to keep an eye on, but not inherently objectionable. However, as with all things, the particular daylight between these two policies may seem somewhat smaller to you.

One other thread
Thread:214342 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 is somewhat relevant here, in that it explicitly affirms that authorial intent changing over time does not matter. (As opposed to using later statements to clarify previous authorial intent.) This is not quite equivalent to R4bp, but they share DNA.

Inconsistent reasoning
Before anything else one must ask the question - why does it matter that our reasoning might be inconsistent? Well. I quite like the construction in this paper on a more abstract level - it's one of the more accessible ones I've found, but let's bring it down to earth even further. It is perhaps only slightly controversial that one should avoid directly contradicting themselves, so if R4bp somehow ends up contradicting the underlying ethos of R4 (and I think it does), I don't think people here will need to be convinced that this is an issue.

Instead - I made need to convince people that changes to a rule should be consistent with the overall reasoning enshrined in other rules as well. After all - these are separate rules, why would we apply standards for one as standard to another? I think this is incorrect in two ways. The first is the obvious - we have obvious concerns about what we signal to other people with these changes, returning editors and outside parties. If the reasoning is this disjoint it raises doubts as to our competence and stability over the long term. The second is that these are not multiple rules, though they may appear that way and we often call them so. The "four little rules" is best understood as "four little criteria", not as "four little operating policies for Tardis Wiki". They together constitute a single operating policy for Tardis Wiki, T:VS. And this single operating policy needs to have coherent reasoning throughout in much the same way that we would want R4 to be coherently written throughout. Could we write T:BOUND in a way that's ever so slightly in tension with T:WRITE POLICY? Sure, and it's worth bringing up and discussing, but it's not an immediate disaster, it's more that it's going to have eventual problems and that it signals potential worries to other parties. But this is all one policy. We'd hope that it's a coherent whole.

Given this context, I want to begin by emphasizing that it's important to note that this rewrite of R4 has made R4 inconsistent with the original reasoning that led to R4. See Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?.
 * Tangerineduel has made the point that we can't believe a writer who says that their work is canonical. That's very true. But, in my opinion, he's incorrect on the reverse. I think we do have to believe a writer who declares, "Look, this isn't a part of the mainstream continuity." After all, we've believed it before. I don't see any rational argument for doing something different in this case. Moreover, it's kinda stupid to say that as the author, unless you mean it. Saying something is out of continuity will have a negative impact on sales. So if someone says it, you do take it seriously, because they're acting against their self-interest.

R4 was written with the express skepticism of trusting writers to tell us what is "canon", as they could be self interested. (Or, for R4bp, nepotistic, or big fans of something, or still self interested.) We were supposed to consider the inverse comments because they had potentially negative effects to the authors and they simply would have no motivation to say this other than that it was the truth. Now, I think this view is somewhat naive, I've read through the ra.dw archives surrounding CoFD's release. But it's not entirely wrong, and it's certainly the case that it stands in stark contradiction with R4bp as well as many of our recent rulings related to R4.

So that, in itself, is an issue, that the reasoning behind R4bp contradicts the reasoning behind R4. But there's another concern here, and it's the concern that shows a potential path forward if we want to keep R4bp. Allowing later works to modify previous intent is incoherent on the face of it. And, indeed, this is not what R4bp attempts to do. Rather, R4bp simply says that we no longer care about the previous intent of authors because some new author has insisted that the previous work really truly does take place in the latter author's understanding of the DWU. Now, this reasoning is fundamentally philosophically suspect - the standard view in philosophy of aesthetics contemporarily is that of actual intentionalism - there's just no reason we should care what this latter author thinks in how it impacts our reading of the first work. But this is perhaps too technical a point for a wiki to base their policies off of, and I think it clear that not everyone will have the background to engage in a discussion on the topic.

Rather, let's ask the obvious question. If R4bp is not about clarifying intent of the original author, or of trying to clarify original intent in the original text (as if this could be distinct from the author), but instead of inventing new, R4 satisfying, authorial intent, why are there not analogous RXbp's for the other 3 rules in T:VS? If we truly wish to commit to R4bp and be logically consistent, I don't see a clear way out of at least considering them.

Let's briefly touch on what each RXbp might look like.

R1bp - See Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy. It was ruled that Deleted Scenes are often R1 breakers, not R3 breakers. It's not trivial that they all satisfy R4, I admit, but we at least see some rough outlines of what R1bp might look like in this thread, how deleted scenes or past versions of scripts might become valid under R1bp rather than R4bp - being referenced in later fully fledged works of fiction, even as they themselves are fundamentally incomplete but satisfy R2, R3, and potentially R4.

R2bp - So there are a few ways to go about this. Obvious the requirements that need to be met are that it satisfies R1, R3, and R4. So it needs to be intended to be in the DWU before anything else, let's make that clear. The two different approaches here are ones I'm going to call the "Cyberon" approach and the "Audio Visual"s approach.

In the first, you merely don't need to have licensed DWU concepts in the story - if it's intended to be set in the DWU and later referred to using these licensed elements in a valid DWU story (so the DWU elements are also licensed), it too is brought into the wiki's notion of the DWU. (I note here that I still dislike the usage of continuity and would prefer not to use the idea of "referring to the story" - I have it here for symmetry's sake. I think the better option is to simply declare the concept retroactively a DWU concept.)

The second is to allow stories to actively violate copyright so long as later valid stories reference them in a way that attempts to "bring them into continuity". There are a few Audio Visuals that have sequel stories. These would count. (I note here that my preferred tactic above has no obvious analogue here. I think it has to be some sort of "continuity" move and you have to clear up what continuity means.)

Relevant threads off the top of my head are Thread:174552, Thread:177311, Thread:207146, Thread:184791 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1, Thread:137866 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon II, Thread:240280 from User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Help!, and Forum:BBV and canon policy.

R3bp - A bit of a difficult one to imagine, I admit. Largely because there's so little R3 jurisprudence. Both Tangerine and myself contend that deleted scenes violate R3 as well, but Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy ruled against us. T:OFF REL refers to things like video games being in beta - perhaps if a game has a public beta but simply never officially releases. Aside from this page the only thing I could find was a comment from Amorkuz talking about how media released at conventions didn't count as an official release (see Thread:258247 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2 'To summarise, things sold at conventions and through direct mailing are not "commercial releases"') I'm not sure if this is official policy, or just a then admin giving their opinion. Potentially we could let these sorts of things become valid if so, if they're later referenced by fully valid works. But I admit, this is perhaps the hardest to work with, simply because we need to have the thing to wikify it.

Finally, and I think this is a very minor point - it's one I didn't even stumble across until a recent conversation with Nate - there's now a profound lack of symmetry between how we handle in-universe coverage of events and out of universe determination of validity. Let me explain.

We all agree that for various events in the DWU competing events are relatively common, yes? And it's important to report neutrally on these accounts, stating what each source tells us, and not to speculate further. So if in one source we see precisely X and in another Y, we say that in one account X was held to have happened and in another Y was held to have happened, refusing to speculate further, refusing to say further than what X tells us, and refusing to say further than what Y tells us. And previously there was some symmetry between how we handled these cases and invalid sources and valid sources referencing invalid ones. An invalid source says X, but it also, implicitly, says that it cannot be trusted and we can't use it to write articles, so we ignore it, and then a valid source says precisely Y, so we say Y. But now we've decided to break this symmetry. (One could argue that we're maybe violating some sort of "meta NPOV", but I think this is a bit silly.) Now, I don't think many will find this argument even slightly compelling; like many here it's not a slam dunk, but just another building block in the overall construction. Plus, symmetry arguments make my mathematician brain happy. So I have to include them. Sorry.

But we just validated all of these things!
But if it was a mistake to do so in the first place this just can't be a response. Perhaps these stories deserve to be invalid! Regardless, I don't think the situation is quite so dire. Many of those things recently validated by R4bp had perfectly reasonable R4 arguments for their validity. Indeed, at least one editor in the thread insisted that R4bp shouldn't wall off the ability to make normal R4 arguments as well. People have just declined to use this by and large, since we have a shiny new hammer and a lot of problems look like nails. Indeed, much of the frustration here, I believe, contra Scrooge, is that we've had fantastic R4 arguments for validating so many of these stories and the threads have simply been closed summarily or not addressed. As to the specifics of what we've recently validated, for what I can remember off hand,

Cushingverse - there was an incredibly detailed and nuanced thread at Thread:232095 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon IV

Vienna - I mean, C'mon. From User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 1 there's Thread:125464, and many more discussions.

Death Comes to Time - Thread:267931 in User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates 2

Dimensions in Time - should never have been validated. The issue here was R2 worries primarily, R4 was an afterthought.

Daft Dimension - I mean, I'm not convinced, but I don't think it's too difficult to validate it elsewise if you truly believe it should be valid.

Friend from the Future - Maybe there's an issue here? I don't think it's trivial that there is, and even if there is, it would fall under a more restrictive "allow authors to clarify their intent later" policy.

The fluffy little Pomeranian in the room
So.... Uh.... What about my thread? What about Forum:Temporary forums/Non-narrative fiction and Rule 1? Aren't I being a touch hypocritical here with calling out R4bp as being a massive change with all of these problems when my thread has these same problems? (Says the hypothetical interlocutor.)

Am I maybe being a touch inconsistent?

I mean, probably, to some extent, all humans are. But I don't think so in the obvious ways, at least. The relevant concerns would be the four(five) principles at the beginning of this post, yes? I think, bearing in mind the various ways things could have turned out - there were a few different ways in which I proposed that we could move forward - ease of explanation and ease of enforcement are obviously satisfied, as is continuity of past policy interpretations on the part of such things like TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual. This leaves us only to worry about whether or not the reasoning is continuous with other threads and/or inconsistent with itself or other rules.

Even supposing it was - I want to stress - I don't think that failing a single condition here is itself grounds for reversing our decisions. My concerns with R4bp come from the quantity of issues in all their different forms, not that a single issue exists.

But I'm certainly not convinced that the change given was inconsistent with the other rules. Perhaps it's discontinuous with prior threads? But if this is the case, it's because the issues concerning R1 were coming to a head as the forums closed. If you wish to ding me on this, you may. I don't find the situations particularly comparable, and if R4bp was in an analogous situation I certainly wouldn't be merely complaining that it lacked quite the right precedent because we were merely discussing the issue prior to the forums closing in multiple threads. But if you wish to do so that's your right.

Other potential responses
One immediate criticism that springs to mind is that in attempting to argue that the references/continuity distinction is, uh, of questionable legitimacy, I'm perhaps opening myself up to the obvious riposte that we just do use these sections without controversy and they work quite well. For more on this discussion, see the ongoing conversation at Forum:References into Worldbuilding.

I, of course, strongly deny the veracity of this statement. Our continuity sections, as mentioned in said forum thread, are a mess. There simply is no clear standard as the wiki currently operates for what places something into the continuity section. And let me try to guess why this is the case. It's because nobody really cares?

I mean, I'm being a bit harsh here. But if I see something a bit sketchy placed into a continuity section, it's just not really worth it to fight over 9 times out of 10? Like. Look. I despise this from The Timeless Children in Story Notes:
 * The premise of this episode also fulfils several elements of the Hybrid prophecy from Season 9.
 * A hybrid creature (the Spy Master had merged with the Cyberium), would stand over the ruins of Gallifrey and unravel the Web of Time (the Master had hacked into the Matrix), breaking a billion billion hearts to heal its own (the Master had also slaughtered the Time Lords after he became distraught at learning the truth of their origins).

I want to force whoever started this nonsense to rewatch Hell Bent over and over Clockwork Orange style until they understand it. It's clearly not an intentional reference, and it fails to fulfill one of the parts of the prophecy, it's just silly to note. But I don't really see a reason to remove it on a page like this, it's well within the bounds of what's on other pages.

In a delightfully circular way, because there's no real standard to decide on what's a real continuity reference and what's just us seeing connections where none exist it devolves into just editors bickering. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. There are no official standards, so anyone can place anything, so nobody cares enough to enforce community driven standards.

But here's a fun little nuance that nobody has figured out yet. We've decided to base R4bp off of the wiki notion of continuity, no? As it stands, this is wildly broad, and I don't think this is what Scrooge intends, as you can see from the thread discussion above. But just as nobody cares about continuity now, and is willing to let these contested facts stay there currently, what happens when people realize that policy fights over individual continuity sections can, in aggregate, effect interpretation of R4bp, by either expanding it or weakening it? Just as we have arguments from people over R4bp and people just can't see eye to eye, we're going to have arguments over individual continuity sections as proxy wars with people seeing clear connections on one side and other people clearly rejecting these connections on the other.

These sections only "work" because people don't care about them, and they hardly work at that. R4bp has placed undue emphasis on them, if in a roundabout way, and I think people are going to find that they'll buckle under the strain.

So finally, let’s discuss a criticism that Scrooge suggested to me with the potential idea of "invalidity by proxy".
 * Why [in short, allow forward R4bp but not reverse], rather than the pre-Sequels thread way of doing things? It's all in the fact that a licensed story is assumed to pass Rule 4 by default unless there is "extraordinary evidence" otherwise; and that is a very old, very well-established piece of policy indeed. What the Sequels thread did, was establish that (as you recently argued in the Daft Dimension thread!) authors' understanding of "the DWU" cannot be trusted to correspond to the Wiki's boundaries of validity; such that we cannot safely assume that by referencing something we call invalid, they are intending to set themselves outside the DWU. In other words it established that the in-narrative continuity-references weren't good enough to meet the threshold of "extraordinary evidence" that we require to cancel out the default presumption of Rule-4-validity.
 * Whereas there is nothing procedurally wrong with the R4BP thread establishing a different, "lower" standard of evidence for the completely different question of whether a source intends to bring another one into the DWU in some way. It's not a contradiction to have different thresholds of evidence/different default assumptions, for different questions. The default assumption should be that a Who story is intended by its author to be in the DWU, therefore very strong evidence is needed to contradict that claim and minor in-story instances of discontinuity don't suffice; meanwhile, the default assumption (or so the R4BP thread decided) should be that an author who references an "invalid" story intends to bring into the DWU, therefore we have a lesser threshold of evidence for confirming this scenario.
 * These aren't contradictory, and they don't even come from different mindsets: both positions flow naturally from a shared assumption that the default should be an assumption of Rule-4-passingness from any given author (whether it be for their own story, or the work they're choosing to reference) unless stated otherwise or suggested otherwise by extremely strong circumstantial evidence, like parody-ness or egregious fourth-wall-breaking.

There’s a crucial mistake here to my mind, and it’s one that was brought up by myself in the original R4bp thread and completely ignored. We’re not dealing with stories that have come to us from the aether, fully formed. We’re dealing with stories that have already failed R4. And it’s just not the case that the standards Scrooge is suggesting here are compatible with our normal procedures for how to deal with with stories that fail R4 in any other scenario.

Perhaps they should be! Perhaps we need to re-evaluate how we handle our validity debates for stories that have already failed R4. But they’re constantly highly contentious areas with very high burdens of proof placed on those who wish to readmit those stories back to the status of validity. This absolutely is inconsistent with how we handle R4 matters in every other area but R4bp. (Lest anyone think the above idea about different standards of evidence for different questions work as a response here, I ask you to consider whether you’d find a similar comment made by a mod acceptable 5 years ago when they were explaining, say, a blanket ban on Parody, as it was written down as an exception in T:VS. The question in, well, question, being whether the work is a parody. Reasoning is clearly not being applied consistently and special exceptions are being carved out.) The default assumption is that invalid stories are not in the DWU, so we need extraordinary evidence to validate them. Thus we’re back in exactly the same dilemma as before. With no clear way to make the decision - it takes extraordinary evidence to invalidate, it takes extraordinary evidence to validate.

This leaves us with one alternative, is there some higher level of reasoning that stops this from being special pleading? Is it that we just have to assume validity unless proven otherwise?

Well, yes and no. One could argue that nothing is lost if we just placed things in the BTS sections of various pages. There's been a recent trend on this wiki where people argue in favor of validity because they worry that we will lose information as lost to time forever because things are invalid. These fears are largely misplaced - the nature of invalid pages does not necessitate this, it merely dictates what pages information from these sources you can place information from them on. There are specific examples where work has been lost, but this is because of other factors, not merely invalidity.

I note that there's a caveat here, that some claim that in the past admins have discouraged them from editing invalid story pages. Well, discouragement can come in many different ways, and I really couldn't find any broad statements saying not to do it. I could find a few hyper-specific comments about individual users not rehashing certain discussions over and over, or about how admins were tired of the 2016-2017 inclusion debates, but never a broad level discouragement. With one exception. I did find User talk:DENCH-and-PALMER/Archive 1 (And below it, Re: What?) where an admin explicitly says that invalid pages are considered to be less important. Now, this behavior is alleged to have happened for quite a bit longer, so I can only assume it happened in chat, somewhere I just didn't catch, or it was the more subtle forms of discouragement mentioned. I don't think this is an appropriate approach to take to invalid stories, let me be clear. And I can understand why someone would wish to validate as many things as possible given the past.

But more than this, I'm not unsympathetic to the underlying idea in the first place. I do think we should be trying to have things as valid if we can, and that "invalidity by proxy" would be a deeply worrying outcome. But there's a third option here, between choosing invalidity by proxy as privileged and validity by proxy as privileged. We can simply cut the link between older stories and new stories. We placed it there in the first place. It's the link that's causing issues. We need either to rig it more successfully in one direction or remove it.

And even if we suppose that I cede Scrooge’s criticism, which I don’t, it doesn’t entail that the inconsistencies with the original intent of R4 go away, nor do the inconsistencies with the rest of T:VS not having RXbps. At best it isolates you from this particular Munchausen-ian problem.

In conclusion
Oh, wow, that's a long thread, isn't it? Let me try to summarize some of the points so that people can give their preliminary thoughts on just the introduction + conclusion before going back and reading the entire thing, as I'm sure they will. (And hopefully all of the threads I link, as they're important context. :P)

Over the course of this thread I've presented a variety of claims, and defended them with, I think, a fair bit of evidence. R4bp is poorly written both because it's confusing for new editors, and because it's arguably incoherent from a policy standpoint when we start using "continuity" in the manner that it references. It's wildly discontinuous from how our policies have previously functioned, and I don't think there's strong evidence that people have pushed for policy similar to it in the past - it appears to be a very near complete 180. Moreover, the reasoning used for the policy is fundamentally in tension with the reasoning for the original R4, as well as the reasoning used to justify sequels to invalid stories - meaning the very things now being used to validate invalid stories through R4bp are valid through questionable means, and it's not clear as to why R4bp doesn't generalize to other "Rule X by proxies". You may or may not find any one of these compelling reasons to doubt that R4bp needs to be reconsidered. You may or may not find my arguments compelling for each section. But I think, in aggregate, the case is clear that some level of reconsideration and change needs to be undertaken.

But given all of this, is the analysis I've presented really about R4bp? Nate recently suggested to me that it's further reaching than that - it suggests that we might need to completely re-examine our entire system of validity. And I can see the reasoning behind this, but I don't quite think it correct. The reason why this analysis is so broad is because R4bp, as it was constructed, had such broad ramifications that went unnoticed at the time. I think a full review of our validity policy would have to be even broader still, and as I allude to in the introduction, I don't think anyone here is prepared to do that at the present time, nor is this thread really the place for it. With that said, I'm not unaware of the reality that the analysis I've presented may suggest to some that there's an issue so deeply foundational at the heart of T:VS that a fundamental re-analysis of that policy from the ground up is needed instead. I, personally, am unconvinced, but I'm willing to accept that it's a third horn of what I thought was previously a dilemma.

So where does this leave us? Everyone has their own standards of evidence, and I can't comment on what you personally find convincing, but I think there's a strong case here that something has to give. Either R4bp goes, and we return to how we were - I note, I don't think this is particularly disastrous, many of the things we wanted to validate we would still validate, we have to seriously consider the other RXbps as well as most likely rewrite R4bp to focus on standards that are clear and consistent - explainable to new editors and to those of us who just have fundamentally never understood what "continuity" means from this wiki's POV, (this discussion might be shunted off to Forum:References into Worldbuilding, as a similar one has begun there, quelle surprise) or we just defer the issue until later - we say that fundamentally the tension here is that T:VS is fundamentally not working as it should to meet the needs of the wiki in its current day and we need to rewrite it from the ground up and work towards on the steps it would take to actually have that discussion. (As stated at the beginning, one last option is just to ignore everything and insist that no changes are needed even with the flaws presented here. But I rather presume nobody will do that.)

I have my personal preference. But ultimately my reasons for liking it among these three options aren't really the sorts of things I think you can base wiki policy off of. So while I strongly feel that one of these choices has to be made, and I'm going to defend that contention quite strongly here - I think the status quo cannot continue, it is up to the community which of these three options we should choose. Najawin ☎  14:59, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

 * Can I have a TL;DR? 15:29, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Let me first of all say that this is a rare case where I not only disagree with the OP being pitched here, I disagree with the need for us to have this debate. Usually I would find such statements unhelpful, but this is a very specific case.

We codified R4BP at the end of January 2023. With all things considered, it has barely been six months since we passed this. In the past, restarting a debate which is so recent has been explicitly against site policy - for instance, when an Infobox image is picked on a talk page, it is often said that the topic can not be revisited for another twelve months. In the olden days of these forums, it was typically frowned upon to respond to a failed validity proposal by restarting it a few months later - I recall being reprimanded for this at times, and I eventually learned that restarting recent forum debates simply wasn’t cordial (even if I was right about the topic at hand).

The fact that much of Najawin’s opening post here relates to him simply quoting a forum post from the last six months and disagreeing with the conclusions is, I think, a big issue; especially as this is now the fourth or fifth forum in these six months wherein he has openly debated how “real” this policy actually is.

Indeed, one of Najawin’s biggest arguments here revolves around him attempting to find some ambiguity in the difference between references and continuity on story pages, partially through citing former historical forums. This is disturbing as we have already had a recent debate where he did this, which had a closing post that resolved the issue. Accordingly, an extensive amount of the arguments in this post are not new and we’ve, in fact, had these debates recently.

Moreover, it was very smart of us to tackle this issue in the temporary space and at the start of the year - before we were allowing a huge influx of validity debates. The reason is that Rule 4 By Proxy and adjacent topics influence at least half of any validity arguments which we are likely to have. There are discussions ongoing right now which now must sit in limbo, perhaps unable to be closed due to this forum creating a convoluted case of T:BOUND (although I obviously leave this up to the admins, I think in this case we should just continue closing forums regardless).

I am going to be attempting to go through as much of this OP as I possibly can. But I will often be discussing other topics which I find more relevant. But this opening post, in my opinion, is meandering, incorrect, and in violation of T:BOUND.

At the start of this forum, Najawin begins things by stating one simple opinion: Validity is not canon.

Surely this is true to some extent - validity is not entirely canon. But the important thing is that, long ago, validity was canon. In the olden days of the site, we attempted to decipher what was canon, as can clearly be identified by taking any sort of glance at T:CANON. However, as the official stance of the BBC became “there is no canon” or even “everything is canon,” the site pivoted. T:VS was soon created, instituting “four little rules.” One of those rules, “was this intended to be set inside the Doctor Who universe,” was at least for a time not significantly different from asking “is this canon?”

Now, I would not go out of my way to say that the current reading of our rules and policies today involve any debate about if something is canon. But, for a time, the worst parts about said discussion bled into every aspect of this wiki.

For instance, many rulings in our past insinuated that “the Doctor Who Universe” actually meant “the BBC Wales Doctor Who universe” - that is, the universe of Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Paul McGann. So a story which could not have properly adjusted itself for this universe - such as Scream of the Shalka - was deemed to have not sufficiently placed itself inside the correct DWU.

Worse yet was the factor that “Not-DWU”, like non-canon, could be something assigned to a specific story at any point. One example is the 1992 Shada was originally declared Not-DWU is because someone working on the 2003 Shada said that the Tom Baker version was not canon.

Thus, in spite of that author never working on the original production or the 1992 VHS, we judged that the Baker Shada was to be non-valid for the rest of time, because this was an “official stance” by someone in 2003.

The issue here is that we can find quotes like this about a lot of media - Moffat himself has said Lungbarrow isn’t set in his Doctor’s universe, same for the rest of the Virgin novels. Shall we say they fail rule 4 now?

If I write a story for Titan Comics, what’s stopping me from saying on Twitter that The Forgotten comic isn’t canon? Would that be good enough to remove that story’s right to rule 4? I’d hope not.

This is made even worse by the fact that, before the start of this decade, we consistently considered the “DWU” to actually mean the “BBC Wales DWU.” As in, the Shalka Doctor isn’t a part of the Christopher Eccleston DWU - thus it’s not DWU. This is the messiest of messy slippery slopes, as even in the revived series a consistent canon is impossible to find with this franchise.

(An infamous example of all of this, highlighted in the OP above, is that there is no evidence that Dr. Who and the Daleks did not intend itself to be set in "the Doctor Who universe" as it was defined in the 1960s. But fans decided it wasn’t set in the "Doctor Who canon” of the Classic series, and the BBC eventually agreed. Thus, it was non-valid - because the “Doctor Who universe” meant the specific universe spanning William Hartnell to (at the time (but also currently I guess)) David Tennant.)

So, eventually in our site history we decided that authorial intent at time of release is what really mattered most, not retroactive intent. You can intend to have your story be DWU, but a future work can not remove you from that status. So Chris Chibnall can’t just say “The Time Crocodile isn’t canon” with the expectation that this will effect our judgement.

And we sorted this out even further in the late 2010s, when it was decided that something being related to a non-valid stories does not make it non-valid immediately. A Dimensions in Time sequel does not Rule 4 simply because an admin (incorrectly) claimed that Dimensions fails Rule 2. Fixing a Hole does not fail Rule 4 simply because the original has a weird fourth wall moment. (You’ll forgive me if I’m not hunting for historical quotes. I was there, thus I don’t need historical quotes.)

Changing this was not just an arbitrary choice - it fundamentally fixed a huge problem on our site. That being the ultimate toxicity of the concept of canon and how it bleeds from story-to-story. In a world where mentioning the plot to Dimensions in Time is a sin, we are judging canon. It’s as simple as that - our validity policies reflect canon if we’re allowing such things. And since “no canon” is the biggest rule we have, we again fixed our policies and did not, in fact, contradict them.

Now, one thing I want to get ahead of in this debate is the idea that Rule 4 By Proxy is a brand new rule invented this very year. This is absolutely not true, as all we have done in 2023 is codify a concept which has always been on the site.

Long-time users will know that I would often joke in forums that the only thing stopping the Cushing Doctor or Lenny Henry’s Seventh Doctor from being valid is some comic story illustrating them as existing in some alternate universe. And I was hardly a lone wolf on this.

As my key piece of evidence, I would like to bring up a series Najawin has not so far. If Rule 4 By Proxy is thrown out and we enforce the opposite, this series will be non-valid the very next day. That is Big Finish’s Doctor Who Unbound.

This series was called non-valid very early into the site’s history. In fact, the rule as per WHY Unbound was invalid still exists in T:VS - any “what if” story is immediately not-valid until proven otherwise. Shortly after I joined the site, I questioned why Unbound wasn’t valid if the series has been depicted as an alternate universe. The following forum says a lot.

in Forum:Is the Doctor in Sympathy of the Devil of mainstream continuity because he appeared in The 100 Days of The Doctor?

Here is a very shortened version of the conversation:


 * I hope that my question can be understood from the title. The Doctor (Sympathy for the Devil) is a page with the Nondwu tag on it, and for a very solid reason; he was introduced in a piece not meant to be cannon. But he appeared briefly in The 100 Days of the Doctor (audio story) when the Doctor and Evelyn "side step" into his universe, so should he be considered mainstream because of that? Keep in mind that this is different from Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon? because that was covering a very vague reference to the alternate Ninth Doctor, while this story is an obvious appearance.


 * And if he is "in-universe" or however tou want to say it, does that mean that his original two stories are as well? OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 05:25, November 24, 2012 (UTC)


 * Perhaps.
 * That the Doctor side steps / crosses over to another universe, based on our other sources would make it valid.
 * The difference here that others may point out is that the Sympathy universe was intended to be non-canon (a term we've by now established doesn't really exist) or to be a "what if" scenario (which Big Finish uses). Our own Doctor Who Unbound article uses the term "premises fundamentally altered" linking to parallel universe. Forum:References to BFDWU as alternate or diverging timeline also discusses this separation and CzechOut stated in that discussion "they're meant to be outside the DWU. That's why they're called unbound — as in "not bound by continuity"."
 * But now brining in this extra reference of the Doctor going there, that means it is a place that can be visited by the Doctor and it, by its reference in 100 Days makes it linked to the main DWU. --Tangerineduel / talk 08:16, November 24, 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry, it's been a while since I've heard this one. Does David Warner actually appear in The 100 Days of the Doctor? ... Well, there are worse ways to spend half an hour.  I'll let you know after I've listened to it. ... Neither Warner nor Nicholas Courtney appear.  What happens is that the Doctor claims to be travelling "sideways" into alternate realities, and then he gives a barebones description of that world's Doctor and Brigadier.  There is, by my reckoning, exactly one sentence which ties it to  Sympathy for the Devil: "He goes on and on about his time with the Brigadier in Hong Kong". Evelyn says that he gave up his TARDIS' dimensional stabiliser so that Six and Evelyn could get out of that reality, so in that sense there is a tangible connection between the two universes. And obviously the mention of "Hong Kong" is an Easter Egg for the "Unbound au fait". But it's really, really minor. It's perfectly possible to believe that there's no connection whatsoever.


 * For the ease of writing articles around here, I think it's better just to make a little note about this at The 100 Days of the Doctor and leave it there. Opening up the possibility that all Unbounds are merely parallel universes off of the main DWU — just because of two quick lines in a highly meta-textual celebratory episode — is going a step too far. If David Warner actually appeared, I'd say you'd have to do it. As he doesn't, the reference is suggestive more than definitive.  It's very much like the situation in ''The Gallifrey Chronicles where the Rowan Atkinson Doctor is supposedly alluded to.  It's kinda/sorta the Warner Doctor, but maybe it's not.   01:15: Sun 25 Nov 2012
 * [Emphasis mine, not theirs]

And indeed, when the Warner Doctor returned and was explicitly from another universe, all Unbound material was made valid, ignoring and reversing that the series was “unbounded from continuity.”

Now again, we are not bound by forums this old, and in fact Czech personally requested that we ignore and in some cases redo any debate from this far back. See the opening post of Forum:The New Forums.

In his post, Najawin argues that this is NOT what was said here. Instead, he thinks that the agreed upon concept of Unbound being retconned into an alternate universe was actually clarification of authorial intent. Big Finish was not retconning that the series existed in a parallel reality to the Doctor’s - they were just clarifying the original intention of the series. Personally, I think this is simply a slanted reading invented to try and ignore the fact that Rule 4 By Proxy, the idea of something which outwardly fails Rule 4 being brought back into continuity by a future story, was clearly understood in theory while T:VS was still being written.

In fact, in the above quotes, we see direct reference to a theoretical story bringing Unbound back into continuity via a future retcon. The quote is not “Well, a future story might make the authorial intent more clear,” it’s 100% “A future story can bring a story back into continuity.” Czech’s response here is swift: “I’d say you’d have to do it.”

(I would go as far as to say that if Najawin’s pitch passes here, Unbound should immediately be non-valid again as a series, because “What if” fiction is directly banned in the fine text of T:VS. Thus, it is only valid through some version of the R4BP concept.)

In fact, what you can see here AND in the forum about Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon? is that the concept of R4BP was never disputed. However, how explicit the connection needed to be in the text was argued about in detail, as we can see here in Czech saying that the events of Sympathy of the Devil being referenced is too vague to form a debate around.

However, we have more recently more clearly defined a community standard for what “continuity” actually is - and there is no need or justification to redebate the topic. To quote the recent closing post of Forum:Temporary forums/Trailers:


 * Some of the points made by User:Najawin about the proposed R4BP rationale struck me as a little strange. Specifically, he claimed that "there's no continuity here" about the scene in Christmas on a Rational Planet, where Cwej finds a disused Prime computer near the TARDIS control room. I can only echo PintlessMan's replies here, minus the focus on "humour" which Najawin disavowed as the crux of his disagreement:

"If, say, a Past Doctor Adventure set in the 1970s had a villain hyping up his powerful new supercomputer and then it turned out to be an ordinary Prime 200, that would be an in-joke. It might be funny to fans who remembered the advertisement but would imply no continuity connection. But what we have here is a very direct connection to the narrative situation of the advertisements: the Seventh Doctor is shown to have, in storage aboard the TARDIS, a Prime computer which he has clearly acquired at some point in the past. We know exactly when he acquired it, and what the circumstances were, because we have literally seen this happen on television in a story starring Tom Baker and Lalla Ward."

- User:PintlessMan


 * A character finding a recognisable object from a past adventure, gathering dust in the very place it was last time we saw it, is a textbook example of "continuity". It's "continuity" to City of Death when, in COMIC: The One, the characters find a spare Mona Lisa in a spare room of the TARDIS among other Fourth Doctor memorabilia, and we note it as such in the "Continuity" section. It's "continuity" to An Unearthly Child when TV: Remembrance of the Daleks lingers on Susan Foreman's history book, left lying around in a classroom — even though, famously, that reference doesn't even actually make sense! This is absolutely a "continuity reference", not just an "easter egg". (It's both. The world is a complicated place where things can be two things at once. We seem to be coming back to this theme in this closing post!) (User:ScroogeMacDuck

As per T:BOUND, the argument as per if a continuity reference being minor impacts it being continuity is finished. It has been tackled here and then here just this year alone. I will not argue against the idea that easter eggs can’t be continuity, because it is policy that they can be and we are bound by policy. There is no new debate to be had.

(This is fundamentally true for many of the recent arguments we’ve had in the forum. Since January, we’ve consistently resolved arguments, seen closing posts explaining policy, only to have said arguments restarted the next time the topic comes up. It’s tiring.)

Rewinding back to the history of this policy in the 2010s, at the most basic understanding of this topic, two things are clear.

1, that no story has the right to remove another story’s “Rule 4ness” after-the-fact. We can’t call the John and Gillian comics NOTDWU simply because some people have sought to “revoke” their “rule 4ness.”

And then 2; that retroactive continuity assigning some level of DWU-ness to a story is an equivalent to the former. Just because the 2003 Shada no longer invalidates the TV Shada does not mean that it’s a contradiction that The Library in the Body validates Sympathy for the Devil. These are separate concepts entirely.

So by the end of the 2010s, precedent and policy was clear: the status of being DWU can not and should not be removed from any fiction by future retcons. BUT, the status of being DWU can be grandfathered in. We did not invent Rule 4 By Proxy this year, we merely wrote it down and made the site better. This wasn’t a contradiction then, it isn’t a contradiction now.

I think something about this forum which I find kind of insulting is A) that we’re all having our motivations brought into question (which is against the rules by the way) and B) that Najawin has continued his favored passion of implying that his opinions are backed up by logic, reasoning and philosophy while we’re all just kind of acting out carnal impulses without thought. I think I’m allowed to be insulted, and frankly I am insulted.

Moving on from that, let’s go ahead and talk about the biggest elephant in the room. The thing that Najawin and I have most publicly disagreed about: what matters more? The present or the past.

As far as I see it, there are three kinds of policy. Policy which is written down, policy which exists through implementation and clarification, and policy which once existed through implementation/clarification but has is not the current headspace or modus operandi of our users/admins.

I have no allegiance to the third thing. None at all. All of the weight and importance comes from the first two - all of it. The third kind should really only be used to clarify historical aspects of the website or to figure out why things exist. But if there is some policy which was never written down but was the belief of an admin in, say, 2015... That has much less weight than the current community saying “We don’t like that.”

As an example: When Scrooge, an active admin in our current community, gives a passing judgement about the difference between Continuity sections and References sections, that has MUCH MORE weight than admins arguing that there is no difference between the two a decade ago.

And if an admin in 2013 has an opinion that goes against current judgement? Then they can show up today and argue that stance again, if they still even believe that in the first place. It’s not my job to debate spirits - and I dislike the implication that the opinion of someone a decade ago is more important than the people who show up here every day.

Hell, one of the big quotes given in this forum is from the original forum about Vienna, with the admin in question arguing why we shouldn’t cover it. The stance represented in this post, if you read the full thing, has absolutely no relevance to how we judge tangential validity today. And yet, it’s quoted here as if it is a completely relevant approximation of how policy works in 2023 - when it’s simply not! This is not the only time this has happened recently, and I personally feel many of these quotes hold less weight in-context.

Another person cited, Amorkuz, is not an admin today because they were unceremoniously stripped of the title. And yet, when an old quote of theirs is found, we often see that presented as being more important than the words of our current, active admin team.

In a previous forum, Najawin responded to me calling such out-of context and ancient quotes “ghost arguments” by saying:


 * You call them ghost arguments. But what they really are is arguments you don't like. Do we just refuse to read Aristotle because he's dead? Descartes? Kant? Absurd. If the arguments are good the arguments are good. They don't have to have someone around to actively promote them.

My response to this is that I believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Aristotle believed in the Geocentric model - that the sun revolved the Earth. If I am giving a presentation on why the Earth revolves the sun, I am speaking of our current understanding of the world and how it operates. If someone said “Well, Aristotle said the sun goes around the Earth, and he’s as important as current experts” I think that’s stupid. Aristotle died 2,355 years ago, he can get dunked on.

Let’s bring up this idea of designing our site to be friendly to new users. I, personally, believe that an editor who joins this month can figure out what continuity is. It’s the connections a story has to other stories and the connections caused by a story. It’s the beautiful thing that wikis are created to document.

What I can not expect with these new users is for them to become immersed with sixteen years of convoluted forum debates. For them to not only read a forum from 2013, but understand all the words they have to swap out for it to make sense with current policy. I can’t tell a new user, when asked why a rule is as it is, “Hey, read this thing from 2009, then read through these four Threads which are extremely inaccessible and often embarrassing for everyone.”

I understand that context as per how our rules formed are important but I just do not agree with this idea that I must consider something a former admin said in 2016 more important than the admins who are with us in this exact moment. I said it before, I will say it again. The present is more important than the past. We are here right now - and our current community has more importance than anything else.

So, yes, the ideas we all have about making the wiki better are important. Saying “Well, you’re motivated by the fact that you want to cover certain things!” Yes. Yes I am. I want to make the wiki a better place, that’s my motivation.

The big reason I feel so strongly about Rule 4 By Proxy is not only that it makes sense, but also that it’s essentially only made our site better in every case that it’s been used. We are meant to be a Doctor Who fandom dedicated to discussing the most obscure parts of the universe - and the obscure connections between stories that almost no one has ever heard of! And yet, due to our outdated policies of the past, we were once expected to essentially lie about the contents of stories in order to preserve some sense of “validity.”

Yes, we can have a “valid” page about Cushing’s Dr. Who, or the “aristocrat Doctor” without validating the Dalek films or Shalka... But they must be forceful stubs, because in spite of these characters returning in valid fiction, we can only allow short blurbs about the “real” stories where they appear. Policies which force pages to be terrible are anti-user, and thus do not serve a purpose other than following rules for the sake of following rules. I have no love for bureaucracy, and I will not act cordially towards the idea - we should make our website a good website.

There is no need to turn around and make stories like Scream of the Shalka non-valid, and the core reason is that very few people want that and it doesn’t make sense. I would say most people active in this forum prefer a more open-minded site where people come to their own conclusions rather than being told “Nuh uh, this doesn’t count.” And the reason this is preferred is mostly that, since at least the Moffat era, this has been the official stance of the BBC!

The biggest issue with our site has always been that so much of the history of if something is “valid” has come down to just judging canon but by a different name. We have the ability to change that, and we’re trying to. And I just don’t get this idea that I am meant to be moved by you finding quotes from 2016 where someone says “I don’t know if this is a good idea, I’m not sure what the boundaries would be.” We know what the boundaries are because we’ve discussed said boundaries countless times in countless resolved forums. We’ve discovered the boundaries. We’ve established precedent and policy.

Najawin’s primary new argument - that “Rule 4 By Proxy” might lead to a threat of “Rule 1 by Proxy” or “Rule 2 by Proxy” is... Well, hardly moving.

The boundaries stated in the closing post of the deleted scenes forum was very clear. A story must be released by itself, as a stand-alone piece of fiction, probably given its own title, before we will consider it a standalone work of fiction with its own release. I do not disagree with this conclusion because it at least creates a coherent policy on the topic. What it does not do is create a rule that a story can be pulled back into “being fiction” by being mentioned by a future story. That doesn’t make sense. For instance, if you agree that 1992 Shada isn't a full piece of fiction, does the 2017 Shada count as R1BP? No, that's stupid.

The horrid threat of us POTENTIALLY COVERING STORIES WHICH BREAK COPYRIGHT IN ORDER TO DISCUSS THEIR CONNECTIONS TO LICENSED WORKS... Feels forced when we currently allow that? It’s called NOTCOVERED? And the Fan works pages? We’ve had a good amount of discussions about this??

The Amorkuz quote about a story needing to be “commercial releases” is noted, but does not leave an impression to me because A) Amorkuz was stripped of his role of admin without ceremony, and B) no part of our rules say a release can’t be commercial. This goes back to my old argument about the three kinds of policy.

Rule 3 insisting on a commercial release is neither written policy or the beliefs of the current commmunity of editors and admins. The fact that a select few admins, 5+ years go, disagreed... Who cares? I don’t, and I refuse your request for me to change my mind.

Truthfully, the only way that something can gain “Rule 3ness” when is if it is simply released. For instance, when Doctor Who Discovers Pirates was released after being lost media for decades, it passes Rule 3. It doesn’t qualify for R3BP. That is not a thing.

Since there isn’t even a coherent theory pitched for any of these three rules, their existence as the end of a slippery slope does not become corporeal. I’m not threatened because these ideas aren’t actually real.

The big difference, in my opinion, between Rules 1-3 and Rule 4 is that Rules 1-3 cover concepts which are academic to some sense. If this fiction? Was this licensed fully? Was this released?

Whereas Rule 4 is something truly arbitrary. Was this intended to be set inside the Doctor Who universe - which is, depending on whom you ask, either a literal fictional universe, a metaphorical term used to describe a story’s closeness to the Doctor Who brand, or just a state of mind that we have to judge on vibes alone. Or, to others, it is simply “Is this canon?”

This is naturally going to be the rule to have the most complications because even we do not always agree on what definition exists for “DWUness”. And when it comes to content which is part of the DW brand but wasn’t intended to flow with continuity, there is going to be a somewhat fluid understanding of its role on the wiki. That is good and natural.

To the average TW reader, valid and non-valid is a completely arbitrary system. They’re separated by a tiny box. Often when we’ve described this concept to Spongebob, one of our contacts with FANDOM, they have reacted with total confusion about what we are talking about. At the end of the day a lot of this doesn’t matter as much as we act like it does.

But the separation between these sections of the site creates a major annoyance when it comes to content which once existed ambiguously with the DWU - but later was pulled back into continuity. There is no good reason to have a NOT-DWU page covering the Doctor featured in Scream of the Shalka only to have a separate page about the “pale aristocrat” seen in the novels.

R4BP is simply a way to make the site better by actually covering what we’re supposed to - continuity in the DWU.

To respond to the few of your specific notes about stories effected by R4BP:


 * 1) The Peter Cushing films are currently covered exactly as they would be if they were valid from the get-go. Any indication that we’re covering them “Wrong” because of exactly HOW we validated them is silly - if we validated the Cushing films tomorrow for just never violating Rule 4, the pages would all look exactly the same.
 * 2) Dimensions of Time should have been validated, it just should have had its own forum. The story does pass Rule 2 and 3 and the narrative that the story wasn’t originally invalidated for “canon” is simply not true. We will have a forum about this I presume soon and it will end with the story staying valid. The simply truth is that previous forums where some argued the story failed Rules 2 and 3 refused the community to respond and made arguments which would be extremely disastrous if applied to any other stories.
 * 3) Friend from the Future is an example of a story that should never have been invalidated. We had an official quote from the author saying it fit into continuity and he specifically planned this. That should have been the end of it, and any argument otherwise simply stemmed from people not understanding the story.

I also want to bring up that any belief that our core interest as a website is always authorial intent is simply not true. Furthermore, if it is, then why The Daft Dimension and Earth-33 1/3 are brought up is beyond me, as those stories are covered as alternate dimensions because that was the authorial intent. There are not grounds to redebate this because T:BOUND is a rule we must follow in these forums.

But I should point out that any idea that authorial intent from the perspective of the writer was the ONLY thing is considered in the past is simply not true. Paul Cornell did not consider the Richard E Grant Doctor “Non-DWU” when the story was released. And I’ve seen no evidence of Dan Freedman feeling that way about Death Comes to Time - in fact he’s written numerous sequels to the story since then. And, again, the creators of the 1992 Shada recon did not consider it “non-DWU”.

Instead, it was the quotes of other people, often later than the release, which was used to pass judgement here. So any idea that Rule 4 is in reference to a golden standard of authorial intent is simply not true.

I am, I must admit, continually disturbed by the ongoing subtext of discussions like these that the work we are all currently doing and have been doing is not real. As if the Temporary forums were a sham, or victories in the New forums are not corporeal. I again insist, the discussions we have on this site as a community THIS DECADE have more importance than anything else. The Temporary forums were real, the New forums are real, and we have established policy. The present matters more than the past, community overrules context.

At the end of the day, this is how I feel - Rule 4 By Proxy is not a new concept. It has history and precedent going back over a decade. And we had a very legitimate and very real forum about the topic barely six months ago. R4BP is policy, we’ve established precedent through several forums since and before January. Unraveling the policy, and making Fixing a Hole, Unbound, Scream of the Shalka, P.S. and more DWU sources non-valid serves no purpose and we do not have the energy or manpower to do it in the first place.

R4BP exists. It’s done. I won’t have much else to say - we are bound by policy and furthermore I’ll be on vacation until the 8th of August. When the 30th day comes, I say nothing in this forum should pass and we should all agree to finally let this end. OS25🤙☎️ 15:32, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * This is a wonderful response OS25, and one I agree with wholeheartedly. I am not as skilled with words or debate, but I have to say I am more than a little rattled at how often decades old comments and thread are used to block discussions or arguments (and I think this is even worse when it comes from former admins who are no longer a part of our community.) Community change, and thus we should update our rules and standards accordingly. It is clear that R4BP is not only supported by plenty of active editors, but, as a policy, has done a lot of good for the wiki and its coverage of sources. It exists, after a lengthy discussion and debate that included both our admins and quite a few active editors, and it shouldn't be undone. I mean, as OS25 proves so skillfully in his post, the concept of the policy has been around for a long time!


 * I don't think I have much more to add, but I would also agree that I think this thread verges on breaking T:BOUND. I for one am really glad that we had both the temporary forums and the policy changes that came from it. Liria10 ☎  15:51, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Seconding Liria's response. I am equally annoyed about very old threads being mentioned so often, especially to create such a long post, and additionally do think this thread violates T:BOUND by bringing up so-recent discussions, especially with the implications of them being less "valid" than older discussions. I'd even say this may be breaking T:POINT, although that's, y'know, reasonably similar. I'm also sympathetic to OS25's claim of "personal attack" (although it's of course not personal to one person...) but not entirely convinced, as I'd like to believe in your - Najawin's - good faith. But yeah, I fully agree with OS25, basically. Cousin Ettolrahc ☎  16:03, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * (In response to OS25, I'll structure my thoughts on Najawin's proposal once I've done my homework, which ought to have been completed a while ago):
 * Just because Aristotle believed that the sun revolved around the earth it does not mean that his views are worthless. If an argument for something is good, then it is good whether made yesterday or two thousand years ago. Just because someone first proposed everyone being nice to each other for once thousands of years ago, it does not mean that there is no virtue on the concept. If new arguments have been brought to light, then we should hear them, and consider how they reflect on our (well, yours, I wasn't on the wiki back then) policy changes.
 * Furthermore, Najawin's OP is not just a look at 4bp, but suggesting where we can go from it, and looking at how we can build on it in a manner that wouldn't have been possible in the original thread. What you have interpreted as an argument against 4bp is a suggestion. Najawin is suggesting 1-3bp, to make our rules more consistent. Therefore, I maintain that this is not a T:POINT/T:BOUND situation (I always get them mixed up). Aquanafrahudy  📢  17:12, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I will be back soon enough with a longer post addressing the object of the thread itself, as a user arguing my case; but let me quickly step in with my administrator hat on to say that I personally assured User:Najawin before he started this thread, that it would not be held to be in breach of T:BOUND, given that he was revisiting the question based specifically on novel arguments and perspectives. This is not to say that users can’t personally opine that the perspectives weren’t worth starting the thread; nor that *every* part of the OP is necessarily in accordance with the spirit of T:BOUND; but when it comes to whether Najawin had a right to start this thread at all, let’s not get bogged down in attacks of that nature. He started it in good faith because I explicitly assured him it wouldn’t, based on what he had shared with me about his intentions for it. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:53, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * To take the points in turn in OS25's post.
 * The fact that much of Najawin’s opening post here relates to him simply quoting a forum post from the last six months and disagreeing with the conclusions
 * This is a wildly uncharitable read of my post. Insofar as I quote text from the thread I do so to highlight what the policy is, before explaining how it fails to meet several criteria that it likely should. I very much try to keep my personal distaste for its conclusions to a minimum.
 * one of Najawin’s biggest arguments here revolves around him attempting to find some ambiguity in the difference between references and continuity on story pages, partially through citing former historical forums. This is disturbing as we have already had a recent debate where he did this, which had a closing post that resolved the issue.
 * This is not true, Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes fundamentally does not address the criticisms leveled in Thread:117229 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I. Perhaps my citing of the other threads confused the issue, since those were somewhat touched on? The one I based most of my criticism on was never addressed though.
 * But this opening post, in my opinion, is meandering, incorrect, and in violation of T:BOUND.
 * Being thorough is no crime. As to the accusation of a T:BOUND (well, really, T:POINT) violation, that others have echoed, it only impresses upon me that nobody actually takes the time to read the things I cite. Scrooge and I had an explicit discussion over whether the arguments brought up in this thread would be a T:POINT violation.
 * At the start of this forum, Najawin begins things by stating one simple opinion: Validity is not canon.
 * Site policy, in fact.
 * But the important thing is that, long ago, validity was canon. In the olden days of the site, we attempted to decipher what was canon, as can clearly be identified by taking any sort of glance at T:CANON. However, as the official stance of the BBC became “there is no canon” or even “everything is canon,” the site pivoted.
 * This is ahistorical nonsense. Look at posts from 2005. Our site founder, User:Mantrid, explicitly says the opposite. Forum:The original inclusion debates
 * In fact I personally don't think we should be making any decisions about canon at all. Unlike, for example, Star Wars where there is more-or-less a consensus on what is and isn't canon, Doctor Who canon is very much open to personal interpretation. As archivists here I feel our 'duty' (for want of a better word) is to record and make available information about the fictional world of Doctor Who in all its forms. As long as we clearly indicate the source of each bit of information then we can leave it up to the user to decide what they include in their own personal canon.
 * As you can see from that discussion, the original editors of the wiki were very aware that "canon" in terms of what the wiki meant was not some set of texts given to them by The BBC. Insofar as they used the term it was to refer to texts that they covered in a specific way.
 * This is made even worse by the fact that, before the start of this decade, we consistently considered the “DWU” to actually mean the “BBC Wales DWU.”
 * Again, this is just not true. There was a significant amount of work in the early days of the wiki on the VNAs and EDAs, as well as the Benny Summerfield books. (So much so that Tangerine was actually considered the expert on the wilderness years era!) If you'd like me to find historical quotes or edits I can, as they're in large supply.
 * In his post, Najawin argues that this is NOT what was said here. Instead, he thinks that the agreed upon concept of Unbound being retconned into an alternate universe was actually clarification of authorial intent.
 * Well, yes, and if you look closer at what you quoted you'll see it supports my analysis.
 * Forum:References to BFDWU as alternate or diverging timeline also discusses this separation and CzechOut stated in that discussion "they're meant to be outside the DWU. That's why they're called unbound — as in "not bound by continuity"."
 * But now brining in this extra reference of the Doctor going there, that means it is a place that can be visited by the Doctor and it, by its reference in 100 Days makes it linked to the main DWU. (Emphasis yours OS25, I can't imagine how you didn't think this was the obvious response) -User:Tangerineduel
 * Unbound is a fringe case because they were explicitly reading authorial intent as saying it wasn't linked by continuity, and when it turned out it was, that's when they had to re-evaluate.
 * In fact, what you can see here AND in the forum about Forum:Is The Curse of Fatal Death canon? is that the concept of R4BP was never disputed.
 * Flatly untrue. It's disputed by Czech in the opening post.
 * I think something about this forum which I find kind of insulting is A) that we’re all having our motivations brought into question (which is against the rules by the way) and B) that Najawin has continued his favored passion of implying that his opinions are backed up by logic, reasoning and philosophy while we’re all just kind of acting out carnal impulses without thought. I think I’m allowed to be insulted, and frankly I am insulted.
 * Hmm? I've rather tried quite hard not to do this. Indeed, I took a multiple day break agonizing over how to quote people best so as to not misrepresent their views - or to do so as little as I could. I wrote this in clear view of everyone else, as your response here illustrates, when I could have written this in private. Nate and Scrooge both left comments on my talk page clarifying points and suggesting notes and I've taken them into consideration. I even asked you for a citation for a claim you made since I tried to incorporate it into this post! I think I've acted in abundantly good faith here. If you truly had an issue with the contents of my post, you could have left a talk page message and suggested edits. I've tried very hard to represent everyone's views as charitably as I can.
 * It’s not my job to debate spirits - and I dislike the implication that the opinion of someone a decade ago is more important than the people who show up here every day.
 * I'm rather concerned why you keep focusing on the people involved here. I hold no allegiance to people from any time period. I hold to the strength of an argument. If an argument from 10, 20, 100, 1000 years ago is stronger than what people today are saying, it wins out. No matter what people today think. People today can gnash their teeth and insist that the community really wants to do something one way. But my allegiance is always to the strength of the argument.
 * Hell, one of the big quotes given in this forum is from the original forum about Vienna, with the admin in question arguing why we shouldn’t cover it. The stance represented in this post, if you read the full thing, has absolutely no relevance to how we judge tangential validity today. And yet, it’s quoted here as if it is a completely relevant approximation of how policy works in 2023
 * This is, again, flatly untrue. I literally say after quoting it "Obviously a controversial thread, but, to note what the interpretation was at the time." It's explicitly in the section about whether this decision was in continuity with past decisions. Dear lord.
 * Another person cited, Amorkuz, is not an admin today because they were unceremoniously stripped of the title. And yet, when an old quote of theirs is found, we often see that presented as being more important than the words of our current, active admin team.
 * I don't know how you got this reading from my thread, I'm really quite interested, but let's just again stress that this too is untrue. Amorkuz resigned.
 * My response to this is that I believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Aristotle believed in the Geocentric model - that the sun revolved the Earth. If I am giving a presentation on why the Earth revolves the sun, I am speaking of our current understanding of the world and how it operates. If someone said “Well, Aristotle said the sun goes around the Earth, and he’s as important as current experts” I think that’s stupid. Aristotle died 2,355 years ago, he can get dunked on.
 * You could not have picked a worse example. First of all, the issue is one of arguments, not mere assertions. Would this hypothetical interlocutor be presenting Aristotle's arguments for geocentrism? Second of all, Aristotle had much better reasons for believing in geocentrism than you do for believing in heliocentrism, so I'd rather hope you had a much better response for the argument than that. Thirdly, general relativity + mach's principle + L + ratio.
 * I, personally, believe that an editor who joins this month can figure out what continuity is. It’s the connections a story has to other stories and the connections caused by a story.
 * It's good you believe this. It's also false, as demonstrated by the forum threads linked. Perhaps most will. Maybe. But there will be a not insignificant number who simply never will.
 * The big reason I feel so strongly about Rule 4 By Proxy is not only that it makes sense, but also that it’s essentially only made our site better in every case that it’s been used.
 * I disagree on one of them at least, but even if this were true, you need to show something stronger, that without R4bp the site would be worse. And I don't think you can do that. Because the cases it's been used on are, by and large, cases that already should pass R4.
 * Najawin’s primary new argument - that “Rule 4 By Proxy” might lead to a threat of “Rule 1 by Proxy” or “Rule 2 by Proxy” is... Well, hardly moving.
 * Given that the conclusion of my post is not "R4bp must go!" but that "we need to reexamine it and make changes or it has to go", I'm not sure why it would be?
 * The horrid threat of us POTENTIALLY COVERING STORIES WHICH BREAK COPYRIGHT IN ORDER TO DISCUSS THEIR CONNECTIONS TO LICENSED WORKS... Feels forced when we currently allow that?
 * Again, this would be validity. (And, again, Amorkuz resigned.)
 * Dimensions of Time should have been validated, it just should have had its own forum.
 * Subtle communication error. I disagree with the (specific) act of validation, I don't (inherently) disagree with its validity.
 * I am, I must admit, continually disturbed by the ongoing subtext of discussions like these that the work we are all currently doing and have been doing is not real. As if the Temporary forums were a sham, or victories in the New forums are not corporeal. I again insist, the discussions we have on this site as a community THIS DECADE have more importance than anything else.
 * I'm shocked that anyone could read this subtext, but I again insist that arguments trump all.
 * At the end of the day, this is how I feel - Rule 4 By Proxy is not a new concept. It has history and precedent going back over a decade.
 * Your quotes establish the precise opposite. But have fun on vacation. Najawin ☎  18:15, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Alright, this still isn't the big object-level reply, but if I may defuse what I think is a crucial misunderstanding-in-progress:


 * Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes fundamentally does not address the criticisms leveled in Thread:117229 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon I


 * I think Ottsel was speaking procedurally moreso than epistemologically, such that this reply falls flat. It needn’t be the case that you deem your criticisms to have failed to be “fundamentally addressed”, in the sense of resolved to a degree that *you* find satisfactory; rather, the point is that those concerns have been *aired* in a thread, and a closing post has found consensus against giving them weight in Wiki policy.


 * It does not matter, goes the argument, if you still think of these concerns are problematic, or even terminal, for the Wiki notion of “Continuity”. You have aired out your grievances, and for one reason or another we have decided that we do not care. You complain that your questions weren’t answered to your satisfaction, but the thread found that those questions weren’t compelling questions to the rest of the community in the first place, and at some point a conscientious editor has to step back and accept that nobody else agrees that their supposed problems are in fact problems, and they can’t keep shouting them out into the void.


 * I don’t know if I’d fully endorse this myself — as demonstrated by my agreeing to waive T:BOUND issues and continue to argue the object-level point at Forum:References into Worldbuilding — but this does not strike me as an unreasonable meta-discussion of the scope of T:POINT and T:BOUND. If a question has been aired out and consensus dismissed it, you can’t simply restart the thread on the basis that by your logic the question hasn’t been "fundamentally addressed"! And that’s the scenario Ottsel is seeing here, and understandably recoiling from.


 * (As for User:Amorkuz, yes, as a historical point it is true that he resigned rather than being stripped of his rank, but without wading too deeply into semi-private matters, I think it’s fair to describe the situation as him having resigned in disgrace, or some other phrase demonstrating that his prior opinions on matters relating to coverage or validity should be held as generally suspect, not as the wisdom of a respected forefather.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:31, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * No, I mean I literally didn't bring up the arguments made in that Thread in Forum:Non-valid Continuity sections, categories, and prefixes. They're distinct from the arguments made in prior Forum threads I cited. I only skimmed that one because we just had the forum archives up and it was so long and it dived off into territory that wasn't quite relevant to the overall point needed for that particular forum discussion we were having. We just fundamentally didn't discuss it. All I said concerning that bit was
 * There is substantial disagreement over what these terms mean, and no clear resolution that I can see. Important context for how to interpret the next thread, in my mind.
 * That thread simply hasn't been discussed until this one and Forum:References into Worldbuilding.


 * (I'd certainly say he resigned under fraught circumstances. But my understanding is that they were the result of a particular thread. Regardless, I'm not appealing to anyone like a respected forefather here as far as I know. I'm just trying to show how views evolved. As a one time admin he's inherently relevant to that conversation.) Najawin ☎  18:43, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * (Your understanding, then, is somewhat lacking. His specific transgressions relating to that one thread were when things reached a boiling point, and were what caused him to be blocked for a few months as a first punitive measure — but his resignation wasn’t about that thread per se, and, more to the point, the final message wherein which he resigned was also in and of itself a paranoid, irrational attack on, well, the entire editing body of the Wiki, which, if he had posted it *without* also explicitly resigning, would itself certainly have been grounds for punitive demotion.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:01, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * (Fair enough! I certainly read a lot of... controversial discussions with him, but I figured that things were just deeply frustrating, as they can sometimes be, until said thread and the comment in question.) Najawin ☎  19:06, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Thoughts on the suggestion of creating 1-3 by proxies for the overall coherence of T:VS
 * I'm probably going to go through this thread by individual point, addressing various points when I feel ready. The one that has been gestating in my mind for the longest time has probably been this, and therefore it's what I feel most comfortable with discussing.
 * Rule 1 by proxy - To me, this doesn't really make much sense: how can something be retroactively a work of fiction? But then, I don't understand the conclusion of Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy (something on which I keep meaning to ask for clarification, but never seem to get round to) to be sure of this. From my understanding of the closing post, I feel this might be possible, but I'm not sure.
 * Rule 3 by proxy - Ditto
 * Rule 2 by proxy - Now, this to me is the most interesting. I prefer the "Cyberon" type to the "Audio Visuals" type, as with the latter we are actively allowing essentially fan fiction to be covered, which quite literally is what T:VS was created to prevent. But "Cyberon" certainly has something to be said for it. The question we have to ask is why do we cover only the licenced descendance of the DWU? Why can't we go backwards? Something which has always been intended to be set in the Doctor Who Universe and features a concept or character which has or will later appear in the DWU seems like a perfectly reasonable direction to go in. (Ultimately, this is about personal preference; it's all about which direction the community wants the four little rules to go, not really about evidence, unless anybody has some good arguments against such a theoretical rule) However, this would be a massive and radical leap forward. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is anybody's guess. I personally think that this is a perfectly reasonable criteria for what is set in the Doctor Who universe. Other people, feel free to disagree. (I will adress the other points in this thread at some point, I promise!) :) Aquanafrahudy  📢  19:38, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Firstly, I'd like to say I know understand Najawin's desire for this thread more, and retract my total support of OS25's rebuttal. (Although I personally see no need for this thread and so will probally not participate in it further). Secondly, re: "rule 2 by proxy", or rather, the proposed "Cyberon" precedent - too big a topic for this thread, and as its not indicated in the title, I don't think we should change policy in such a way here. But I do look forward to such a thread existing separately in the future! Cousin Ettolrahc ☎  19:53, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree that R3bp is really weird and hard to do just on a technical level. It might be possible in some very fringe cases, but this one needs to be really thought about if we go down this path of the three I've presented. R1bp I think is still difficult, but a little easier. Scripts, script extracts, deleted scenes, we say these aren't complete works of fiction, not that they're not works of fiction. The idea is, perhaps, that by later works referring to them they treat them as discrete stories onto themselves and validate a reading where they are complete works of fiction.


 * I disagree with Ettolrahc that this isn't the place for the RXbps- they're one of the alleged ramifications of R4bp if we elect to take that route, but I thank her for her retraction, insofar as it extends. :P Najawin ☎  21:16, 2 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Also, and this was likely due to me not fully reading the mega-OP, and also due to a slightly uncharitable readkngy, I thought you were throwing out rule 1-3 by proxy as a strawman against rule 4 by proxy - as I now see that wasn't the case, I understand this thread more, and appreciate it. And as for a r3bp, the only reason I see this thread as inadequate is that someone will probally want to write an OP. But perhaps this thread can address some parts of "r3bp". Cousin Ettolrahc ☎  05:57, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Right! I've been working on my reply for a while, and as it required the use of structuring section-headers and suchlike, I thought it best to give it a separator-frame. But let's be clear that the following is not any kind of admin-hat-on closing post, just my (lengthy) participation in the debate. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:04, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Introduction
This is the question on which User:Najawin chose to open his attempted take-down of the Rule 4 By Proxy concept. It is a very good question. In fact, in its answer lies, I think, the fundamental crux of the misunderstanding which exists between us regarding the value of the R4BP idea. I find it somewhat unfortunate, then, that his introduction elides actually answering the question, and retreats to the question of what makes a policy good or bad, in general.

This “is obviously a truly massive topic for discussion and not really something that I think anyone is prepared to discuss in full here”, he says, but you thought wrong, my friend! I am prepared to discuss it! And I will. Because that's what this is about.

And let me say one more thing: Tardis:Valid sources, as a policy page, is strange and kludgy. It used to be much worse than it is now; but it's still a mess, even though that's meant to be my best shot at a streamlined version. If the outcome of this thread is the basic overhaul of how we structure our validity policies that User:NateBumber longs for, I would be happy with that. Like a physicist glimpsing a theory-of-everything in the distance, I can almost taste a better, more elegant way of phrasing our criteria for coverage and validity than even the four little rules; something intuitive, flowing directly from the Wiki's core mission. And I think R4BP, or something very like it, would be a natural, intuitive byproduct of those ideal rules; so yes. I bite that particular bullet (though not, as we'll see, in a way that implies R1BP, R2BP and R3BP, exactly). The relative kludginess of the way in which it is affixed to the current T:VS is a sign that we need to update the rest of the damn page, not the other way around.

"So, like, what even is validity?"
To answer that question, I believe we must ask an even broader question: what is it we do here? What's this Wiki for?

Well, what we seem to do is this:
 * 1) We select a subset of all the fiction ever written by Homo sapiens, based on the criterion "does this have a legal relationship, direct or otherwise, to the 1963 episode of BBC television An Unearthly Child?".
 * 2) We create pages about individual works of fiction contained within that set. These pages summarise the plot and list out the cast and crew, the featured characters, the miscellaneous worldbuilding elements.
 * 3) We create pages with an in-universe perspective on the characters and misc. worldbuilding elements contained in these works of fiction, using our pages on these works of fiction as "sources".

Validity, indeed the entire idea of "the Doctor Who universe", is a philosophy for how to implement #3. The vast majority of the works of fiction selected at Stage #1 are going to have fictional elements in common with one another, they're going to have intentional narrative connections to one another; they're going to have continuity with one another. We would not be well-served to create The Doctor (An Unearthly Child), The Doctor (The Daleks) and The Doctor (The Edge of Destruction) to fulfill our duty of in-universe coverage of each of these individual works we cover. When The Daleks says stuff about "the Doctor", it's building onto what past 'DWU stories', all one (1) of them, had already established about that fictional character. To put it another way, if a viewer of The Daleks was already watching three weeks ago, then they're fully encouraged to bring that knowledge with them as implicit in the new text; when William Hartnell walks on-screen, it is as if the expected-memory of AUC has itself been brought into the text of The Daleks as one enormous footnote — complete with anything it says about non-Doctor elements like Earth or humans.

Repeat this process enough times, and you have a huge, sprawling "shared fictional universe", a web of narrative connections from story to story, where it makes more sense than not to merge our in-universe coverage of Source A and Source B. In a sense the choice is arbitrary, but it's more informative to Wikify them as though they described the same underlying set of in-universe concepts, as opposed to introducing their own characters who might resemble or echo the casts of stories past.

Naturally, there are contradictions; at a certain point in the web's history, it ceases to be a reasonable assumption that the writer of a new story is even aware of every prior node in the web, let alone actively intends for all of them to exist as potential background to their new stuff. And before you know it, you get contradictions. You get a Doctor who's human on Page 10 and definitely not human on Page 30. But even when they contradict parts of the web, these works remained more tethered to the web than not; it remained sensible to cover it all on a single First Doctor page. Continuity trumps discontinuity when it comes to deciding whether something is best covered as part of the broader gestalt of in-universe pages, or carved out into its own standalone space.

So yes, it's a web — it's not a perfect circle with a solid boundary that you can be on the right or wrong side of. By and large, 99% of the works of fiction defined in Stage #1 are part of that web. As a result, it made sense to decide that the default in-universe perspective defined at Tardis:In-universe perspective described "stuff that's part of the web". Those rare covered works which don't truly connect to the web, we set apart from their fellows. They come in two varieties:
 * at “best” they're “unproductive dead-ends” — they might incorporate some context from the web, but are not intended to reflect back onto it — not "intended to count": they add further information to their particular spun-off version of a valid concept like the First Doctor, but with no intent that further works connecting to the broader web should incorporate these data as context for their own depiction of the First Doctor. The [[/Non-valid sources subpages]] are the solution e have found to efficiently cover such sources' transformative uses of preexisting elements.
 * At worst they're lone nodes, with a legal but not narrative connection to the web. Think The Corridor Sketch. In-universe elements from things like that are best covered "in a vacuum", on their own pages entirely; as are any original elements of the first type.

And that's invalidity vs. validity.

T:VS, the beast with two heads
In light of what I've just outlined, T:VS is kind of a strange policy page, isn't it? It's two different things smashed together. Whether we cover something is a Stage #1 question; whether a covered source is valid for the main bulk of in-universe page is a Stage #3 question. As currently written, the explanatory tables of special cases at T:VS even have to use separate columns for "Covered?" and "Valid?", because things can be one without being the other, like a two-factor authentification process from Hell. Increasingly we see Board:Inclusion debates thread preface themselves with "Validity:", "Coverage:", or "Validity/coverage:", because those are different questions.

It's taken me all those years to realise: we can and should have Tardis:Covered sources and Tardis:Valid sources as completely different policy pages.

T:CS would essentially absorb Rules 1-2-3, while T:VS would be solely dedicated to the "how" instead of the "whether" of coverage, meaning Rule 4 and all its complexities.

Once you realise this, then User:Najawin's so-called "obvious question" of why there isn't a R1BP or a R2BP or a R3BP evaporates. It's because Rule 4 is different from the other three rules. It's a Stage #3/"T:VS" question instead of a Stage #1/"T:CS" question. Altering the way we carve out the Set Of Works Of Fiction We Officially Cover itself is a very, very different proposition from altering how we group or separate in-universe coverage of the elements contained on works of fiction that are already in the SOWOFWOC. I don't see how there's any logical necessity for the rules whigh govern T:CS to govern T:VS. They're different rules about different things; about different kinds of things altogether, in fact.

(All this notwithstanding, I am, as I mentioned in the past, in favour of a limited form of the so-called "R2BP", to account for the Iris/Phoenix Court situation more cleanly than our current weird one-of-a-kind exception; see also Talk:Bibliophage (short story). But I wouldn't call it Rule 2 By Proxy, nor consider it a natural logical extension of R4BP. And R1BP and R3BP seem like complete red herrings. Pro tip, if it's not clear what concepts by those names would even look like, then consider the possibility that maybe they're not quite so logically necessary at all.)

Validity by proxy: still a very good idea
So then: let us grant, if only for the sake of clear argument, that R1-2-3 become T:CS and Rule 4 alone stands as T:VS, thus allowing us to dispense with the "but what about RXBP" red herring. Let's discard, then, the name "Rule 4 By Proxy" and speak simply of "validity by proxy", because validity in and of itself is necessarily a "Rule 4" matter in old money.

Is "validity by proxy" still a good idea?

I say yes. The whole reason we have a concept of "validity" is that for 99% of the SOWOFWOC, it makes more sense to merge rather than separate our in-universe coverage of their contents. "Whether the author intends their story to be set in 'the DWU'" is an abstraction which serves as a proxy/predictor for this base practical question.

That is: a story that passes Rule 4 is a story which its author intended to be read in light of at least some of the existing contents of the Web, which eliminates the "lone node" possibility; and it is a story which this author would ostensibly anticipate later works in the Web to connect back to, at least in theory, which eliminates the "dead-end which no later node is ever meant to connect back to" possibility. Thus the argument for merging in-universe coverage into the great big gestalt applies.

All Validity By Proxy needs to justify itself as an addendum to this new T:VS — a different situation than "authorial intent is to be set in the DWU" which would also carry an implication of "validity" — is to pass that same standard. User:Najawin said it himself at the start: "We don't smash atoms together to find out what validity is, it's not a platonic form floating out there in the ether. It's not really a natural kind and probably not a social kind. [What it is,] is socially constructed."

- User:Najawin

Validity By Proxy and the "Intended to be set in the DWU at time of release" criteria do not need to have any other common underlying factor. It suffices that they both describe cases in which we expect it'll be more informative than confounding for our in-universe coverage to be merged into the greater whole.

So it comes back to this: Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) and Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka) coexisting on the same Wiki is not a healthy situation. It's precisely the same problem as The Doctor (An Unearthly Child) vs. The Doctor (The Edge of Destruction). What's going on is that being subsequently referenced "against its will" by later parts of the web nullifies intent-to-be-a-dead-end and returns us to a state of affair where the considered story is just one more node in the Great Big Web, which means that it's more useful to fold its in-universe content into the gestalt of the general in-universe sections of the Wiki.

Why no invalidity by proxy?
For the same reason that there's no linear-time invalidity-for-contradiction!

It took me a little while to put my finger on the true underlying reason why this objection failed to whelm me even a little bit, but that's because it's really a straightforward application of a wider "continuity trumps discontinuity" concept.

For example: Genesis of the Daleks is intended to be in continuity with ("in the same universe as") The Daleks, but not with Genesis of Evil, although the latter is also in continuity with ("in the same universe as") The Daleks. Continuity Trumps Discontinuity, so Genesis of the Daleks is held to pass Rule 4: it's valid via its connection with The Daleks (a past DWU story) even though it contradicts other past DWU stories (like Genesis of Evil).

No-invalidity-by-proxy is just looking at the same graph while removing the "time" element. Genesis of the Daleks is intended to be in continuity with ("in the same universe as") The Daleks, but not with Genesis of Evil, although the latter is also in continuity with ("in the same universe as") The Daleks. Continuity Trumps Discontinuity, so Genesis of Evil is still valid via its connection with The Daleks (a past DWU story) even though it is contradicted by other, later DWU stories (like Genesis of the Daleks).

No time-symmetry problems exist with validity by proxy: they just become a special case of "A is intended to be in continuity with [B, a story that is already DWU]" where we cease to care about whether B already existed when A was released, and who precisely did the "intending".

On the subjectivity of Continuity
I believe him when he says that he has other qualms. But above all else, User:Najawin seems to dislike this entire framework because he thinks notions like whether a story is "in continuity with" or "referencing" another one are too darn subjective. Instead of being content with "Continuity Trumps Discontinuity" as the takeaway from the early rulings on what validity is to make of stories that contradict each other, he wishes we could define "the DWU" of Rule 4 fame as being completely divorced from any notion of "Continuity". He writes:

"Cards on the table, I straightforwardly reject this. I think the "arbitrary tag" formulation is largely correct, in that there's a "DWU" as the wiki understands the term, and then a "DWU" as every individual author understands the term and for R4 statements we do some translation between the two. (…) I rather assume that no author understands the term quite like the wiki does (…). For the wiki I think it's simply a label and doesn't refer to continuity in the slightest. As I think you'll see later, I'm far from the only user to have said similar sentiments in the past."

- User:Najawin

Some parts of this are trivially true. But a lot is being handwaved with that "we do some translation between the two". What does the Wiki meaning of "DWU" entail, and how might it differ from how authors employ it? As I have outlined: I think that by "intended to be set in the DWU", we mean "intended to be part of the Web": we mean "intended both to have narrative connections to preexisting node-points in the Web, and to be suitable for later node-points to connect back to". Intent to be in the DWU is intent to reference and be referenced, to build upon and to be built upon, by other works in the big web of fiction stretching backwards to 23 November 1963. We care about authors' notion of the DWU (which need not quite quite match 'our' DWU) insofar as their personal DWU reflects ‘the portion of the Web they call home’.

Asking if something is set in the DWU is asking if it is substantially part of that web or not. It can't mean asking if something is inside a hypothetical bounded circle or out of it: plenty of valid sources would fail that standard. I don't know what Lawrence Burton would say if you asked whether Against Nature was set in "the" Doctor Who universe, in those words; it all depends on whether he interprets it as "somewhere in the Web" or as "inside a bounded circle", I think. Certainly I'm fairly sure he would not agree with such a statement if he took it to mean that it was set in a universe which necessarily included The Eleventh Hour. But it is indubitably intended to be set "in the same universe as" Alien Bodies which "is in the same universe as" The Dalek Invasion of Earth which is "in the same universe as" An Unearthly Child. It's part of the Web. It passes Rule 4 in that sense, and that's the sense we actually care about.

But — my mental model of User:Najawin now objects — is ‘continuity’ not substantially in the eye of the beholder? "Arbitrary! Slippery slope! Android boyfriend!" he cries out.

To which I say: we've made it this far. And I don't mean the dratted #Continuity sections: looking back, I think my response at Forum:Temporary forums/Trailers, gesturing at "the continuity sections we have on all our pages", was too narrow. No, the precedent, I now see with greater clarity, is, like, the entire main in-universe name-space of the whole blasted website. Making judgement calls about when a newer story is talking about the same thing as a newer one is what we do, all the time. It's the entire basis of our Wiki; it's what allows us to put The Doctor (The Daleks) on the same page as The Doctor (An Unearthly Child).

The question of whether the Doctor's line in Time of the Doctor is referencing the Shalka Master or not… already exists. It would exist, just as irresolvable, even if we decided to throw up our hands and delete the #Continuity sections. Heck, let's also delete #References while we're at it. The question is still there, laughing at us, because — I cannot believe I did not spell this out sooner — we still have to decide whether we put that line on The Master (Scream of the Shalka) or create a separate the Doctor's boyfriend (The Time of the Doctor) page. Case in point, whether Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) really was the Shalka Doctor was never, actually, the real point of contention. Our page freely stated as much.

To say that such matters are just too darn subjective to be worth structuring validity around, we'd have to say that they're also too ambiguous to structure coverage around (surely coverage is more important, still, than validity? surely it's worse if we get coverage itself wrong?). And that would be tantamount to saying the Wiki itself cannot feasibly exist.

"But these things could be validated anyway…"
Yes. Sure. I understand and agree with User:Najawin's frustration that for lack of a pressing need, we have failed to revisit e.g. the Cushing movies individually, and validate them "in their own right". But look, the original R4BP closure specifically permitted and couraged this, it's not the policy's fault that no one's actually done the work. Furthermore I think the matter could be more innocent than he makes it appear: i.e. 'there are still urgent issues so no one will get round to the "proper validations" until those have been dealt with; once the backlog finishes clearing up we'll get around to them'. Let's have faith in the community.

Moreover, even if each individual purported R4BP case so far turns out to be a misidentified special snowflake which needn't have been invalid in the first place, the principle would still remain. It's perfectly possible to imagine a counterfactual universe where the Cushing movies really were intended to be Completely Outside The DWU by David Whitaker and Milton Subotsky. In that reality, if the plethora of references to the Cushingverse in valid media still existed, I would still bang the drum for their proxy validation, rather than be stuck with another Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) situation. So the principled thing to do for me in this universe is to argue that R4BP needs to be on the books, just in case, even if it were to surface that we didn't currently have any actual live cases of it at present.

Moreover, the argument about hammer and nail cuts both ways. I am sympathetic to all the validity cases he lists, but equally, I'm not sure I entirely trust myself there. I think there's a lot of motivated reasoning. I respectfully submit it might be so with Najawin himself on a subconscious level. What if, say, Dan Freedman really did — on balance — think of DCtT as set outside the DWU despite appearances? What if there were a prominent oft-referenced invalid story that could only be validated through something like R4BP, with no wiggle room in the quotes? Wouldn't that have been dreadfully inconvenient?

This is more of a provocative hypothetical than a real accusation of motivated reasoning in this instance. But it's a dangerous precedent to set. "In case of an invalid story that's often referenced in valid sources, look really hard for a rationale to validate it under conventional Rule 4"? At best that's just enshrining a backdoor-R4BP by another name while keeping up appearances. At worst it's an invitation for a free-for-all of biased validity debates in years to come.

A principled alternative: a simpler Rule 4
In his opening post, User:Najawin didn't present his conclusion as all-or-nothing: in addition to his preferred proposal, he proposed alternative solutions that he finds more acceptable than "status quo with no changes". This is sound. Both our posts have lots of moving parts. So I'll do the same.

If you accept my framing for what the current Rule 4 is doing "under the hood" (Web, dead-ends, all that jazz), then I think there is another thing to do that would allow us to jettison "proxy" stuff. It is unfortunately a lot more radical than validity-by-proxy, but it's also certainly more streamlined and easily-implemented. It is simply this: simplify the Wiki concept of "intended to set from the DWU" to remove the intended-to-be-a-dead-end aspect altogether.

That is: from now on, "passing Rule 4" (slash "passing T:VS" if we do the T:CS/T:VS split) would simply mean that you are setting yourself in continuity with at least one previously-valid story. It would only matter that a story wants to be read in the DWU's context; not whether it hopes that further DWU stories will be read in its context.

This describes most R4BP cancidates. It's never been in doubt that Scream of the Shalka or even Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? take place in "a universe where all of Doctor Who thus far had ‘happened’"; but we had a higher standard for "set in the DWU", requiring that the authors somehow "intend for their story to be acknowledged by new stories going forward".

And another strong argument is that, frankly, it could also describe a lot of currently-valid apocrypha. I'm not sure the writer of a short story in Doctor Who The Official Annual 2009 has any expectation that anybody, going forward, is going to remember it, let alone reference it as A Real Part Of Lore. Not even the writer themself. (As Najawin mentioned in the OP, Steven Moffat once forgot one of his own DW prose stories; can we really assume that when he wrote it, he intended to add an indelible Piece Of Lore™ to Wider Continuity™? Hm.) It's very Wiki-brained of us to assume otherwise.

The reason it's radical is that Doctor Whoah! (DWM 371 comic story) is ostensibly set in a universe where at least one Doctor Who TV story, and probably all of them so far, have "happened". It's hard to come up with a standard that would allow Scream of the Shalka but not a hundred goofy things like this. I think they're the very reason we have the "intentional-dead-end clause" in the first place: to avoid drowning in endless frivolous "according to one account"s (or "in one version of reality"s, depending on what parameters we might decide to set for mass coverage of these things).

But, you know — maybe that's okay. I've certainly been suspicious of "but it sounds like work"-type objections in the past. Maybe that's the way forward the community will prefer.

Would there still be such a thing as an invalid story in this brave new world? Yes, I think so. Hallo My Dalek takes place in a world of its own, a true "reboot" with Doctor Why instead of the Fourth Doctor and so on. Oh Mummy! might have a preexisting valid character in it, but isn't actually set in the same universe as any identifiable valid story: this Sutekh clearly hasn't lived through Pyramids of Mars, he starred in it as an actor. And then there's things like The Corridor Sketch, or Tonight's the Night, or The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. It wouldn't mean the End of Invalidity Itself. We would just be validating… a lot of things.

…But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the opening post?
Well, I have mixed feelings, obviously. While I don't endorse User:OttselSpy25's reply in full, I do, for example, think it cares too much about the opinions of admins in the Wiki's formative years. We mustn’t forget the past, sure, but I tend to think that we are more and more fundamentally confused about basic concepts the further back in the Wiki’s history we go; the older they are, the less usable quotes are, because they’re using much rougher, less thought-through versions of any of the concepts they mention, even as they use the same words still in use today. That’s dangerous, to my mind, and often outweighs the value in trying to see “what people were thinking at the time they originally wrote [Important Policy XYZ]”, even though that’s a praiseworthy instinct.

But all this said, those quibbles are largely incidental. And I don't want bad blood, here; I do not even want an atmosphere of sportsmanlike hostility. By now User:Najawin is at least a friendly acquaintance, though perhaps I'd want to reserve the term friend until we'd spoken of non-Wiki matters off-Wiki. So let me say straight ahead that my respect for Najawin and his intellectual scrupulousness remains very high indeed. I think he's deeply wrong in many ways about this particular topic, but I more than believe he did his best to wrap his head around the issues; and in some areas perhaps we will find irresolvable differences of opinion, where we each acknowledge that the other's logic is sound, but disagree on certain fundamental premises/"values". We shall see.

But either way — and especially considering that I explicitly encouraged him to finish and post this, assuring him he would not be held to be in breach of T:POINT — I stand behind his right to have started this thread. More than that, I'm glad he did. Refuting what I see as his mistakes has helped me to crystallise and formalise my thinking on what T:VS is for and what's wrong with its current wording. No matter the outcome on validity-by-proxy itself, if I can but get consensus behind me to split the current T:VS into Tardis:Valid sources and Tardis:Covered sources, I will count that as a great improvement to the Wiki in its own right, more than justifying the thread which will have precipitated it.

I usually reserve this for closing posts, but thanks to anyone who reads through this, and preemptive thanks to anyone who tries and answer it in as much depth as it was written! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:04, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Don't mind me just a page break

 * Done my first read through, thinking about my response. I will say, as a preliminary thought, the T:VS, T:COVERED split is touching on a similar idea to something I've been thinking about recently, but from a radically different direction. (And someday I'll overcome my privacy concerns. Someday.) Najawin ☎  17:22, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Scrooge, you decided what the DWU means extraordinarily well, I really enjoyed reading that part. That idea should definitely be ingrained into the new T:VS, if we make it. And yes, I strongly support splitting T:VS into T:CS and T:VS. One, singular qualm I have with this is that there are some sources which we could give some coverage to, but at least fail rule 2 in the non-total majority - namely, -types. I think we should make it clear, in T:CS, that these sources should not be fully called "not covered", as they do have some coverage, but perhaps should be called something like "semi-covered"? I'm unsure of the terminology, but please we don't go for non-covered, as that, on the surface, appears to include standard ao3-fanfic, which we don't cover in any capacity. Saying that, T:NO FANFIC probably needs an update due to . And again, amazing essay-reply!Cousin Ettolrahc ☎  17:36, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I fully support the proposed T:VS/T:CS split, as they really ought to be two seperate entities. As for the proposed change to what may or may not become T:CS, I've actually been thinking about something similar since Najawin began this post, if from a completely different perspective. I think that this would make a lot of sense than what we are currently doing, and state my position that we should not hinder coverage of something just because it is "silly". The DWU has always been silly, and we certainly shouldn't avoid changing our policies to something more sensible/radical just because it would mean "silly" sources being valid. Aquanafrahudy  📢  17:54, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Well fucking done. One of the best put together arguments (dare I describe it as a treatise?) I've seen around here. I am bombastically in support of the proposal to split things into T:CS and T:VS. I think this construction is more easily understood than our current way. I'm in absolute support of this. That said, I am very opposed to "the simpler Rule 4" and I want to voice that now. My objection isn't because "that's too much work" but because "it would make the Wiki more tedious and ultimately less helpful for readers." The Wiki isn't a creative writing project for the editors, it's a resource for the readers. While the interests of the editors should never be lost, we should not let those interests override the operating goal of a Wiki: to provide relevant information to the reader. NoNotTheMemes ☎  17:57, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * @NoNotTheMemes Why do you think that Scrooge's proposal is less helpful to readers? Aquanafrahudy  📢  18:01, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I've just said that Scrooge's proposal is VERY helpful for readers. I was merely maintaining that the position he devil's advocated for was not a good alternative and ensuring that if somebody looks back on this closing statement and misreads it, that the devil's advocacy position is a step too far and not something we should do. NoNotTheMemes ☎  19:03, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Oh yes, Memes, thanks for bringing that up. I am also agaisnt the "simpler rule 4", although I wasn't under the impression Scrooge was actually advocating for it, more devilling. Although I misinterpreted Najawin's OP in that regard, so 🤷‍♀️. And as for the point Aqua brought up about us not covering sources because they're "silly" - that's not why, or at least it shouldn't be. The idea, as far as I'm aware, is simply that parodies should be presumed to fail R4/NuVS unless proven otherwise. Subtly different, but I feel importantly so. Now, I also think we should keep it that way, because, wel.... perhaps someone else can explain this better, I'm not sure how to. Cousin Ettolrahc  ☎  18:08, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Regarding the simplified-Rule-4, I was neither actively advocating it, nor merely devil’s-advocating it: I meant precisely what I said. To wit, “personally I think it’d be a step too far and Validity By Proxy is preferable, but if people are opposed to Validity By Proxy, I think Simplified Rule 4 becomes the (distant-)second-best option in epistemological terms, still well ahead of repealing R4BP and going back to the original status-quo”. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:59, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Dammit Scrooge, I'm looking for how to do Commutation Diagrams in MediaWiki because you can't \usepackage TikZ. Probably this evening (for me) or tomorrow, so tomorrow GMT either way. Najawin ☎  19:09, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm probably going to be closing this thread so I'm not going to get involved in any of the actual debate, but you could produce and render the LaTeX in an external program and then upload them as images? In fact, this is what the official documentation suggests at w:meta:Help:Displaying a formula. As a side note, I've been reading a book on category theory and was wondering when/if it was going to come up in one of these discussions. It seemed inevitable. Bongo50   ☎  19:59, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

$$ \begin{array}{lcl} & X & \overset{f}\rightarrow & Z & \\ & g \downarrow && \downarrow g'\\ & Y & \underset{f'}\rightarrow & W & \\ \end{array} $$ Is what wikipedia gives as an example, and it seems to work. Just remember, all epis split if you try hard enough! Najawin ☎  21:38, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I also support the T:VS/T:CS split. It actually addresses something that's bugged me for a while, because yeah, under the 4 little rules, three of the rules are about one thing while the other rule is about something else. Time God Eon ☎  23:30, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

The Web or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deflationism
Ah, The Web. I'm sure we've all thought about it. I know I have. Indeed, I thought about it for quite some time after the R4bp thread, in order to think about whether or not it might actually work for a satisfactory account of validity. I don't think it does, but there are some subtle issues here that we should discuss.

Firstly, is The Web Validity, or is it merely a tool we construct to help us talk about Validity? I think it's clear that The Web of Narrative Connections is clearly a useful tool - if it can be constructed - for any discussion of Validity, since individual authors should have their own views of the DWU in which a subset of their view of the DWU is roughly analogous to a subset of The Web. So it's useful even to someone who thinks that continuity shouldn't touch our validity rules at all, if only for how it impacts the views of others. Scrooge suggests it's the former.
 * I think that by "intended to be set in the DWU", we mean "intended to be part of the Web"

I think this position is... difficult to hold. First and foremost, what about a writer who simply doesn't want anyone to reference their work? A writer that is notoriously disagreeable? They actively discourage people from building off of their storylines whenever possible and try to insist that their work shouldn't loop back around to the rest of what other people are doing, but still write using DWU characters? It sounds almost familiar, if a bit too extreme, no? Is this hypothetical "Angry Harry" still writing for the DWU? Seems to be to me, even if they don't consider their work suitable for others to reference. How about a series that uses some DWU concepts in a completely disjoint way from how they've been used before, (maybe even says that it's "its own universe") perhaps there's some crossovers later on down the line, but there's no backwards narrative connections? (Okay, I'm teasing a bit there, it's not that extreme. But the basic principle applies. What if we take some DWU concepts, rip them free of their original context - you've even suggested that we could do this with an image, a design, to some extent - and then have them run forward in their original series, while they might in the future be fine referencing The Web.) Even if we accept something like The Web, what you're suggesting is too restrictive. But it needs to be this restrictive, because if not, if you allow these dead ends and false starts, then the way you've defined R4 doesn't quite work here.

Alright, now, next, and is it just me, or is this getting really dodgy? Like. Sure. We're dealing with natural language, not formal ones. But when we start trying to define a categorization scheme using the things we're supposed to be categorizing, I get very suspicious. This has historically been a losing play. The insistence of Czech, Tangerine and others to base validity on solely OOU considerations is very well thought out in this regard.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think the issue here is that this is just obviously wrong. The DWU as we mean it on this site is defined by our validity policies. Our article on Doctor Who universe says as much. And these validity policies change over time. It's simply not the case that "Valid" = "part of The Web (not a dead end or false start)". Perhaps, perhaps, this is what it should come to mean, in that we should use The Web as a guide to T:VS. But it doesn't mean that. The two terms are not synonymous, and I don't think it's clear that they even line up at the present time.

Now, nobody is saying The Web isn't important, just that it isn't synonymous with validity. Validity is merely what we make of it. Think of it like the legal/moral distinction. Perhaps we should base our laws off of morality. But legal positivists don't think there's any inherent correlation between them, whereas natural law theorists insist the opposite - "an unjust law is no law at all". I think even if our validity rules didn't correspond to The Web at all, they would still reflect The DWU as this wiki understood it, since we've defined the term to refer to what we construct using T:VS. And I don't think this is a radical position, I think it's the most reasonable one given the plain fact that most people here have lived under a time where certain things we all wanted valid were ostensibly invalid.

Now enough of that, let me explain why The Web isn't important.

Oh, I kid I kid, I jest I jape. It's useful. It's very useful. But I'd be wary to use it so closely as a guide to validity, even aside from the definitional concerns. It's a useful tool, but it should be something we temper with other factors. Why? Well, the same reasons that User:NoNotTheMemes alludes to. And, indeed, this is one of the reasons why I didn't try to offer a Grand Theory of Validity in my opening post. As someone with a copy of Sakurai and Napolitano on my bookshelf not six feet away from me I feel it's my duty to warn Scrooge away from this path with such scant provisions and scant preparation. Avoid its siren song!

At least in addition to this massive web of continuity concerns, we need to think about how our readers will benefit from what we deem valid and invalid, rather than how our editors will. I know some people IRL who are massive Doctor Who fans, just massive. And they despise the wiki and consider it near unusable because it mixes together EU content and show content. I keep telling them that this will never change, that it's a foundational principle of our wiki that all sources are equal, but it really puts them off. And our decision validate all of these R4bp works, well... Some of them frustrated them more than others, but to them it just wasn't helpful, it obscured things more than made it clear. And I don't want to suggest that every reader is like this, but my suspicion is that a lot of them are. One of the earliest conversations on how to deal with validity, which I linked above, Forum:The original inclusion debates, suggested to use italics to demarcate EU vs tv content. And this clearly didn't happen in the long term, though it actually did happen here and there in the early days, people just didn't do it consistently and it fell out of favor. And people have suggested more updated versions since then, see Thread:129501 at User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon II. I think there are multiple concerns we need to balance when it comes to validity, these are just the two most obvious. I'm sure, given time, that we can come up with more. Reducing it to one concern is... Misguided in the extreme in my mind. And I certainly wouldn't wish to beg the question against those who feel the need to weigh the scales more heavily towards curating content towards our readers than I do.

Does T:CS work?
Probably not as Scrooge has alluded to it.

Firstly, I want to rebut the idea that R1bp is incoherent or unclear as I've expressed it. I think this is untrue. I think R1bp is relatively coherent and clear, if a bit messy and in need of some tune-up. R3bp is definitely difficult to envision, but this is due to the lack of R3 jurisprudence in particular. Which, well, you contributed to Scrooge, so nyeh. (As I'm writing up the last section, I had a thought. Are Stage Plays generally thought to violate R3 alone? I think there's maybe a chance that one works out there then? But really it seems to me to be usually seen as an R1 issue.)

But can we so easily extricate R4 from the prior work done? Probably not. Certainly we couldn't this time last year - non-narrative fiction was invalid for failing R1 but still covered. We technically still haven't fully relitigated video games and that's an R1 issue. And I think this alone should give us pause. If this 3 step procedure Scrooge is talking about only holds when we've already reformed T:VS to be in line with (what he thinks T:VS would look like after following this same 3 step procedure :P) a version of it that reflects our preferences more heavily than those of past editors, and it simply fails to apply prior to that, well, doesn't that suggest that perhaps this analysis is perhaps too idealistic? It's describing what we wish to happen rather than what actually is happening? If there's no possible way to separate out R1 considerations from past versions of T:VS, then I don't think it's the case than this is what covered and validity mean, and that R4 is a separate stage in the procedure than the other rules. At least, not as of yet! (And, by logical consequence, this means that the various RXbps still come tumbling down like rainfall. If it's all one policy, they're all there.)

And it's worse still, because I'm pretty sure we'll find something floating around that's not a "complete work of fiction" but is covered as invalid even after we fix video games and whatever else we're thinking of. Indeed, Forum:Deleted Scenes and Rule 4 By Proxy seems to suggest this outcome as a possibility.
 * when we consider this, it starts to make a lot more sense that a bunch of deleted scenes lack pages altogether. Stuff which breaks Rule 1 goes un-covered all the time.

I mean, surely this comment in Scrooge's closing post only makes sense if R1 breakers can be covered. (And note that this was after the narrative->fiction shift.)

It's at the very least non-trivial that we can easily divorce R1 from validity in this proposal, and I think probably straightforwardly false that we've meaningfully done so already in a way that R4 truly constitutes a separate stage. (Note, as I'm writing up the last section, I figured out the obvious examples. Stage Plays and Escape Rooms. Arguably they violate R3, but this is still a problem, as they're covered as invalid. I believe it's generally a R1 issue too.) And sometimes failing R1 means not covered, sometimes it means invalid, and it's messy and the entire thing really is one policy, stage three is a substage of stage 1, we assign validity when we create these OOU pages and then create IU pages referencing the labels the equipped sources on wiki use. But I do think there's something wrong with our account of coverage. It's just different from what Scrooge suggests.

Namely. Boy, "not covered" can sure mean a few different things, can't it? And there's not always a clear rhyme or reason as to why something that "isn't covered" is in one category and not the other. Like, sure, validity, invalidity, they pass R2 and R3, and are vaguely speaking works of fiction. To be valid it must pass R1 and R4, to be invalid it has to pass at least part of R1. There are ways in which it can fail R1 and be not covered. These types of stories have pages, plot summaries, and in-universe pages for their characters and plot elements. Sure, the invalid ones don't "talk" to the valid ones, but they're largely the same.

But, like, there are some "not covered" things that we just don't discuss here, for a variety of reasons, failing R2, R3, etc etc. But you can be "not covered" and still have a page here. Or have a page here and even have a plot summary. Or not have your own page, but be a part of a collection page dedicated to a specific type of thing or specific series. I'm really skeptical that we can offload our problems we've found here onto a split between T:VS and T:CS, but dear lord there's a whole hierarchy of how things can "fail to have in universe pages for plot elements" and still be on this wiki that we just have no terminology for and no clear unifying standards. It's very much a case by case basis.

Should we actually split T:VS and T:CS? I don't think so. I think if we want to go down this route, which we may! This seems to be where everyone is headed! If we go down this route, the issues are much deeper engrained, and I don't think that a split this simple will change things. Moreover, I think even this split is so radical that I'd suggest asking every admin we know to be semi-active to weigh in. (And, yes, it's both simple and radical. It's too simple for what it needs to be, and radical for how it changes how the wiki has been operating for a decade.)

If we really want to go down the "reform T:VS" route, my suggestion instead would be that we, again, ask all the semi-active admins to weigh in, just to start. Then the next strategy is that we prepare for quite some time to basically do a full rewrite. We let people know in GB, reddit, twitter, etc, that we're doing a large policy overhaul and want feedback, (I know, I know, I love asking the community. But this in particular is a really big change.) as well as having at least one other person do something like my archaeology project, so that multiple perspectives on the history of the wiki and what's important can be seen as editors read up on this in preparation. I think it's something that we should approach with a lot of care. But this is a suggestion. Once again, people can feel free to disregard it.

Category Theory is a Lie and Alexander Grothendieck Set Mathematics Back 100 Years
So perhaps I'm just too set in my ways, but I don't fully understand Scrooge's response about linear time invalidity for contradiction. His argument doesn't seem even slightly analogous to me. Let me explain why using some handy dandy commutative continuity diagrams. Here's the terminology you need to understand these diagrams, okay? "VN", where N is a number means that this is the Nth "Valid" story we're considering for the diagram, "IN" means this is the Nth "Invalid" story, "V1->V2" means something like "V1 informs the continuity of V2", or "V2 is trying to be in continuity with V1". "V1-/->V2" means the negation of that, and "V1<->V2" and "V1<-/->V2" means that we erase the time dependence of our previous relations.

So back in the days of yore, we had the following two stories, $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1, & I1\\ \end{array} $$. You might ask why I'm not including an arrow here. Because, frankly, my argument has no need for it. V1 and I1 might have related continuities, they might not. (EG: It's hard to deny that Shalka is continuous from the classic series.) My argument does not assume that invalid stories and valid stories are intentionally discontinuous. Indeed, it considers the entire issue a red herring. Now, given these two stories, we can consider another story that references the two of them. $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow I2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$. Now, I2 was made invalid, and this, crucially, was because of the connected arrows, because of a pattern present in this diagram, namely, $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & I1 & \rightarrow & ? & \Rightarrow & I1 & \rightarrow & I2\\ \end{array} $$. The sequels/prequels to invalid stories thread changed this. Now, depending on factors other than patterns in these diagrams, both $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow I2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ and $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow V2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ can exist. The R4bp thread concluded with the idea that considering diagrams of the form, $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow V2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ we can replace them with $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow V2 & \leftarrow & V3\\ \end{array} $$. This is asymmetric. Scrooge suggests the issue is one of looking at the same graph while removing the time element. I wish to submit that this is clearly false. If we're considering diagrams of the form $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow \quad ? & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ and simply deciding whether "?" is to be valid or invalid, I don't see how changing this diagram to $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \leftrightarrow \quad ? & \leftrightarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ changes the calculation one whit. (Indeed, it's arguably because of this change that my argument works! We need there to be a symmetry between going from $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \leftarrow & I1 & \Rightarrow & V1 & \leftarrow & V2\\ \end{array} $$ to $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & ? & \leftarrow & I1 & \Rightarrow & I2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ and there just isn't without assuming time invariance. My argument really was that using these arrows at all was circular reasoning, given how our diagrams were populated, but time invariance actually makes it stronger. Otherwise this second form of the argument only works on diagrams of the form $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow I2 & \leftarrow & I1\\ \end{array} $$ which is a rather different issue.)

Perhaps the difference will become more apparent if we chart out his proposed counter example and why I don't think they're similar?

Scrooge suggests we consider the following diagram instead: $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V2 & \nrightarrow & V3 \\ & \uparrow & \nearrow \\ & V1 \\ \end{array} $$, or, if you prefer, $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V2 & \nrightarrow & ? \\ & \uparrow & \nearrow \\ & V1 \\ \end{array} $$. And this is clearly non analogous, right? I mean, even if you insist that my hypothetical has to populate the continuity relationship between V1 and I1, a view I straightforwardly reject, even if you apply time invariance to this graph as well (bear with me, this is actually the one issue here, diagonal arrows can't do this on mediawiki, so I'm going to turn it into a box diagram) $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V2 & \nleftrightarrow & ? \\ & \updownarrow && \updownarrow \\ & V1 & = & V1 \\ \end{array} $$, in this analogy, there's still a giant hole - that both stories already propagating the diagram are already valid, and the "non continuous" arrow is a relationship between one of them and the new story we're considering, not between the previous stories that already are present in the diagram.

Now, one might argue, perhaps we shouldn't privilege past states of the diagram over future ones. That if we fill in those continuity arrows between I1 and V1 from my example we get $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \nrightarrow & I1 \\ & \downarrow & \swarrow \\ & ? \\ \end{array} $$ and then adding time invariance to this diagram gives us $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \nleftrightarrow & I1 \\ & \updownarrow && \updownarrow \\ & ? & = & ? \\ \end{array} $$ and then when we realize that in his example we clearly agree with validity for the question mark, so we do so here as well, and then this back propagates to I1. So $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \nleftrightarrow & V3 \\ & \updownarrow && \updownarrow \\ & V2 & = & V2 \\ \end{array} $$. Potentially then all structures of the form $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & X & \nleftrightarrow & X \\ & \updownarrow && \updownarrow \\ & X & = & X \\ \end{array} $$ are either all valid or invalid?

Perhaps this is what Scrooge is suggesting all along? It's not time invariance wrt media, it's time invariance wrt the decisions we make about these pieces of media. I don't really think he is? I'm just trying to steelman this argument. I don't really see a reading in which the two are analogous otherwise. Like - it's got some weird implications for how we conduct validity debates at the very least. At this point, not being a category theorist, and that's probably the best way to think about this, I think I have to beg off discussion ever so slightly, but my intuition is that this is precisely the reductive version of R4 Scrooge has suggested and people have not largely been fans of. It's that instead of springboarding off of Unearthly Child our web springboards off of every piece of DWU media. That's my guess. (I think this is the first time I've ever wished Amorkuz was here - I think he was an algebraist?)

Regardless, perhaps Scrooge can clarify what he means? I really don't see any similarities - I don't see how this is in principle a rebuttal.

Continuity, References, Android Boyfriends, oh my!
And so we come to this. Perhaps the heart of Scrooge and my disagreement, and perhaps the thing we'll simply never see eye to eye on. I think I can convince him on much of the rest that's gone before, or perhaps that we'll come close to mutual understanding. But this, no, I think we're just speaking fundamentally different languages here. Case in point
 * The question of whether the Doctor's line in Time of the Doctor is referencing the Shalka Master or not… already exists. It would exist, just as irresolvable, even if we decided to throw up our hands and delete the #Continuity sections. Heck, let's also delete #References while we're at it. The question is still there, laughing at us, because — I cannot believe I did not spell this out sooner — we still have to decide whether we put that line on The Master (Scream of the Shalka) or create a separate the Doctor's boyfriend (The Time of the Doctor) page.

We do the second. It's site policy. We do the second. This has been upheld time and time again. We do not go further than what the source tells us. Indeed, I state something very similar to the inverse of this argument in my OP.
 * We all agree that for various events in the DWU competing events are relatively common, yes? And it's important to report neutrally on these accounts, stating what each source tells us, and not to speculate further. So if in one source we see precisely X and in another Y, we say that in one account X was held to have happened and in another Y was held to have happened, refusing to speculate further, refusing to say further than what X tells us, and refusing to say further than what Y tells us. And previously there was some symmetry between how we handled these cases and invalid sources and valid sources referencing invalid ones. An invalid source says X, but it also, implicitly, says that it cannot be trusted and we can't use it to write articles, so we ignore it, and then a valid source says precisely Y, so we say Y. But now we've decided to break this symmetry.

And this is where I feel our intuitions just differ fundamentally. Mine, vs yours and Nate's and probably many other's. For me it's less than ideal to have these pages for the things we all clearly know are The Master, etc, on pages other than theirs. But I'd rather make sure that we don't speculate over having a flawed rule in order to merge them. (And lest someone suggest that any rule we create to merge them will be fine because "we'll only apply it to pages we know concretely should be merged", first of all, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, second of all, you can imagine how little this is going to convince the mathematician. "Oh, we have this cool machinery that's proving all these theorems we're pretty sure are true. P!=NP, Collatz, Navier Stokes, Golbach, Twin Primes..." "Okay, but I've seen the machinery, it's pretty suspicious and it looks like it can be used to imply basically anything." "Yeah, but that's okay, we're only using it on stuff we already know is true.")

Now, I'd like to rebut the idea that I'm against "continuity" or "referencing" at all. This isn't true. I just don't think that we, the wiki editors, have access to that knowledge. (Because, again, actual intentionalist. Well, partially. I just think that textual evidence is a very poor guide for what precisely we're looking for here and it's going to lead to incredibly messy differences of opinion. We are epistemically limited in this matter to a truly remarkable degree.) And so if we decide to use it for validity it must be based on authorial statements. As I said in the original R4bp thread. I do think it's occasionally possible for there to be relatively unambiguous and universally understood statements of the type of authorial intent we're looking for in a text. I just believe they're incredibly rare. And this is what the Android Boyfriend example shows to me - not the impossibility of communication between individuals, but that we fundamentally cannot be trusted as to what "clear" actually means when we're reading a text. One person sees a particular reading as obvious, another sees another reading as obvious. It might still be the case that in a different section of the book everyone, or near everyone, reads the text in the same way. But we should be very skeptical that our readings of texts are the sorts of things that we need for this policy to work without authorial statements. We're just so epistemically limited here. (I also note that I don't wish to define the DWU as R4 intends it as completely divorced from continuity. It is defined that way, well, modulo R4bp. It's constructed by T:VS.)

But no, I don't think this line of attack is particularly compelling. It's explicitly site policy to not speculate, to only say what the source tells you, nothing more. I'm quite comfortable declining to do so, or at least trying my best not to, (because I know I've done so in the past, forgive me Scrooge, for I have sinned) and being deeply skeptical of those things that I accuse of subjectivity. I note as well that this criticism rests on trying to dissolve the distinction between the language and the metalanguage, as it were, how we add things to and categorize them within the DWU, and how the DWU resolves itself once things have been added. I am, of course, deeply skeptical of this.

And so we end on the sky not falling
So fair warning, it's like after midnight as I wrote this, and if it starts to get a little bit less coherent and tends towards hysteria, that's probably why. (Don't hold me too hard to the stuff I wrote in this section tomorrow or, to a lesser extent, the last section. Subject to change. I think the last section is prettttttty solid, but there might be changes in my views after a night's sleep. The previous stuff is good, or, well, as good as you can get in a day. Not super thrilled with the first section, I think there's more to be said there. But it's workable and it would take me like a week to actually do the good version, and I think that's a bit rude, given it's my thread.)

I think I'm rather more cynical than Scrooge on the subject of whether people will revisit prior subjects that have been validated using R4bp, but I look forward to being proved incorrect. In a way this section of his neatly reflects on a comment OS25 made a week ago.
 * The big reason I feel so strongly about Rule 4 By Proxy is not only that it makes sense, but also that it’s essentially only made our site better in every case that it’s been used.

Well, I don't think it makes sense, and I think this confidence is misplaced, given the closing of one recent validity debate (there but for the grace of Rassilon...) and the opening of another. R4bp can make the site change in ways that I think many of us are not necessarily fans of. So I'm not certain that we should be appealing to consequences here. I think they're very much open ended. For me, as I said above, the reasoning comes first. I can live with Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows). It's irritating, but not ideal. I can live with a prominent, often referenced invalid story. I can live with weird implications of well thought out rules consistently applied. Poorly thought out rules, or well thought out rules inconsistently applied? That's when I have real frustrations. And R4bp is the last category of the three. (Well, it's well thought out in its own right. I don't think how it jives with the rest of T:VS was quite as thorough.) By its very nature, as it's currently written it's arbitrary in application. Arbitrary in terms of whether we decide to use it or something else? I can live with that - that has to happen to some extent. But in how we apply it? Not so much. And what's more, we don't have to. We're biting a massive bullet here for no reason at all that I can see. Quite a few.

I've sat here trying to write about my frustrations of us, all of us, perhaps just not communicating and not quite having the same ranking of where things fit in our priorities for about 20 minutes now. And I'm just not seeing it. Everything I write borders on hysterical, far too verbose, or cruel. Mainly hysterical. Maybe we'll just never bridge that gap. But I hope we can. I truly hope that we can come to an understanding on why things being arbitrary in terms of application in particular is such an issue. Najawin ☎  07:42, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Another page break
Didn't totally understand all of that, but one thing I'd like to say is that I think we as a wiki should not be intentionalist about sources. Even if the "android boyfriend" in Time of the Doctor isn't intending to reference Scream of the Shalka, the similarity is still there. We simply phrase it in a way to ensure its not definitive, such as "The Eleventh Doctor once mentioned having an android boyfriend (TV: ). Indeed, One possible Ninth Doctor travelled with an android version of the Master (WC: ) Cousin Ettolrahc ☎  12:06, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The android boyfriend is a bad example in any case, because the reference doesn’t actually fit the facts. The Eleventh Doctor states quite plainly that he “invented” the boyfriend, and “accidentally”; the Shalka Doctor built the Master a body, he didn’t invent the Master, and he certainly didn’t do it by accident. Nor try frantically to “get rid of” him as Eleven says he did the android boyfriend. All intentionalism aside the scenario described in “Time” just *does not* textually match the Shalka Master.


 * Anyway, read the reply, will work on a counter-riposte. We’ll get somewhere yet. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:52, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Well the obvious response is just how Moffat forgot he wrote an entire episode he clearly forgot some of the circumstances of the scenario. But I don't think this.


 * As for the idea that we shouldn't be intentionalist with sources, well, we're not. As much as we should be - because it's correct - we're not. We don't care that the Man with the rosette is intended to be The Master. What I'm saying is that we should be intentionalist on the higher order concern about whether something is intended to connect with other DWU stories. And not even fully intentionalist! If we were fully intentionalist it just wouldn't matter if someone tried to later connect with an invalid source, we'd ignore them. But there's a real difference between the first order concern about continuity and the higher order concern of validity and people are really keen on blurring this line, and this is very much not a good idea. Najawin ☎  17:17, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
 * To clarify, other (specific) DWU stories. Najawin ☎  17:38, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Still working on my second big reply, this is not that. But unrelated to that (the following is not a load-bearing point in my current line of argument), I just want to push back against “if we were fully intentionalist it just wouldn’t matter if someone tried to later connect with an invalid source, we’d ignore them”. Because I think it is a coherent ultra-intentionalist position to say that in a R4BP case, the whole of the narrative contents of the invalid story becomes implicit-but-intended information in the new source.


 * That is, if Invalid Story A says “The Doctor once owned a pet emu, and also had a nephew called Bradford Who”, and then Valid Story B features Bradford Who and presents itself as a continuation of Invalid Story A from his point of view — then Valid Story *B* is *itself* asserting, implicitly, that the Doctor of the valid DWU owned a pet emu. See the stuff in my First Riposte about the text of AUC being incorporated into the text of The Daleks as “one enormous footnote” by the carried-over presence of the First Doctor, Ian Chesterton, & Co. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:24, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * If you erase the language / metalanguage distinction, sure! And I've seen that. And I never want to see it again. (And note that I did say "on the higher order concern". I sort of state here that there are multiple levels.) Najawin ☎  20:37, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm a bit behind here. What's the language/metalanguage distinction? Aquanafrahudy 📢  20:55, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * "the language and the metalanguage, as it were, how we add things to and categorize them within the DWU, and how the DWU resolves itself once things have been added". Technically those are backwards, as befits something I wrote at midnight. (I did warn you all!) The "language" is, well, statements about the DWU, entities within it, etc etc. The "metalanguage" is statements about those statements, how we classify and categorize things on a higher level. It's not a common distinction to use in natural conversation, but it's one that allows for clearer analysis. Eliminating it, or using a system that is strong enough to eliminate it on its own, tends to lead to... problems. Najawin ☎  21:22, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Are we making progress? I think we might be making progress. Well, once more unto the breach… Note that the following is somewhat more off-the-cuff than the earlier reply, and is addressed to Najawin in the second person, as a direct reply to his points in the order in which he made them — instead of a structured argument of my own. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:28, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

The Web and the DWU
On the topic of the Web and the DWU, I think you have misunderstood me. "First and foremost, what about a writer who simply doesn't want anyone to reference their work? A writer that is notoriously disagreeable? They actively discourage people from building off of their storylines whenever possible and try to insist that their work shouldn't loop back around to the rest of what other people are doing, but still write using DWU characters? It sounds almost familiar, if a bit too extreme, no? Is this hypothetical "Angry Harry" still writing for the DWU?"

- User:Najawin

Why, yes, of course he is — so long as Harry is open to the possibility that he himself will pick up on his own plot threads in further works! Our hypothetical writer is being very possessive of a branch of the Web, but he's not severing the Web at all. "What if we take some DWU concepts, rip them free of their original context - you've even suggested that we could do this with an image, a design, to some extent - and then have them run forward in their original series, while they might in the future be fine referencing The Web."

- User:Najawin

………good job on rederiving Validity By Proxy from first principles?? This is so thoroughly the kind of case I'm talking about that I don't entirely comprehend why you're presenting it back to me as though it supported your position. "And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think the issue here is that this is just obviously wrong. The DWU as we mean it on this site is defined by our validity policies. Our article on Doctor Who universe says as much. And these validity policies change over time. It's simply not the case that "Valid" [means] "part of The Web (not a dead end or false start)". Perhaps, perhaps, this is what it should come to mean, in that we should use The Web as a guide to T:VS. But it doesn't mean that. The two terms are not synonymous, and I don't think it's clear that they even line up at the present time."

- User:Najawin

This is just the kind of tiresome T:BOUND debate I mentioned I wanted to avoid at Forum:References into Worldbuilding, and I wish we wouldn't get bogged down in it now. Yes, in a sense I'm taking about what it "should come to mean" more than what it is. My position is that "part of the Web (not a dead end or false start)" is the most parsimonious and accurate formalisation of what a coherent definition of the "intended to be in the DWU" part of Rule 4 is talking about. Obviously it's not in and of itself live policy yet; that's what the present thread-tangent is trying to promulgate. But that is because we don't currently have a formal definition of what we mean by "intent to be DWU", just a lot of slightly-contradictory precedent. I think it's past time we did put together a formal explanation; and I think Web-talk is the closest to a definition that satisfactorily matches current, and even historical, practice.

I've shown why the "finite circle with a firm boundary that you're in or out of" way of thinking about "being in the DWU" simply doesn't work, because e.g. Against Nature fails it. "It's in continuity with prior stories that set themselves in the world of An Unearthly Child, therefore it's indirectly in the same universe as Doctor Who" is the only sense I can think of in which a lot — though not all — of Faction Paradox could be said to pass Rule 4, and that goes for a lot of spin-offs past and present.

As for the "no intentional-dead-ends" clause, it's taken straight from the old debates on Death Comes to Time, where the deciding factor for it failing Rule 4 was not that it messed about with the lore of the Time Lords, or even that it ignored the TV Movie, but, above all else, that Freedman said that by the time he finished it, he himself had decided he would ignore it if he was allowed to do further Who stories.

What else does "passing Rule 4" mean, if not a somewhat-hazy concept that is best crystallised in those terms? What's your pitch for a formalisation? Or do you simply think we shouldn't try, and keep it hazy? That seems hard to square with your approach elsewhere.

Usefulness to readers
"I know some people IRL who are massive Doctor Who fans, just massive. And they despise the wiki and consider it near unusable because it mixes together EU content and show content. (…) And our decision validate all of these R4bp works, well... Some of them frustrated them more than others, but to them it just wasn't helpful, it obscured things more than made it clear."

- User:Najawin

Skill issue.

…Okay, okay, I know. But listen. Do these people's frustrations have anything to do with the arcana of why we have historicall considered these sources invalid? I think not. You alluded to this yourself in your opening post, many, many words ago. There are canon-purists in the Doctor Who fandom, but not many, I think, who would deem the validation of Search Out Space unthinkable, while being totally fine with Party Fears Two. We're talking about a rather small number of stories here, and not the most unthinkable to treat as "real"; a few drops of restrictiveness in an ocean of permissiveness. People who want us to be a BBC-TV-trumps-all Wiki will never be happy, and that's unfortunate, but throwing them a few scraps of invalidity won't satisfy them while harming the experience of readers who are otherwise in tune with how we roll.

Besides: "One of the earliest conversations on how to deal with validity, which I linked above, Forum:The original inclusion debates#Excluded, suggested to use italics to demarcate EU vs tv content."

- User:Najawin

That's a very last-month concern! is here now, for all the "canon-sorting" needs of readers who actually care. It finally allows us to fulfill our original principled ambition of "present the maximum of info, and let people pick for themselves". People who object to the reality of Search Out Space on the grounds that it is not an Episode Of Doctor Who have fewer legs to stand on than they ever did, because a citation to "TV: Search Out Space" is no longer identical to a citation for "TV: An Unearthly Child": checking whether it's a proper episode or a special crossover skit is now just one citation-expanding click away.

If people don't want to do that — again I say — skill issue. It's one click. So long as people who can be bothered are able to find what they want and separate it from what they don't care about, no encyclopedia should limit the scope of the information it contains for reasons like that.

T:CS
I won't dissect your words in this section sentence by sentence again, because I think I would just end up repeating myself from the first section re: T:BOUND. I am proposing a formalisation of a more consistent, more streamlined T:VS (slash T:CS); not a complete break from prior policy, but certainly an evolution, not just a reformulation. I accept as much. The whole point is that trying to cover both concepts in one policy has in fact led to weird conceptual bleed between the two, in ways that actually affected the end-result of validities and invalidities, compared to what what I think a more logically consistent approach would have yielded.

I hold that T:VS as it currently exists (all one policy) is in fact bad. Better than what came before, but still much worse than it “ought” to be. As the man said, “the worst possible coverage/validity policy except for everything else that's ever been tried”. I have an idea for something better; reform by reform, our community, in recent years, has been shifting closer to that better way; I think we should continue with that full-bodied regeneration, and speed it up if possible. The T:CS/T:VS overhaul would be a great step forward in that reform.

Perhaps that's a difference between us; you seem to start from the perspective that the Wiki's way of doing things for the past fifteen years has been basically acceptable, albeit not necessarily perfect. I do not grant this. I love Tardis Wiki very much and I think it is better than the vast majority of Wikis, but — have you seen the vast majority of Wiki? If we think that's good enough, we're damning ourselves with faint praise. Tardis Wiki's coverage policies, while being leaps and bounds ahead of those of other Wikis of its age and size, have historically been quite bad in absolute terms. There's a dozen ways in which they simply don't make coherent sense except through a lot of kludgy patches and precedent; or, relatedly, in which an ill-conceived — but plain — original intent has been neutered by a similar mass of kludges and adjustment, but remains on the books anyway. (User:OttselSpy25's perennial complaints about the hollow "no what-ifs" rule come to mind.)

Forgive the melodrama, but we are shamed. We are shamed by the fact that T:VS is such a daunting mess. We are shamed that we banished non-narrative fiction for so long, that we spent years parroting the word "canon" (albeit in gradually more intelligent ways), that there was ever a time when Faction Paradox not being covered was remotely on the table. We need to do better, in a very deep sense; to cut mercilessly through what is left of the bad in our policies. And also to nurture the good — yes — because there's a lot of good buried in there, already. A lot of worthy principles, fragments of a better whole that's waiting to be unearthed. But there is, too, plentiful cause for radicalism.

In short: I am a reformist rather than a revolutionary, because I do believe we can and should operate, in earnest, transparently, through the established institutions of the Wiki. (The established institutions are pretty good.) But what I am not is a moderate.

(How's that for grandiose and hysterical? Really, Najawin, I assure you, you're good.)

So can we please discuss the proposed update on the merits, now, without endlessly quibbling over quite how much the proposed new policy strays from the past? As for asking other people to weigh in — I am not against keeping this thread open for double the length, if we find ourselves still uncertain in twenty-odd days. And I am not against issuing batch-notifications on talk pages, a site-wide announcement (like we did for the Master thread or ), and, sure, even cross-promoting the thread on other Who fan platforms. You have my blessing to do so if you want.

But as you often say, it's the arguments that really matter, not the number of "aye"s. If my arguments make sense — if by the final deadline, the community and the closing admin agree that they make sense — then this thread will rule as much, and replace prior jurisprudence as the standing policy, and that is how these things work. That is how this community functions. I'm all for inviting more voices to weigh in within the framework of how a policy-change thread is meant to work — but I deny that such things are procedurally necessary in their own right, as I think you believe. They're not. They're just good ways to get a better, more in-depth discussion within the thread, which is what actually matters. We admins are custodians, not oligarchs.

…Anyway.

"But, like, there are some "not covered" things that we just don't discuss here, for a variety of reasons, failing R2, R3, etc etc. But you can be "not covered" and still have a page here. (…) dear lord there's a whole hierarchy of how things can "fail to have in universe pages for plot elements" and still be on this wiki that we just have no terminology for and no clear unifying standards. It's very much a case by case basis."

- User:Najawin

Sounds to me like a very good reason to have a clear Tardis:Coverage policy that formalises and describes the ins and outs of coverage-policy, without also trying to talk about validity policy! I apologise if I've implied as much, but I'm not saying T:CS would literally just be Rules 1-2-3 and nothing else. The whole point is that we'd do away with the misleading Four Little Rules division of these concepts. T:CS would strive to explicate the various levels of coverage from "full plot summary and in-universe pages" to unproduced story-pages to the merry denizens of Category:Real world media with DWU connections.

Unrelatedly, I do not understand how you read my post as "only making sense if R1 breakers can be covered" when the quoted sentence is specifically saying that "stuff which breaks Rule 1 goes un-covered all the time"?…

"Oh look. Maths."
I saved this section for last in writing this reply, and was honestly not sure whether to bother fully refuting it in its own right because I think the crux of our disagreement is a higher-level matter that renders the whole thing moot. Your entire analysis — unless I've missed something — overlooks, perhaps willfully, a foundational stone of mine, which is that we accept the Web Theory of Rule 4: i.e. "Genesis of the Daleks sets itself in continuity with The Daleks" is synonymous with "Genesis of the Daleks sets itself in the universe of The Daleks" is synonymous with "Genesis of the Daleks sets itself in the DWU". As such it is the justification for Genesis of the Daleks being valid in the first place (R1-2-3 being equal) — it and a hundred overlapping statements of the same form e.g. "Genesis of the Daleks sets itself in the universe of The Sontaran Experiment", all of which ultimately reduce back to "in the same universe as [X1] which is in the same universe as [X2] which is (…) in the same universe as An Unearthly Child".

If you won't grant that to start with, then sure, nothing else follows. And I feel like you don't?

But if you do grant it, then "removing the time element" means disregarding the difference between "[Story A] references [Story B]" ("[Story A] sets itself in the universe of [Story B]") and "[Story A] is referenced by [Story B]" ("[Story A] is treated as part of its universe by [Story B]") : to reduce both propositions to, ultimately, "[Story A] ⇔ [Story B]".

So — Case One. Suppose that we have three stories A1, B1 and C1, which came out in that order, chronologically. Both B1 and C1 reference ("set themselves in the universe of") A1. However, C1 is pointedly discontinuous with B1. We have, in other words, “B1 -> A1 <- C1”. In current practice, if A1 is already part of the DWU (part of the Web), then both B1 and C1 individually pass Rule 4. Another way to judge C would be to say "C sets itself outside the universe of B which sets itself in the universe of A1, therefore C1 sets itself outside the universe of A1". But we don't do that. This is what I mean by Continuity Trumps Discontinuity.

For Validity By Proxy, let's consider Case Two. Let's look at A2, B2 and C2. A2 is still starts off DWU. B2, however, fails Rule 4 to a first approximation: it does not set itself in the universe of A2, nor of any arbitrary already-DWU A[N]. But C2 is continuous with both. With Validity By Proxy, Continuity Trumps Discontinuity so we now care that B2 is now, from a timeless bird's eye view, in continuity with at least one DWU source (C2) even if it isn't in-continuity with A2 (nor with any other individual DWU work predating C2).

For the purported Invalidity By proxy, let's consider Case Three. Let's look at A3, B3 and C3. They have the same relationship to one another as A1, B1 and C1, but now we're wondering if C3, which is in continuity with A3, setting itself as discontinuous with B3, means that B3 is now retroactively outside the DWU. From everything we've learned, the answer is clearly "no": Continuity Trumps Discontinuity. B3 is continuous with at least one DWU story (A3) and nothing can take that away, not even it being discontinuous with a zillion other DWU stories like C3 (whether they postdate or predate B3!).

Supposing that a blue arrow represents "has continuity with [in either direction]", and a red arrow represents intentional discontinuity — then all three graphs look the same once you abstract away the chronological release order, the question of whether a blue arrow means "references" or "is referenced by". That is what I meant.

Does this help?

Also: "(…) my intuition is that this is precisely the reductive version of R4 Scrooge has suggested and people have not largely been fans of. It's that instead of springboarding off of Unearthly Child our web springboards off of every piece of DWU media. That's my guess."

- User:Najawin

No, this is wrong on several levels. The Simplified R4 (which people, including me, indeed aren't fans of) has nothing to do with where the Web springs from: it has to do with snipping away the "intentional dead-end" exception pioneered by the old DCtTT thread. With DCtT the question is not whether it ultimately goes back to AUC or not; there is every reason to think it does. It fails Rule 4 not for lack of going back to AUC (it does), nor because it ignors the TVM (that's no different from Genesis of the Daleks ignoring Genesis of Evil), but because Dan Freedman stated that he himself would have ignored it if he'd written further Doctor Who stories in that period. It was an intentional dead-end. That, and not anything else, is the way in which it fails Rule 4. Simplified Rule 4 would get rid of this notion.

Continuity references
"We do the second. It's site policy. We do the second. This has been upheld time and time again. We do not go further than what the source tells us. Indeed, I state something very similar to the inverse of this argument in my OP."

- User:Najawin

No we don't. Not all the time. Absolutely not. Stop right there.

I mean, just look at Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows) again! Nothing in Tomorrow Windows actually says the tall aristocratic gentleman is the Doctor. Not in so many words. He could be some random guy the Doctor is destined to meet! After all, he also sees the Daleks in those windows, doesn't mean the Doctor is someday going to regenerate into "the Daleks (plural)". If the true objection to Validity By Proxy were that we can't be sure the pale aristocrat is the Shalka Doctor, then our page should be Pale aristocrat (The Tomorrow Windows), and it wouldn't discuss "this was presumably intended to be the Shalka Doctor" any more than "The Woman (The End of Time)" would discuss "some fans think this is a regenerated Ulysses".

If you want precedent, then God help us, this is Talk:Totem (short story) territory. But put simply, when we're not getting our knickers in a twist about the validity of the sources involved, we acknowledge non-spelled-out connections all the time based on presumed intent. Especially for identifying preexisting recurring characters making cameos.

Maybe you think we shouldn't, but we do, and it's hard to imagine how the Wiki would operate it we didn't; again, at the extreme, that way lies The Doctor (An Unearthly Child), The Doctor (The Daleks), The Doctor (The Edge of Destruction), etc. A line has to be drawn somewhere, but for many years now, it's been drawn well beyond "erring on the side of acknowledging a description of a particular Doctor as being that Doctor even if the literal text could theoretically match any number of people".

And besides, I don't think even you would go as far as that reducio ad absurdum of wondering whether Hartnell's Doctor character in Story B character really is the same as the character with the same name and the same face in Story A. Assuming, then, that your argument only applies to """ambiguous"""" continuity-references like the "pale-faced aristocrat", it fails as a defeater to the basic principle. Picture a continuity reference of the form "…and in one timeline the Doctor travelled with Alison Cheney", or indeed of Alison appearing in person; surely you agree with stating confidently that this is a reference to the actual preexisting character of that name? So unless you bite a bullet that I think goes well beyond sanity, then at best this entire line of argument should reduce the scope of potential Proxy cases, but it wouldn't actually be a defeater to the concept. I think we agree there are such things as uncontroversial continuity-references, we're just haggling about boundaries.

Falling skies, or, why I will not give in
"Well, I don't think it makes sense, and I think this confidence is misplaced, given the closing of one recent validity debate (there but for the grace of Rassilon...) and the opening of another."

- User:Najawin

There, I suppose, we just diverge. Ironic license issue notwithstanding I would see nothing harmful about covering Do You Have A License… as valid in the abstract — if there were a solid R4BP case for it. Which The Bloodletters probably was in its lowkey way. Certainly all my ambivalence in the case had to do with my doubts regarding Fogarty's intent, or otherwise with the specifics of The Bloodletters; had we a clearer case — the Chiropodist showing up in the flesh as a supporting character in something-or-other — I would say in a heartbeat that validating it was clearly the right thing to do.

"For me, as I said above, the reasoning comes first. (…) I can live with a prominent, often referenced invalid story. I can live with weird implications of well thought out rules consistently applied. Poorly thought out rules, or well thought out rules inconsistently applied? That's when I have real frustrations."

- User:Najawin

Well, the whole tragedy is that I quite agree with you there. I want consistent, well-thought-out, straightforwardly-applicable rules! I like nothing better!

But I am an optimist. I do not believe in the policy uncertainty-principle, I do not believe there is a necessary trade-off.

Granting that Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)/Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka) is suboptimal, I will always believe that we can do better. An overall site policy that is both well-reasoned and avoids situations like this must exist, surely — and I cannot accept, lying down, the idea that it is beyond this community's brainpower to devise. The original R4BP proposal, and its reincarnation as Validity By Proxy in the more ambitious T:VS/T:CS framework, are my best guesses thus far about what that policy may look like. Perhaps I haven't got it right yet; perhaps the correct justification eludes us. But even if it should turn out to be the case, I refuse to stop looking. There must exist a logical policy that permits this, and so help me, we are going to find it and put it on the books if it kills me.

Accuse me of motivated reasoning if you must — I do realise how it sounds. But I look at it as a sanity-check situation. Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)/Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka)… cannot be the best we can do. Come on. If the legal analysis seems to imply otherwise, the obvious hypothesis is that the legal analysis isn't good enough and we must keep looking. The idea that no such policy can exist is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence you have not remotely provided.

More provocative perhaps, but (to my mind) equally principled, is my contention that it's okay to keep Rule 4 By Proxy in vigour even in an "imperfect" form, should you manage to build consensus that my current policy justification is imperfect. You can still act as though murder is a priori wrong even if you haven't yet cracked a unifying theory of moral philosophy; in fact, by most accounts, you should. Ditto: we are pretty sure, at a meta-level, that something R4BP-shaped is closer to correct than Ninth Doctor 4 (The Tomorrow Windows)/Ninth Doctor (Scream of the Shalka), and we should keep using R4BP as a "model" even if we keep looking for the "correct" underlying principle.

I stress that all of this is sort of a hypothetical, to me. I do think the Web Theory is in fact reasonably correct and reasonably robust. But I also believe, with even greater certainty, that R4BP gives the right results even if it should turn out to do so in a suboptimal way; and consequently, that it'd be harmful to repeal it and return to the prior status quo which might make more sense on its own (wrong-headed) internal terms, but strays further, in its output, from what the conjectured Perfect Validity Policy would yield. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 23:28, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Pag3 Br3ak
Read, thinking about, will respond ideally tomorrow, perhaps the next day. In the short term as an immediate response, I'll say that the distinction between The Web being a good guide to an ideal system of validity and actually being validity really does matter - if it's the former the RXbps really are issues, (potentially temporarily, potentially not, but it's certainly not trivial that they're red herrings) if it's the latter they can be easily dismissed. As for the issue of the graphs, that's actually identical to what I suggested as the steelman argument in terms of graph structure. Woah boy. That's... I'm gonna have to take some time to unpack that. That's got some weird implications. I'm pretty sure it's identical to the strong version of R4 that, well, I suggested, even if you didn't mean it to be. Najawin ☎  00:01, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * If you mean that idea “that instead of springboarding off of Unearthly Child our web springboards off of every piece of DWU media”, then yes, sort of? But I wouldn't phrase it like that. The point is that it is the nature of the Web that any individual node-point links back to AUC eventually, albeit indirectly. That, plus timelessness, plus intentional-dead-end-nodes-exlusionism, and you get the proposed Timeless Web Theory of validity.


 * I was just clarifying that this had nothing to do with the Simplified R4 option which I outlined (and which people don't like), contra your apparent belief. Simplified R4 is a proposed alternative to TWT, which removes dead-end-exclusionism instead of removing the temporal aspect.


 * (And again, "weird" or not — I genuinely dare you to devise another formalisation of Rule 4 that doesn't invalidate Against Nature and its ilk. I've tried! Nothing else makes sense! That's actually why I don't care that much about the good guide to an ideal system…/actually validity distinction: I don't think there's anything else "intended to be in the DWU" can feasibly mean that wouldn't imply the invalidation of a bunch of currently-uncontroversially-valid things. And we need a formal definition of what "intended to be in the DWU" mean, if we're to talk about inevitable logical implications of Rule 4 By Proxy at all, surely…) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 00:26, 9 August 2023 (UTC)


 * No, not quite, I mean that instead of merely Unearthly Child being the center of The Web, it treats every node as the center of The Web. It's a weird one. (The basic intuition here translated to a non mathematical notion is that if you can't privilege the past in terms of our reasoning you can't privilege TUC as the center of The Web and being the thing where the relevant IPs start from.) I'm gonna actually have to unpack this to make sure, it's intuition at this point, and, again, I'm very much not a category theorist, so it will largely just be diagram chasing. I might have to crack open the category theory book I have. >.>


 * Again, I hope to get it done late Wednesday-Early Friday GMT, but this bit is weird enough that I actually don't make promises. I actually have to do math instead of just draw diagrams. Najawin ☎  01:00, 9 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Is it maybe possible to make your arguments without the diagrams? Your commitment to formal logic is admirable, but I think it's just conceivable that objections whose entire substance requires a mathematics textbook to hand might not have supreme relevance to a forum discussion about what, in practice, is or is not Doctor Who. Starkidsoph ☎  01:09, 9 August 2023 (UTC)


 * The diagrams in question are just making visible the continuity relations that we're going to be talking about anyhow. It's that or saying "well some story is in continuity with another story, but it's also in continuity with a third story, but those second two stories aren't in continuity with each other", but doing different variations of that like 10 different times. I feel like that would get more confusing, not less. (Indeed, that's why diagrams like this were invented, because it actually gets really really confusing if you write it out without a picture.) Najawin ☎  01:34, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

So where have I been for the past few days?
Mainly trying to do some diagram chasing. After a certain point I realized that category theory has some useful insights and there's some stuff to care about (and I'm still working on that, hopefully I can formalize that intuition I mentioned above. I still make no promises. It's an intuition.), but that graph theory is probably the better field for some other related issues. (One obvious pair of questions is "given a configuration of a subset of The Web, how does adding a vertex with incident edges - thus, our earlier configuration is a subgraph of our new configuration - impact validity? What are sufficient and necessary conditions, for instance, of everything in this latter graph to be either all valid or invalid?" For those who care about the formulation, the technical question has to do with walks on 2-colored graphs, your first graph is a subset of the second.)

And it turns out that when you look at these things from the perspective of graph theory, it's equivalent to considering that the "intentionally discontinuous" relationships simply don't exist. There's simply no reason to discuss them. Which makes sense, as my initial argument never did. Which ties in nicely to the next section.

Into the Spiderverse
Scrooge suggests that the hypothetical Angry Harry is not actually trying to sever their work from the web. This is less than clear by his own standards. What I described is almost an archetypal "Dead-End" situation. There's no intent for the work done within these plotlines to reflect back on the rest of the DWU. Nobody has ever suggested, to my knowledge, that these Dead-Ends must be a single work. They often are. But that isn't a necessary condition. Perhaps Scrooge is reading me as saying that the hypothetical author would pick back up his works within the rest of the DWU? No, this is expressly not my intent with the hypothetical. It's a dead end branch. Do we trim it? It seems a bit extreme in this particular example to me.

As for the idea that I've "rediscovered validity by proxy", this is in response to me attempting to point out the other obvious flaw with the definition - taking DWU concepts, divorcing them from their previous context (hint, this means that they do not refer back to things in the web, so by your definition they are not intended to be in the DWU at time of release), but are perfectly fine with later DWU works referencing them, or later works in the same series referencing the DWU. A "false start", rather than a dead end. Arguably these authors intend for this to be DWU the entire time, but it's solely because they're anticipating latter "narrative" connections rather than writing them at the present time.

Scrooge specifically says that things in these two categories don't connect to the web - you can fail to connect in multiple ways. That's why this issue emerges. Indeed, he cuts off the second one explicitly - saying it wasn't intended to be in the DWU. (I'm not asking if it later becomes in the DWU, just if it was intended to be so originally.)

And, indeed, this is where Scrooge's analysis - under his own view of validity - of the similarities between the two scenarios breaks down beyond all recognition. Because we do not have simply $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V2 & & V3 \\ & \uparrow & \nearrow \\ & V1 \\ \end{array} $$ and $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & & I1 \\ & \downarrow & \swarrow \\ & ? \\ \end{array} $$. For the latter situation, both $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & & I1 \\ & \downarrow & \swarrow \\ & ? \\ \end{array} $$ and $$ \begin{array}{lcl} & V1 & \rightarrow & I1 \\ & \downarrow & \swarrow \\ & ? \\ \end{array} $$ describe it equally well.

All things equal, we do not know whether I1 is invalid because it fails to reference valid stories or because it wishes to be intentionally disjoint from further valid stories under Scrooge's formula. The question mark in the second graph could just as easily be a story that wishes to borrow from the mainline DWU but not reflect back on it, per his own criteria.

Which brings us to the question that needs to be addressed yet again. Does validity trump invalidity? Not how Scrooge is suggesting it here in any other area of our policies. It's fantastic rhetoric, don't get me wrong. R4 certainly asks us to make sure that we don't make things invalid without just cause. And I think we're all in favor of more things being valid than invalid. But if we truly believe that once something is invalid the smallest hints of validity should turn us the other way, well, we need to massively change how we conduct validity debates for already invalid works. We just don't proceed like that. We need to be consistent.

Is Validity The Web? Does it matter?
So I'm very concerned with the idea that
 * [Scrooge's] position is that "part of the Web (not a dead end or false start)" is the most parsimonious and accurate formalisation of what a coherent definition of the "intended to be in the DWU" part of Rule 4 is talking about.

This is obviously false. And I don't just mean this rhetorically. It's like, really really obviously false. Perhaps it's more parsimonious than what we have written elsewhere - I don't think so, but w/e - but it's just factually not what we currently talk about. It's wildly different. And this isn't even a new-T:BOUND issue. This is actual written policy. Rule-4-DWU is defined by T:VS. That's how the term is used for wiki policies. Is this helpful? Less than obvious. But let's be very clear that this has no relation to R4-DWU as it currently stands. And, indeed, contra
 * But that is because we don't currently have a formal definition of what we mean by "intent to be DWU"

This is formalized! We've defined what DWU means! (I mean, I guess we haven't defined what intent means, but, like, good luck with that. Have fun.)

So, again, The Web does not even begin to correspond to R4-DWU. It is, at best, an idealized replacement. Why does this matter? Because it was touted as a solution to a few different problems. Firstly, the RXbps. If the 3 step process is not real, if it's merely idealized, they still exist as problems, and have to be reckoned with. Secondly, and more importantly, invalidity by proxy! If one agrees that The Web isn't how we're currently treating validity, then they seem to agree that as R4bp currently exists there's a whopping great logical hole in its derivation. Or, at the very least, there's an argument for one they simply haven't addressed except to say "well in my ideal system of validity it isn't present". Well, to Scrooge, I have to say, in my ideal system of running the wiki a lot of things would be different. But I can't use that as an excuse to dodge out of issues in my arguments concerning here and now problems in any other thread. If The Web isn't currently validity and is merely an idealized system, these are still very real problems that must be tackled head on.

Covered work
I don't think there's that much disagreement here, I do think we need to clean up our system of coverage, but I'm deeply skeptical that we can easily extricate the four rules from each other. And, well, you brought up the idea of separating them as part of this "three step process" (which, again, does not exist in its current form), so certainly it's relevant that you can't separate R1 from T:VS.


 * Unrelatedly, I do not understand how you read my post as "only making sense if R1 breakers can be covered" when the quoted sentence is specifically saying that "stuff which breaks Rule 1 goes un-covered all the time"?…

If it was phrased as "isn't supposed to be covered", or "doesn't merit coverage", etc etc, that would work. But as written it rather clearly says that some R1 breakers can be covered.

As for the idea that I think this wiki's rules are largely good enough, I'm borderline tempted to call this libel. My concern here is more that much like in the past there was a very hard line taken by a certain group of users and the wiki was very, very difficult to use for anyone that didn't share their viewpoint it seems that we're trending the precise same direction for other viewpoints. We should be reasonably pluralist in how we edit things and allow others to edit. (And let me very much challenge the idea that you're a reformist, as a friendly aside. If the idea of using The Web as well as the T:CS/T:VS goes through, there will be nothing left of the original T:VS - no voting off the island, no R2/R3, no narrative, no authors able to wall off works from the DWU. Perhaps vive la revolution, but let's be very clear. These two changes in concert would kill whatever is left of the original T:VS in its entirety.)

Continuity
Whether or not people follow the rules is different from what the rules are.

Oh, you want me to continue? Look. Obviously putting aside the issue of naming the page, which is its own can of worms, simply saying "oh, it was an incarnation of the Doctor" rather than "it was someone the Doctor saw" is technically against our non-T:BOUND rules. It's one everyone ignores from time to time, because we absolutely understand basic context, but, you know, it is. And that's why this choice isn't a choice. We have a policy in place. If it's unclear to us, even slightly, there's a standard to fall back on. We shouldn't be speculating. Now, do we need to still understand things like object permanence? Of course. But the argument just assumes that it's solely up to user discretion. And it's just not.


 * Picture a continuity reference of the form "…and in one timeline the Doctor travelled with Alison Cheney", or indeed of Alison appearing in person; surely you agree with stating confidently that this is a reference to the actual preexisting character of that name?

To be honest with you I haven't read Kripke. Joking aside, I quote myself here:
 * I do think it's occasionally possible for there to be relatively unambiguous and universally understood statements of the type of authorial intent we're looking for in a text. I just believe they're incredibly rare. And this is what the Android Boyfriend example shows to me - not the impossibility of communication between individuals, but that we fundamentally cannot be trusted as to what "clear" actually means when we're reading a text. One person sees a particular reading as obvious, another sees another reading as obvious. It might still be the case that in a different section of the book everyone, or near everyone, reads the text in the same way. But we should be very skeptical that our readings of texts are the sorts of things that we need for this policy to work without authorial statements. We're just so epistemically limited here.

We agree on the possibility. But to bring up an example this contrived I think you're showing just how difficult it truly is.

Minor notes
What do I think R4 means? As I said -
 * individual authors should have their own views of the DWU in which a subset of their view of the DWU is roughly analogous to a subset of The Web

But there are some crucial issues here. One, I don't think that authors' views on the DWU necessarily correspond to our view on the DWU, which is, again, constructed by T:VS. Immediate problems I see here are something like an author that thinks of a variety of works of fiction as living in one shared world, built up not just with explicit narrative connections, but with headcanons as well - their "mental web" contains far more than Doctor Who. This isn't inherently an issue, a lot of authors do this. A lot of fans do this. But if you write a book that you insert into your mental web, and its actual connections, usually narrative, but sometimes thematic or other types, are far stronger to other series than they are to what we understand as the DWU, even if fully licensed, we might just cut the cord. If it's just really weird but not caught up in something else's gravity, as it were? I'm not sure we'd cut the cord. We might. But probably not. (You suggest Against Nature here, but, imo, that's not that weird or non-DWU, once you get the premise. I suspect Golden Age is weirder.) Another question is whether an author could ever be so intentionally discontinuous with the rest of the DWU sans, say, one node that they get booted out. I don't think so. But it's not too difficult to understand why Cushing was declared invalid, or why we might say that if someone wrote a sequel to the TV movie based solely on it + The Leekley Bible it might be invalid. I wouldn't endorse that, let me stress, I'd strongly disagree. But it wouldn't shock me. Also, given our definition of DWU, even if an author doesn't say "well, I don't want it to be in the DWU", if they express disinterest in it being in the DWU as defined by T:VS through other comments, we can take that as evidence. Again, lack of continuity is not itself evidence, so you need to do more. But if they say something like "oh, it's not in the same universe as ..." and just keep going, eventually we've got to start considering it. There's a limit here.

So I think the issue is a little more nuanced than just narrative connections. (And, of course, I'd let people just opt out. As our rules say they can - sans R4bp.) They have a mental model, we have a set of policies, there's some translation.

Does not resolve the problem I discussed, they want a way to filter out the extraneous information. Again, I don't agree with them. At all. And I would never support removing T:NPOV. But this focus on The Web as opposed to thinking "does this information really benefit our readers on this page or does it mislead them" I think will end up pushing out editors who have slightly different styles in editing. I know Nate, and I'm not entirely sure if he wants me to mention this, given he hasn't commented in this thread yet, briefly mentioned to me his thoughts on a three-tiered model of validity. I'm not sure this works, but it gets at some of the concerns here. It's at least an option. But I'll be honest, I get suspicious around tiers of coverage / validity as it sounds like wookiepedia.
 * I am an optimist. I do not believe in the policy uncertainty-principle, I do not believe there is a necessary trade-off.

Neither do I! People have chosen my least preferred route of the three offered. R4bp as it stands is broken, and it seems people's solution, to my mind, is to break T:VS to be in greater accordance with it. (Yes, T:VS could stand to be changed. But the solutions here are... less than ideal.) If you all truly wish to do that... I mean...

But to my mind it's far better to kill R4bp and return to the drawing board for a better solution to the problem we know exists that I don't think it solves well, or to fix the fundamental flaws it has and keep it around.
 * You can still act as though murder is a priori wrong even if you haven't yet cracked a unifying theory of moral philosophy; in fact, by most accounts, you should.

A: I'm not a moral intuitionist, no I shouldn't. B: I absolutely have cracked a unifying theory of moral philosophy.
 * But I also believe, with even greater certainty, that R4BP gives the right results even if it should turn out to do so in a suboptimal way; and consequently, that it'd be harmful to repeal it and return to the prior status quo which might make more sense on its own (wrong-headed) internal terms, but strays further, in its output, from what the conjectured Perfect Validity Policy would yield.

And you've yet to give a concrete example of where this failure state might occur. We agree on most if not all the cases listed in this thread, no? Perhaps not Daft Dimension. But if this is the sole point of defense for why R4bp can't be repealed for fear of the consequences, I think very little of this argument. Perhaps others disagree.

P4ge bre4k
Read, will reply soon. (Though I think you have a sentence that cuts off at the end of the first paragraph of ‘Into the Spiderverse’?) But first, brief, off-the-cuff thoughts, some of which may prompt short replies from you that’ll hopefully make my letter reply more efficient…

Important disclaimer: think we’ve been talking at cross purposes re: what a “false start” is and the trouble with Harry; will have to sit down and rephrase there.

Regarding: “the Web isn’t currently validity and is merely an idealized system, these are still very real problems that must be tackled head on”… I am tackling them! By saying we should officialise Web Theory (or something very like it)! What’s your “ideal system of running the wiki” anyhow? That’s a genuine question.

Curious why/how you feel the three-step process falls short of reality. It’s more of an ethnographical observation than a policy (proposed or otherwise), and seems to be perfectly satisfactory as a description of What It Is We Do On The Wiki — boiling it down into one sentence, “giving full Wiki pages to a certain body of fiction, then giving in-universe valid coverage to the fictional contents of a certain subset of that body of fiction”.

Finally: I consider myself to be a reformist insofar as I am pushing the Wiki towards what I hold to be its ideal self in a gradual, thread-by-thread manner, respecting the established way for a user to argue for policy to be altered. There’s a difference between the Ship of Theseus, and burning the old boat completely then building a new one in its place. If I’d been a revolutionary I would have, I dunno, just up and deleted all the bad policies overnight. (And engaged in I don’t know what bad-faith shenanigans to get any admins who disagreed with me booted from adminship.) But that’s not who I am. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 11:36, 12 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Entirely possible with Harry! I'm trying to show by how your own lights and views your definition of The Web is a little too simplistic. But it needs that simplicity, imo, to adequately define R4 in your view.(If you switch the "and" to an "or" bad things happen.)


 * No, trying to institute an idealized system isn't tackling them. If there are problems here and now, you have to address them here and now. Once again, I can say that in my preferred system of running the wiki all of the arguments against [whatever position I hold in a thread] vanish. But that doesn't mean I don't have to defend that position against those arguments in that thread. If you cede that they're problems for R4bp as it currently stands, and so we have to reform T:VS in order to fix them, so be it! But you've not done so! You've called them red herrings, or uncompelling, and to justify this you've referred back to The Web. This is where the issue lies.


 * As to why the three step situation falls short of reality, I've addressed it before briefly. I don't think you can extricate the steps from each other as cleanly as you do. In making our stage 1 determinations, we often bare in mine our validity rules, and you can't just separate those cleanly from our "covered" rules, as we've talked about. When something is covered, even before we write up IU pages for it, it's usually covered as "valid" or "invalid", which means that the third stage can't solely be what validity is - our ability to write IU pages based on it comes from, in a sense, how we've labeled our OOU page. Maybe this still isn't enough to move you, if it's in stage 2 rather than 3, well, it's still not stage 1. But, again, I do emphasize the entanglement of coverage and validity. But more than that, I want to emphasize that stage 1 is sort of broadly written with the "or otherwise" clause, and I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that? There's a maximalist interpretation of this - which is how we justify pages like Cultural references to the Doctor Who universe, or a more reasonable one, which is still just an attempted construction of the DWU (and I think this is what you're suggesting), and those pages are just fun side projects. If it's the latter, I don't think you can disentangle stage 1 and stage 2 either, precisely due to this entanglement of validity and coverage. We usually kick R2 breakers off, but we do have a few R3 breakers around, iirc. I think they'd count? Now, I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just saying I don't think this is an accurate description of affairs as it currently stands. And because of this you actually need to address the issue head on. Najawin ☎  16:00, 12 August 2023 (UTC)