Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-1713281-20190509171612

I've wanted to post this for a while, but I think we need to formalize what we do and do not cover here as far as "canon".

Like most things around here, I don't believe that we (older admin teams) ever had a 100% concrete rule about this, but the party line, as it were, is that nothing published by Marvel was canon, until otherwise confirmed by reference materials; think handbooks, indexes, encyclopedias, Marvel Atlas, etc. Outside of this, anything that was featured alongside those characters/teams/events/items confirmed to be canon by reference materials, are also considered canon. For example: Spider-Man has been confirmed canon in dozens of reference books over the years. Minor villain Black Alfred has never been in a handbook, but because he has interacted with Spider-Man, then we can show that he is also canon to Earth-616.

I know this seems like semantics and fanboy nitpicking, but where this line-drawing comes into play is three main areas:


 * Licensed characters
 * Creator-owned characters (i.e. Epic Comics and Icon Comics series)
 * pre-FF #1 Marvel issues, especially anthology series

Most of these are agreed to be non-canon, but I've been seeing more and more examples where these types of characters are being given articles either with TRNs (Undoniel and I had a discussion along those lines here that initially spurred this post), or with users going through anthology series like Journey into Mystery or Tales to Astonish and listing all of the character appearances with Earth-616 by default, which then leads to our red-link hunters creating pages with no attempt at sourcing them (We've had a long-running, successful forum thread dedicated to trying to source said characters to a proper reality).

I personally still interpret canon with this line of thinking, but consensus is the rule around here. Either way, I think we need to discuss and crystallize a formal rule on this for users so that we can be clear on what we want to cover, and what we don't. 