I really don't want to meander and come off as anything other than sincere, so I won't beat around the bush.
On 10 April, I created a thread on the Holby Wiki Twitter account responding to claims suggesting that the wiki was either ignorant to or unwilling to acknowledge certain personality traits in characters or contextual clues that, in the real world, would be indicative of things such as being on the autism spectrum and being non-heterosexual. In the thread, I explained that not everyone here (including myself) has seen every Casualty or Holby City episode, and the wiki is open to exploring aspects of the Holby universe that are not explicitly stated.
I know that are definitely groups of people who were happy with this explanation and felt vindicated by having their assessments of certain characters be presented on what is supposed to be a factual wiki. Sadly, I regret to announce that I'm going to have to retract my statement, and the wiki will have to go back to having in-universe articles only stating facts that have been presented explicitly in canonical material.
I have to admit that my decision to allow more 'speculative' (for want of a better word that doesn't suggest that I'm dismissing observations that are, in my opinion, inarguable) information into in-universe articles was mostly spurred by seeing comments disparaging the wiki. For better or for worse, I'm extremely conscious of how this wiki is perceived by the wider Holby fanbase. I and some of the wiki's past admins have made a few gaffes over the years, such as allowing misinformation about actors to go uncorrected, irresponsibly teasing embargoed news on social media and the whole situation regarding plagiarised content from Holby.tv.
However, in this case, I am going to have to put my foot down and start removing content that is not explicitly stated or shown in episodes.
Let's ditch general statements for a moment and discuss an example. In the Casualty episode "Sanctuary", while Dylan is treating a patient on the autism spectrum who is struggling with sensory overload, he decides to help her by cutting down a cubicle curtain in order to construct a dim and dull-coloured tent for her. While Dylan cuts down the curtain, he and Zoe have the following conversation:
Zoe: "Have you gone mad?"
Dylan: "I prefer the term 'neurodiverse'."
Zoe: "I prefer the term 'off your bloody rocker'."
In case there was any doubt, I believe that Dylan is autistic. Furthermore, I personally cannot understand how anyone could doubt or not pick up on the fact that, from a real-world perspective, he is autistic; his mannerisms and general demeanour scream it. I've chosen this example as, by virtue of the use of the word 'neurodiverse', some could argue that this is canonical confirmation that Dylan is autistic.
However, as much as it pains me to say, this is still not explicit confirmation from the Holby canon that Dylan is autistic. In the context of the conversation, Dylan could easily have used words like 'maverick' or 'unorthodox' to describe himself, and taking Dylan's comment at face value, in my opinion, would make the comment almost nonsensical as it implies that no neurotypical person would ever have considered using a cubicle curtain to help ease a patient's sensory overload. I could also be cynical and highlight Casualty and Holby City's track records when it comes to portraying stuff like autism and sexual orientations (*cough* Jason Haynes *cough* Toby De Silva *cough*), and you could make arguments refuting my suggestions and post mountains of evidence pretty much proving that Dylan is autistic. Ultimately, the fact that we have to provide mountains of evidence and analysis to prove that Dylan is autistic when Casualty could have just said the word once shows that we should probably hedge our bets.
We also have to remember that the real world often differs from the Holby universe. As much as Casualty and Holby City's writers try to emulate real life in both shows (especially when it comes to medicine), there are still fictitious surgical procedures and trials, and I'm not even going to go into the utter mess that is the shows' interpretations of how the NHS is structured. Our articles about medical conditions and procedures are written from an in-universe perspective, hence why we have those big blue notices at the top of them warning readers not to use them as substitutes for genuine medical guidance. While I'm not going to start comparing the two shows to something like Doctor Who, we have to be careful about jumping to conclusions based on experiences and information from the real world. To borrow an insightful line from Kelsey Phillips - "You slept with a man. That means you're gay."
In the end, we need to maintain an in-universe perspective when writing about in-universe subjects; we should avoid throwing our own interpretations into the mix. If we do that, we'll just be sticking fragile pieces of canon together with our own reality-based mind glue, and that's pretty much the definition of fanon.
TL;DR - In a knee-jerk reaction to some legitimate comments about how the fandom views certain characters, I decided to allow people to add more subjective information to articles. I have since realised that this contradicts the wiki's position on perspective and that I was potentially opening Pandora's box, so Holby Wiki will go back to structuring articles around established and explicitly stated facts.
I will elaborate on this further when I start writing up policy and MoS pages regarding this, so please contact me if you have any questions or if anything needs clarifying.
What this experience has made me realise is that I have very much been hogging this wiki all to myself. Although the community here is not extremely active, I regret the fact that I have enacted changes like this without consulting you all first and sincerely apologise. Although I admit that I'm not the best at establishing formal standards and writing policies and guidelines, that is not an excuse for leaving you all in the dark and wondering why some of your edits have been reverted. Over the next few weeks, I will endeavour to expand the wiki's editing guidelines and user conduct policies, and, in future, I will propose potential changes to the wiki to you all before implementing them.
Cheers.
![The Casualty Chronicles, Episode 1 [S34 E27]](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ba30f44e-7f95-4d8c-8e59-4837f8d671ca)
