Being someone who thrives on the fringes of spinoffery and obscurity, I occasionally find myself wondering what the inclusion criteria for TARDIS Guide are.[1]
I suspect that the answer may be that since TARDIS Guide is as young of a website as it is – not to mention that at the time of writing, only the website administrator (that is to say, @shauny) has been able to add new material – there are no entirely formal inclusion criteria.[2] And that’s reasonable, I’d argue! Why complicate things prematurely? Still, there are a few details I’d like to probe, since they coincide with my own reading habits.
TARDIS Guide includes the Audio Visuals,[3] which are unlicensed, but deeply historically significant and somewhat popular (…even if the numbers on TARDIS Guide don’t currently reflect that).
Of course, TARDIS Guide doesn’t want to get stuck covering every bit of fanfiction, but what about other unlicensed-but-notable works? Like, say, Jim Mortimore’s legendary Campaign? Or Obverse Books’s upcoming Eighth Doctor charity anthology, Party Like It’s 1998, which features short stories by a dozen Eighth Doctor Adventures authors.
The TARDIS Wiki covers non-fiction works, such as The Black Archive, Chicks Dig Time Lords, and TARDIS Eruditorum. It seems that this is out of scope for TARDIS Guide – perhaps expressly, given the “stories” terminology.
I’d also like to ask, I suppose: What’s the proper procedure for asking to have something added to the site, if there is one at present? (Going through Paul Magrs’s works, as I’ve been doing lately, there’s a lot of Who connection – guy loves reusing characters.)
The TARDIS Wiki has a long and intricate set of rules on the matter, which TARDIS Guide self-evidently doesn’t match – which I think is only natural. Different ends. ↩︎
A lot of the missing stuff is missing because I have not yet gotten around to it. We have several spreadsheets waiting to be uploaded
Some of the other stuff is missing because we decided it shouldn’t go on the site.
We kind of match TARDIS Wiki for the most part although there are exceptions.
And actually what I am planning to do with some anthologies is add in non-Who stories just so people can rate the entire anthology and it doesn’t seem weird.
But what I am also planning to do is tag anything that we don’t think really belongs in the Whoniverse as “Beyond the Whoniverse” and then have an option to remove those from your stats, so you don’t feel forced to complete stuff that isn’t relevant.
I hope all this makes sense! And yes the site is young and still evolving. We should probably put together a formal list of requirements for what should be included, that would make decisions easier
And @deltaandthebannermen wants me to add Blake’s 7 which is a whole other can of worms…
We have been trying to add official stuff, but sometimes it is hard to know where to draw the line. Also, some notable and important “fan” work, like AV, Real-Time, and BBV, have been added. We have been working on it in this topic recently: Revamping Story Imports – Get Involved! where we often take votes on stuff as well. I don’t think there is a perfect criterion but the goal is to only have licensed stuff (whatever that means )
We do plan to add it but I want to try and draw a line under the fiction stuff first before I start that particular rabbit hole.
And soon I’ll hopefully be adding a feature where moderators of the site can add stuff themselves which will take a big burden off me and then it should accelerate adding stuff loads! But we will definitely need a strict criteria for it then… perhaps we should work it out here!
I just don’t understand where the line is drawn between a “notable” charity/unlicensed work (that would theoretically qualify for TG) and an “non-notable” one (that wouldn’t).
Yeah it’d be good to have a line drawn somehow. There’s a few things I don’t necessarily agree with being here per say but it doesn’t bother me that much
I probably am too lenient and am more to the side of just adding stuff that people want than excluding stuff.
The only reason why someone wouldn’t want too much stuff is their percentage completed stats. So I really think “Beyond the Whoniverse” will help there.
But, again, what is the difference between “pure fanfiction” and some of the non-licensed charity anthologies some folks want added?
On another note (I know we’ve talked about this before; remind me), how can you tell if something is licensed or not? I’m mainly referring to the obscure stories on this site that are fifty degrees removed from regular DW and have no ties to any of the characters.
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