Welcome to the home of the Nitpicker’s Guild. Phil Farrand, author of the original Nitpicker’s Guides for Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the X-Files has given us permission to continue his legacy. We have space on Facebook but the posts tend to be forgotten in the long run. It is our hope to provide a more permanent access to the nits here at this blog.
The Rules of Nitpicking:
RULES OF CONDUCT
All nitpicking in the Nitpicker’s Guides; through the Nitpickers Guild and through this group is governed by two simple rules (or directives, if you prefer).
The First Rule of Nitpicking (Our Prime Directive, if you will) is:
All nits picked shall derive from sources the creators considers canonical.
The creators of any work deserve to have some control over that work. If you are going to pick nits then it seems only fair that you play by the creators’ rules. In the case of Star Trek, the creators have divided the camp into two separate entities. On one side are all the episodes of the television programs (be it TOS, or NextGen, or DS9, or Voyager), and the movies and a specific set of reference books from Pocket Books (the Compendium, the Companion, the NextGen Tech Manual, the Chronology and Encyclopedia). These works are considered authoritative (i.e. they actually happened and are true in the Star Trek Universe). On the other side is everything else: all the novels, the animated series, all the unauthorized books, etc. This stuff is all just Star Trek “fiction.”
With this in mind, it is considered bad form at Nitpicker Central to use something that’s non-canonical to nitpick something canonical or to prove that a nit is not a nit. For instance, the guild has received a lot of mail over the fact that we question Saavik’s Vulcan-ness in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. She curses. She cries. She’s emotional. All things which are opposed to the Vulcan ideal. Many people have sited the novelization of STII attempting to prove that Saavik is half-Romulan. However, the movie never states this. Yes, we know there was dialog that stated this but it was cut from the script. It never made it to the screen. Therefore, according to the creators, that piece of information is not authoritative since it only occurs in the novelization. Even the Encyclopedia agrees that though Saavik appeared to be other than pure Vulcan in STII, she took on a pure Vulcan personae in subsequent movies. Correctly so, the Encyclopedia does not state emphatically that Saavik is half Vulcan/half Romulan because that information never appeared on the screen.
The Second Rule of Nitpicking (Our Secondary Directive, if you will) is:
All nitpickers shall perform their duties with light-heartedness and good cheer.
This whole nitpicking thing is about having some fun with our favorite movies and television shows. This is not about stomping and yelling and insulting and flaming and the like. The quickest way to insure that your submission will never see the light of day in any of the media of the Nitpicker Guild is to send a flame. Those type of messages disappear from the face of the Earth once they reach the admin. Profanity and obscenity are not allowed. They rarely add to the content of a message. Increase your vocabulary! Learn to express yourself without the crutch of expletives! Any post with profanity will be deleted.
Get started at the Nitpicker’s Guild start page
Vulcan Stev's Database 