i have a question. How the was the Canon/Noncanon decision made?
It all depends on the story. Generally the proofers/beta readers determine if it is accepted as canonical or not.
Issues such as:
Is that how [this or that] works in the setting? Such as the Church, for instance.
Are certain 'well known' characters used directly or in passing there to have been a part of the story.
Does the story have drastic impacts on the setting.
It's complicated, and usually writers will adjust their stories to fit within what has already been accepted as canonical.
The distinction I used was "is it a story on the archive?" :P
As someone who's read the update notes on the mailing lists… it is complicated. "Background" is non-canon because it made Thomas a gendermorph. "Long Live the King" was an attempted correction to make THAT Thomas be the father of the current Thomas… but after "Malvoisin", it was easier to just make them non-canon.
When the archive was first created by Lovebear, she asked everyone for permission to include their stories. Some authors, from what I can tell, forgot to give permission (i.e. Eric Rossing and Cerulean; Jon Sleeper at first) Some authors did, but later retracted their stories, because they wanted to rewrite them and never did ("Geneses" and "Leonidus"). And some weren't added because, although other people were referring to them in-canon, they weren't technically finished ("Distant Voices", "From the Shadows").
As of now, stories are only canon if the author sends the story to the MK webmaster. I don't know if it's a hard rule to submit it to a mailing list first so that the community can beta-read it, but most people do anyway. I would guess that most authors from 2002 onward forgot to send it in.
I know what you're thinking, Misha. Could we add some of these "noncanon" stories into canon? There's no reason why not, just look at "Reflections" and "Coming Home". There are two hurdles, though:
1) Can the author be contacted to give permission? And will they give permission?
2) Do the stories fit with canon nowadays? I'm… still kinda embarrassed about preemptively adding the second half of "Penance and Retribution" into canon, when it involved a darkling invasion of Metamor that killed many, followed two weeks later by a surge of Hipoccian refugees settling in the valley, both of which went unmentioned for the rest of MK (at least Oren's follow-up stories mentioned the Hipoccians).
I actually was going to write a post to the mailing list, regarding a few noncanon stories I'd read that I feel have merit: the MK Histories by Oren the Otter; Misanthrope" and "Father Figure" by Firemane; "Sunday" by Bill Kieffer; and the 2012 revision of "A Taur's Tail" by Stephen Tigner.
And while we were at it, if someone could reassess the impressively longer stories to see how they fit in canon: "Dead of Winter", "Fire and Ice", "Meeting at Caralore", and "Menace of the Malachites" by Volk-Oboroten; "William and Emily" by ShazerFox; "Two for the Price of One", "The Spotting of a Knight", and "New Lessons to Learn and Old Ones to Teach" by Kamau.
(I did take a cursory glance at "Menace of the Malachites", and it seems it might conflict with "Llyn's Tribulations" regarding Lik. Just throwing that out there.)
How about this?
I'll split up "non-canon" into two parts. One for those stories that are explicitly non-canon (think Fox Dragonrite), and one for stories that are of uncertain status (like Stealthcat's 4 stories). And I'll add another color for earlier drafts of stories, I know there was some additional confusion regarding that.