Category:Canon

From Red Galaxy

See Canon (fiction).

In world building a canon is a set of rules, often a list of parameters, to which contributions should adhere in order to create a sense of consistency in the resulting corpus. Canon is particularly important in collaborative world building where it ideally represents a consensus of the participating world builders. While canon can be a list of negative and positive parameters the function of canon can be taken by a community or movement's manifesto.

Canon is sometimes declared as a manifesto or set of rules. However, canon cannot be fully specified and is always emergent from the (hopefully) ongoing work of a corpus. Since canon is inevitably emergent, canon can be left completely implicit. World founders who do not want to specify a canon should still list their world on the main page under "Alternative Canon".