User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-121.45.54.78-20130925110520/@comment-6032121-20200602021933

I think the loose current policy with unlicensed cameos like "the Northern chap with big ears" is that we pipe-link it to the obviously correct page ("A norther chap was also present at the gathering…"), but don't put it in list of appearances, which ought to be rather more official than that. This makes intuitive sense to me.

You put this on a level with the Mistress in that debate, but there's a pretty stark difference between a one-sentence cameo — which, I am told, wouldn't necessarily even require a license to mention the DWU thing by name — and a main character of a story, who's implied to be a preexisting DWU character, except the story isn't licensed to use that DWU character.

In the latter case, it's more a matter of whether we merge the pages altogether than a question about list of appearances specifically. But the way it seems to work is that when you've got Concept A owned by e.g. the Beeb, and Concept B owned by e.g. popular VNA writer Writerman D. Exampleson, mere logical inference isn't enough for us to accept A=B, but if a source licensed to use both A and B establishes A=B, we can carry over that identification even to B stories that wouldn't have the license to use A.

So for example, an appearance of the Yssgaroth counts as an appearance of the Great Vampires, because while those are legally different IPs, The Pit establishes that they're facets of the same thing in-universe. But no story licensed to use Romana and the Mistress has yet confirmed them to be the same individual, so that doesn't pass muster with us in the same way.