Forum:Updating policies, guidelines and the wiki/Canon

This page details the wiki's stance on the issue of canon in the Halo franchise.

What is canon?
Canon is defined as characters, locations, and details that are considered to be genuine (or "official"), and those events, characters, settings, etc. that are considered to have inarguable existence within the fictional universe. Halopedia operates strictly as a collection of Halo canon information. "Official" Halo canon can only be created by developers of the Halo universe. Therefore, any material added to Halopedia must be official, sanctioned canon that can be cited from a work created or sanctioned by Halo's creators, Bungie Studios and 343 Industries. Better put, Halopedia is not a site for fanfiction.

"When a painter starts, they have an idea. They sketch, they doodle, they make strokes on canvas and paper with pencil, pen, brush, charcoal, whatever... Until the painting is finished, any previous stroke of the brush can be covered by a later one, altering the position of a tree, the color of the sky, a reflection in the water, the placement of a person, the existence of anything.... until the artist says "fin", it is not up to others to determine what is "so" and what is an "alteration"."

- Recon Number 54

The general rule of the canon policy is fairly simple, as explored in the canonical case of i love bees, that "the content should be considered canonical unless contradicted by more authoritative sources".

Interpreting canon
There are various ways of interpreting canon but in most cases, they will typically refer to two modes of interpretation: Watsonian and Doylist. The most common approach in most fanbase would be from a Watsonian perspective, that is to interpret the information from the standpoint of the text. This is sometimes called an in-universe perspective. The Doylist approach refers to the real world perspective. As Fanlore puts it, "[t]hings that happen in canon happen because of decisions made by the author or TPTB; inconsistencies are probably authorial error. These explanations will sometimes be written right into the canon."