Then again, you should look more, because there is and the rules do in fact reflect on such, and I am not the only one, staff or non-staff, that stand on the same stance on this.
Quote the rule where it says that. I have reread them multiple times. They're dismissed if they're uncertain/uncaring, brief/vague, contradictory to the series, or if they add new things that weren't a part of the original series. There's nothing about requiring proof that it isn't run by interns. There's nothing about requiring proof that the author's responses are always consistent. There's nothing about requiring proof that the author's responses are official. Of course those would be reasons to dismiss it if they were found to be true, but they're not the null hypothesis.
When it comes to author statements, they aren't. And this is from the Editing Rules page as well by the way, so, no need to take my word for it.
That is a misinterpretation of it. Just before that it says author statements are only accepted when they clarify what's been shown or implied. That's meant to cover statements that give characters new abilities/feats that have absolutely zero basis in the original text. The WoG statements we're talking about are clarifications about the size of the cosmology, and the events in the story, so that rule does not dismiss them.
Also, you do realize if things were taken with your interpretation of that rule, literally no WoG would be accepted. There is no higher standard of evidence than "Clarifies what happened and doesn't contradict."
You already know why this by itself is meaningless. Not even about social media specifically, but things related to death of the author and word of god already not being absolute, with or without things like twitter or Facebook being used as outlets.
No shit they're not absolute, but they're still a valid source of evidence,
because they're the author.
Its not simply a matter of mistrust though (but even then, see above on this, the authors word in the first place is not absolute law regardless of social medias place as evidence).
No-one is saying the author's word is law. Just that they are a source of evidence.
It's a matter of the fact that the circumstances surrounding the given answer and how they're likely just being done to feed into fan desires from specific leading questions challenges the credibility of the answers.
Oh come on,
one of those pieces of WoG has Reki saying that a specific answer to one of those questions will be given in the next novel, but still provides a less specific answer (these two stellar objects are much closer than Earth and Mars).
If Reki's planning to just lie to his fans, he'd disappoint them pretty quick if he doesn't follow up on stuff like this.
Stan Lee isn't the only example though, I named him since he's one of the most notable compared to the typical celebrity. But cool, I'll just get a thread in to add that detail if needed. Though, I don't really need to since this very suggestion was even pointed out, and agreed to be possible, by others in the very staff thread where we had this discussion.
Obviously not all social media and authors on said social media will do this, but the point your missing is that it is possible this is done. Now obviously, this is a case by case basis that won't apply to all, but for a site where we have character statistics influenced by evidence on pretty much a constant every day basis, and where our site already tends to do this with evidence thats flimsy at best, a public social media outlet where answers can't even always be elaborate (because things like twitter in fact limit the amount of words put into a comment, which can effect how detailed an answer would be before its even written, assuming its a serious one in the first place) needs to be heavily scrutinized if its to be used to determine the fate of a characters statistics.
It's possible, but shouldn't be the null hypothesis. Stan Lee is an extreme outlier in this regard. The vast, vast, vast majority of authors wouldn't have interns answering questions about their works on their social media accounts.
Just because something is possible and has been done by a tiny number of authors, doesn't mean it's the default assumption that has to be disproven for all other authors. Especially when it's something this hard to disprove. Do you expect every single author to go around saying "By the way, I don't have any interns operating on this account"?
Was my explanation via Discord not enough? I hardly consider my standards in this particular regard "draconian". As I've said countless times if the argument can be made without reliance on Twitter of all things, why bother bringing Twitter in at all? This is massively derailing the thread, I feel, but still, that doesn't seem like an insane notion to me.
Your explanation via Discord was good, because it isn't the same thing Kukui's defending here.
The essence I got from your explanation was "Sometimes WoG has contradictions, and sometimes flippant statements are made. I'm usually against it unless it's an account established as a Q&A about lore. And if the arguments can be made without Twitter, that's for the best." I don't really know what you'd consider proof that it's a Q&A about lore (does it have to exclusively be about lore, or can it just be an account that's answered dozens upon dozens of lore questions?) but other than that it seems fair; if it's contradictory or the answers a flippant it should be ignored.
But here Kukui has stated that the null hypothesis for all social media WoG is that it may secretly be done by some random intern that has no clue about the lore, and that we have to disprove that before it's ever used. On top of that, we have to somehow establish that it's official, whatever that means, just coming from the author isn't sufficient. On top of that, we have to somehow establish that it's consistent, even without anyone demonstrating that it's ever been inconsistent. I'm not really sure how to prove this either. I consider such extreme standards to be draconian, they're going off rare cases which we have no reason to believe are actually occurring here, and they require evidence that's very difficult to obtain.
And I mean sure, ignore Twitter if you want, but it can be a useful thing to push people over in edge cases like this. Where the text itself gives pretty much no information on the cosmology, some users want to assume that it's universe-sized, and other users want to assume that it's only the stuff that's been physically accessed, the author's Twitter explaining that it's small seems like a nice and easy way of dealing with that.
