Board Thread:Manual of Style/@comment-1259419-20160517104930

I think we should rethink the whole concept of canons and how it influences how we write the articles on this wiki.

"Canon" meaning
Most fans think this is what "canon": set of related media that producers have said is canon. Every part of a canon can be taken as gospel.

This if ofcourse not true. Film producers never came up with the word or concept of a "film canon". Furthermore, there can be minor contradictions between media within a canon.

For example: in the first JP novel Lewis Dodgson was born in 1946 and according to the second novel he was born in 1950. But fans have never demanded that this means the two novels are set in different canons.

Because of all this, we have used this definition of a canon:

set of related media that objective fans, after carefull examination, agree to describe part of the same story. Minor contradictions can exist, and are considered goofs. Preferably, each media was intended to be set in the same universe. Each media was created by or some supervision of the original creator(s) of the canon's main media. Or somehting like this.

Flaws of the current canon system
This paradigm is also problematic.

How do you know if there is are too much contradictions between a film and, say, a website to consider the website uncanonial? There is no non-arbitrary border between "minor contradictions" and "large contradictions".

Furthermore, who are these "objective fans"? For example, all the admins of this wiki in 2011 agreed that Jurassic Park: The Game was part of the film canon. As the years past, most of these admins became inactive. Maybe all the admins of 2015 no longer endorse this. And it could be that in 2020 most wiki admins again fully agree the the game is actually film canon.

It is not hard to understand that we can't rewrite the articles every 2 years because some media is suddenly considered film-canon or not.

The current canon-system is flawed because:
 * It treats the fictional JP universe as our universe
 * In our universe there is one real history that can be reconstructed from scattered evidence.
 * The JP universe is artificial and each movie is made by very different people with very different ideas in different decades.
 * Contradictions, plotholes, goofs etc. are bound to arise.
 * It maximizes the number of things fans have to agree upon
 * Fans who care enough about the franchise to join a wiki often have very strong personal opinion that they will religiously defend.
 * Therefore, a large group of fans can actually agree on almost nothing.
 * It maximizes the amount of discussions and time that is needed before articles can be edited.
 * For many new editors and non-JP-nerds it will be very unclear which blooklet, trailer or website is actually canonial and which isn't.
 * Minimizes the amount of things that can be included in the articles.
 * Most extra material will not qualify for canonicity, and therefore its information will end up in a very small canon that no-one cares about.

New system that I want to propose
I think we should adopt a system that:
 * Minimizes the amount of things fans have to agree upon.
 * Minimizes the amount of discussions that are needed before an article can be written.
 * Makes the list of what can be added to "movie" or "novel" section more intuitive.
 * Maximizes the amount of things that can be written in the articles.
 * Particularly in the only section anyone cares about: "Movies"

Please, give me time to write this some other time. 