Forum:Original FP stories are apocrypha?

Forums: Index > Homeworld > Original FP stories are apocrypha?

I've seen in a few places (such as {{Apoc}} and Books) the statement that this wiki considers the Faction Paradox stories from the Doctor Who novels apocryphal, because Obverse Books does. First of all, is that really so? Does Obverse really say that only the stories with the Faction Paradox logo on them "count"?

And second, even if they do, do we have to follow suit? I know that administratively, it's the simplest thing: if it has a Doctor Who logo, it goes at Tardis wiki, and if it has a Faction Paradox logo, it goes here. But I'm not sure that it's the best policy if our goal is to have a comprehensive guide to Faction Paradox. So many ideas which show up in later FP stories originate in Doctor Who titles (especially those by Miles). Some important figures (such as Compassion) are nigh-incomprehensible without referring to those stories. Wouldn't it be possible to present that information here in some form? Perhaps we could "reverse-translate" references, so that any mention of the Doctor would be recorded here as the Evil Renegade.

I know that drawing the line on what to include would be difficult if we admit material from Alien Bodies, The Taking of Planet 5, Interference and so forth. But sometimes it will be helpful to readers to provide some context, context which most people who experienced the Faction stories first time round would have had. —Josiah Rowe 04:35, June 12, 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I was wrong about the Obverse Books saying DWU stuff was apocryphal. I thought that I had read that, but when I went back to the OB website to look for Iris Widthyme material, I couldn't find it. So I actually changed the language of {{apoc}} yesterday or the day before. It now just gives a link to our canon policy and says "this wiki" finds it apocryphal.

Even so, I do believe that DWU books must be considered absolutely apocryphal for this wiki to have a clear and interesting focus. One of the criticisms of this wiki when it was first started can be consistently found at the FP forums. What I get by reading that thread is that this wiki stumbled out of the gate by including so much DWU material. A typical comment from an FP fan: "I think the wiki would be much more useful if it restricted itself to material published under the Faction Paradox banner." (Incidentally, the original administration on this site used our forum namespace to link to that forum, so for all intents and purposes, this thread is a part of our legitimate history.)

And this wiki was (re)-founded on the notion that there is a hard line between the two universes, and that the FPU begins with The Book of the War. You participated in and agreed with the notion of throwing FP stuff off the DW wiki; I'm not quite sure why you're saying we should be more porous on this side of the curtain. Drawing the line on what to include if we admitted DWU books wouldn't be "difficult" — it would be flatly impossible.

Happily, that's what behind the scenes sections are for. Nothing prevents you from including DWU info in the BTS – but there'll need to be proof of some kind (i.e. a direct statement by the author, as you found for the Maria/Kelsey stuff) that x FPU character = y DWU character. From what I've seen, there's an awful lot of speculation out there about these supposed connections, and we don't want that nonsense.

I would also challenge the notion that Compassion makes no sense without the DWU framing elements. She can't be a complete cypher. There must be a way to write the article using only FPU elements. These FP books and CDs are consistently marketed as "stand alone". Indeed, the Random Static website uses that exact phrase to describe both MNP and RS output. Something can't be both standalone and entirely dependent upon another franchise. (I don't know how you'd include information on Compassion from the DWU, anwyay. Isn't she a TARDIS? There aren't TARDISes in the FPU. So how is the DWU version of Compassion helpful in any way?)

My advice for writing the articles is to throw away the DWU. Consider the information presented as if you have no knowledge whatsoever of DW.

Think about American Torchwood fans. Can you get into Torchwood without any knowledge or appreciation of Doctor Who? Yes. You don't need to know that Jack is a Time Agent who first travelled with the Ninth Doctor and Rose to write a biography of him. There are American Torchwood fans who have never seen Doctor Who, and others who have simply rejected DW. But they still understand the character, albeit possessed of a bit more mystery than DW fans might imagine. (In fact, I'm envious of pure Torchwood fans, because I bet they enjoyed part 10 of Miracle Day a helluva lot more than I did.)

In the same way, it must be possible to read these books and hear these audios without reference to the DWU. Fine, throw in a few behind the scenes notes where relevant, but otherwise write the articles from the FP texts only.

czechout ☎ ✍  <span style="">16:08: Tue 12 Jun 2012 

The reason that I think we should at least consider being "more porous on this side of the curtain" (nice image, by the way) is that it's disingenuous to pretend that the FPU isn't, at least in its origin, the Doctor Who universe with the serial numbers rubbed off.

You're right in saying that it should be possible to describe elements of FP without referring to Doctor Who. But the problem is that doing so gives a less than complete picture of the Faction Paradox universe. Practically all reviews of The Book of the War acknowledge that it describes the conflict depicted in the Eighth Doctor Adventures. The EDAs continued on their merry way without Faction Paradox, but Faction Paradox continued to grow out of seeds planted in Doctor Who novels.

Creating a reference on Faction Paradox without incorporating its roots in Doctor Who is a bit like creating a reference work on Lutheran theology without incorporating any references to Christianity prior to Luther. It could be done, but what you'd be left with would be crippled and incomplete. In this analogy, Doctor Who is the Catholic Church: it can exclude non-Catholic material with impunity (though in reality, it's in constant dialogue, sometimes borrowing liberally — e.g. Rassilon planning for the Time Lords to become "creatures of pure consciousness", just as the Celestis did, is practically Vatican II). But Protestants share the history of the Catholics up to the Reformation and schism.

To take things in-universe for a bit, when we talk about the Sontarans in the Doctor Who universe, it makes sense to exclude information from The Shadow Play. From a Doctor Who perspective, the Sontaran invasion of the Eleven-Day Empire is a timeline that didn't happen, in a world based on Doctor Who but not Doctor Who. But when we talk about Sontarans in the Faction Paradox universe, it doesn't make sense to exclude The Invasion of Time. (It's been a long time since I listened to The Eleven-Day Empire and The Shadow Play, but I have a vague recollection that Lord Ruthven and Lolita mention that the Sontarans once invaded the Homeworld. We should be able to explain that to our readers.) The background of the Faction Paradox universe is the Doctor Who universe with different names and a different emphasis. You can understand Faction Paradox without that background, but such an understanding is incomplete. And shouldn't we aspire to be a complete resource?

As an alternative to the hard-and-fast "no Doctor Who material" rule, I suggest that we allow Doctor Who material if and only if it pertains directly to a Faction Paradox topic. So we could refer to Pyramids of Mars when talking about Sutekh and the Osirans (since it's clearly the source material), but we couldn't refer to All-Consuming Fire when talking about Erasing Sherlock (since they're drawing from a common source). I recognize that the determination of what "pertains directly" will be subjective and open to dispute — but what about Faction Paradox isn't?

The Faction delight in contradiction. Their own Protocols exist to be broken. We can't describe the Faction while playing by the Homeworld's rules. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 07:07, June 15, 2012 (UTC)

I guess what I don't understand is why a "behind the scenes" note is insufficient to explain the connection to The Invasion of Time or Pyramids of Mars. I'm not saying we be so restrictive as to not allow a few lines, in a behind the scenes section, about the DWU origins of a character/species/concept. But why do we need to, in my view, pollute the in-universe section of the article with information from another universe?

I think it both clear and complete to write the, say, Sutekh article with info only from the MB sources, and then put a behind the scenes note leading to tardis:Sutekh. How can our infoboxes be accurate in saying that Sutekh's first appearance is, say, Coming to Dust, when the main body of the article is giving info from DWU sources? That'll be confusing to readers and editors alike.

If we give in to the notion that "the FPU is the DWU just with different names" we do a disservice to the source material and we make it harder for our readers. There's no reason why a reader couldn't experience FP in isolation to the DWU. If we write from that perspective, we're creating something different to the usual resources found on the net. Most online information starts from the assumption that the FPU is the DWU by another name, and they suggest that time ships really are TARDISes, that the Homeworld really is Gallifrey and so on. But especially at this point in the development of the franchise, that's clearly not the case. The FPU is a distinct entity with its own rules, characters and backstory.

I don't see how we sacrifice "completeness" just by putting the FPU info front and center in our articles, and by allowing the DWU "connections" to appear in behind the scenes sections. I could see going as far as allowing the creation of a standard "Connections to the DWU" section, but I'm not understanding why we'd need to integrate DWU info into the main body of articles.

There are plenty of Wikia wikis that operate in a similar fashion. For instance w:c:youngjustice narrowly focuses on the versions of Robin, Aqualad and Kid Flash that are in Young Justice, shunting readers off to w:c:dc and w:c:dcanimated if they want to understand other versions of the characters. Would it be helpful to understand the origin of these characters? Sure, but they've not been given yet in YJ, so the articles exist without an origin.

Likewise, for that period of time where it was an active show, the 2007 version of the Bionic Woman had its own wikia. w:c:bionicwoman was, at that time, kept quite separate from w:c:bionic. Articles were written primarily from the perspective of the 2007 show, with definitions for "bionics", "Jaime Sommers", "bionic ear" and other things strictly coming from the 2007 show.

And there are plenty of other precedents, especially in the area of videogames that derive from a parent franchise, or wikia wikis that are just about one entry in a video game franchise. It's easy and quite an accepted practice on Wikia to have a narrow focus.

From a Wikipedia perspective, I really do understand what you're saying. It's very tempting to try to give equal weight to all appearances and create some sort of "through line". That's the approach most people have taken when they've written about FP. But on Wikia, we have the opportunity to instead have one resource for the DWU, another for the FPU, and then to easily integrate the two.

Wikia's customisation of MediaWiki gives us powerful interwiki linking tools. I've made it even easier to provide an incredibly clear link to the DWU wiki with the {{t}} template. I don't really get why it would be an "incomplete" presentation of information to avail ourselves of those tools and keep the main body of articles firmly focussed on the FPU franchise.

czechout ☎ ✍  <span style="">14:28: Mon 18 Jun 2012 

Well, I still think that characters like Compassion really do have a "through-line" across their Doctor Who and Faction Paradox-branded appearances, and that forcing readers to click back and forth between the two wikis to find that through-line does them a disservice. To take another example, consider Chris Cwej, who started in the Doctor Who New Adventures, then got transformed in the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures, was turned into an army of Cwejen in The Book of the War, one of which appeared under an alias in Warlords of Utopia, and then two more appeared — explicitly working for the Time Lords — in the Bernice Summerfield audio play The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel. Now, we can explain all that in a behind-the-scenes note, but I think it would be easier for the reader if we presented it as a single (slightly tragic) narrative.

That said, if I'm the only one who thinks this, I'm willing to go along with the hard separation. It would be great if other contributors could chime in, so I can tell if I'm way out in left field here.

Perhaps, if we do keep the line impervious in both directions, we could choose a different word than "apocryphal". "Antilegomena" would be more accurate, but nobody would know what that means. Would it be too awkward to fall back on the old "outside the scope of this wiki" wording? —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 03:03, June 20, 2012 (UTC)

I'm open to using another word but "apocryphal",

But, as I suppose I've already indicated, I'm baffled at your larger attempt to redefine, or perhaps just refine, the goals of the wiki.

One of the reasons this wiki failed after two aborted attempts was that its focus wasn't clear. This is, again, backed up by 2007 cmmunity discussion (amongst FP, not DW, fans) which recommended using only FP material. Certainly, in the long, long discussion at tardis, the thing that was always on the table was a clean divorce. I left public notices here and at the Community Central request which suggested, at least to my mind, a clear division between the two wikis. Those notices persisted over what was admitted by Staff to be an unusually long adoption process. Before the proces had been completed, notice was given again on the front page, through {{Main Page/Goals}}, that the wiki would only be using FP sources. The help files, policy pages and templates have therefore been written with the hard divorce in mind.

I just don't see how it's an administratively sound decision to say, "Don't use DWU sources — except when really, really necessary." I would immediately question the degree to which it is ever necessary to use EDA sources. That is to suggest that the books cannot be read independently. And I refuse to believe that the reader can't pick up a FP work and have some workable concept of Compassion. The character can't be that much of a cypher. Sure, those who know her from the EDA appearances will get more out of her, but it just can't be flatly dependent upon them.

More to the point, I think it is actually helpful to a reader's understanding that we have the hard line. If you have to physically click one button to go to another wiki, you can keep it better sorted in your mind, "Okay, this is Compassion from the DWU, while this is Compasssion as used by the FPU." Again, it's like the w:c:dcau:Batman having a link to w:c:dc:Batman. They are distinct versions of the character. And if you start to suggest that the FPU Compassion is actually the same character as the DWU Compassion then the entire argument for separate wikis begins to unravel. I just don't see how you can construct an argument that the two Compassions are the same without saying that a TARDIS really is a timeship and the Great Houses are the Time Lords. And if you start doing that, we're back to where we were before we started this division problem. Either timeships are different from tARDISes, or they're not. Either House Paradox is different from faction Paradox, or it's not. If you start picking and choosing which concepts are the same, the integrity of the wiki breaks down.

And tha's not just me being infelxibly binary. Remember that you yourself have said you were "happy to respect" the decision to part the Red Sea.

To my way of thinking — and maybe it doesn't come across this way, I dunno — this changeover has come at a glacial pace, with me being fully communicative along the way. Of all the structural changes to tardis, this one has undoubtedly taken the longest time. I strongly feel like the time for talkin' has actually passed. The goal of the Faction Paradox Wiki really is to create a reasource using only FPU sources. I think if we find a way to write Compassion and tardis:Compassion using only the sources allowed by P:CAN and tardis:T:CAN, respectively, readers will have a much greater understanding of what's going on.

czechout ☎ ✍  <span style="">17:33: Thu 21 Jun 2012 

Honestly, I'm sure that you're right that my expression of these qualms is coming too late in the process. And really, I'm willing to work within the boundaries you suggest (as seen at Imperator and tardis:Morbius). I may be a Southerner at heart, but I don't believe in fighting lost causes.

The problem is that in terms of its own continuity, the background of the Faction Paradox universe really is the Doctor Who universe with the serial numbers filed off. There was no reboot of the continuity; Lawrence Miles never said that Alien Bodies and Interference didn't happen in the FPU. In fact, The Book of the War pretty clearly indicates that they did. So the Compassion in the FPU became a timeship in exactly the same way that the Compassion of the DWU became a TARDIS. Of course, you can view the character without this backstory. But it's referred to so often, especially in the early books, that doing so seems disingenuous, at least to me.

At this point, I don't really want to push the argument much further. As long as we're able to link freely between the two wikis and note obvious connections in behind-the-scenes notes, I suppose that our hypothetical reader will be able to gather the whole story. But what I don't want to see is a raft of edits like this, removing helpful information merely for the sake of drawing a clear line. I'm hoping that we can retain at least this much connective tissue. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 22:35, June 21, 2012 (UTC)