Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-5425132-20141223121751/@comment-1600847-20170620112654

TES Lore/Canon is kinda weird. Back before Morrowind, Bethesda Game Studios allowed their fans to write their lore (IIRC, the name of the Aedra "Akatosh" came from one of the old TES forum users, "Also Known As Tosh", or "Aka Tosh"). The majority of the books in Daggerfall were written by their fans. But come Morrowind they stopped this practice and stuck to their own writers.

Kirkbride's status in TES lore is kinda weird too. While he hasn't worked for BGS since 2003, they still hire him for small periods (he wrote the plot for the Knights of the Nine expansion), and they'll occasionally take his writings and put them in a game (see: Heimskr's dialogue in Skyrim). However, I don't think that makes ALL his writings canon.

I tend to view MK's works in a limbo: they're neither canon or non-canon until they either appear in a game, or are contradicted by a game.