Board Thread:Series general discussion/@comment-2112031-20170322125406/@comment-18014300-20170323205339

I wanted to clarify a few things.

First, if Discovery is non-canon, this doesn't mean we will have to or will be removing all content of the game. Instead, we would simply be labeling them with a non-canon tag {{non-canon}}; wikis generally document all matters of a franchise, even the non-canon ones.

Second, I know a user just tagged one of the Discovery articles as non-canon. I reverted for the following reasons:

1. I think it's a good idea to make sure that we have really finalized our discussion before we act. Even when Disney controversially but decisively declared a reboot of Star Wars lore that designated 95%+ of its old content non-canon, Wookieepedia held a long discussion on this matter first.
2. Part of this means at least postponing any action until we have managed to talk to Aymar on our thoughts on this. Although it may seem uncouth, I think this is problematic enough that we should at least attempt this course first. It is problematic because it destabilizes the overall lore of Assassin's Creed, especially at a time when the franchise is already being lambasted for being indecisive about its direction and of uncertain integrity. I personally think this has ramifications on Assassin's Creed's integrity as a whole and can be damaging to the franchise. Since Discovery and the film are reconcilable, even if not the most smoothly, and it has been referenced in other media in contrast to the film, I do not think that it is necessary to threaten the integrity of Assassin's Creed canonicity. I am going to reference Star Wars again because it had an immense history of contradictions in lore, many that were worse than the one between Discovery and the film, and for decades Lucasfilms worked tirelessly to weave them all back together, proving that this is doable. I don't want to suggest that we have any right or bearing to contest the word of Ubisoft on canon; I really want to emphasize that that is not what I'm suggesting, but I really believe that this move is so problematic, we should express our point-of-view on the matter especially since we're so involved with the maintenance and tracking of the lore.
3. The final reason for my revert though, is that I didn't want to be too hasty in light of the first two points. More importantly, if we are too hasty, and we haven't clarified our unified stance on this, even if the unified stance should be obvious, there would be a lot of inconsistency in its implementation; it would create a mess. This is partially because many of the articles have Discovery content woven into the articles. This includes, but not limited to, articles on Ezio Auditore da Firenze—a featured article—Granada War, Christopher Columbus and Muhammad XII of Granada. Obviously, to reflect Discovery's non-canon stance, we would need to radically rewrite some of these articles. We would also need to create a template to describe that a section (but not the entire article) is non-canon. Unless these steps are taken, we would be implementing the non-canon status of Discovery partially, in some articles, but not yet in others. Given the recent low activity of this wiki, I think what would likely happen is that a few Discovery articles will be marked as non-canon but not others that would need major rewriting. The ones that need major rewriting may in turn be hastily done and be of poor quality. Then, without a template devoted to describing a particular section as non-canon, but not the entire article, as Wookieepedia does, there would remain confusion over which parts of an article such as "Christopher Columbus" are canon or not. We could move the non-canon section to the Trivia, but then the size of the Trivia section would eclipse that of the biography section. I think that before we implement this, we should have the proper preparation or it might turn out to be sloppy and half-assed. :/

EDIT: For further clarification on this last point, I mean that we should also discuss how we are going to implement Discovery's non-canon status before we go right ahead. For example, are we going to (a) move content relating to Discovery in canonical articles to the Trivia section (b) create a non-canon template for specific sections not entire articles (c) create separate articles for the canon/film versions of characters like Christopher Columbus and Muhammad XII? As some ideas.