This is partly to Mutarada and partly to the huge number of other people in the thread who don't understand why there are canon nazis in the world.
Look, I enjoy TAS. Personally, in my own Star Trek universe, TAS is TOS Season 4. In fact, in my own mental Trek universe (what's being referred to as a "personal continuity" in this thread), quite a few things happened that aren't part of canon. For instance, Greg Cox's Eugenics Wars saga, or the last five books of the A Time To... series. Heck, my personal continuity even includes "Our Billion Year Mission" [SNW... VII, I think] and the latest New Voyages episode. Personally, I prefer "Strangers From The Sky" to First Contact. That's fine. It's good. It is every fan's right to define for himself what he does and does not accept about a fictional universe.
So, everyone ought to leave it at that, right? Everyone gets to define his own Trek universe, so shove off and stop being such a jerk about it. Why do we need a set canon, anyway? It's a sentiment echoed over and over again in this thread.
Thing is, for viewers, who merely view and consume various Trek media, it's all well and good to have your own continuity. More power to you. But for those of us who actually produce some of this stuff--I mean fanfic writers and fan film producers, mainly--a clear, sharply defined, and limited-scope canon is vital to maintaining a consistent universe. That means there must be a central authority who defines canon (else all is chaos). That authority is generally recognized to be Paramount, which, for better or for worse, is the seat of Star Trek canon as surely as the College of Cardinals is the seat of the Roman canon. For the sake of keeping Star Trek even remotely comprehensible, we, the producers (from the lowliest fanfic'er right up to Abrams & Co.) must accept their guidelines. Violations of the canon can be made, and can be made quite often, in fact, but the actual body of work recognized as canon must remain sacrosanct. That list of recognized works in the canon can be altered only after careful consideration and recognition by Paramount, or the last forty years of Star Trek will collapse into a jumbled insanity overnight.
Imagine, for a moment, if we abolished the canon entirely. All Trek writing of any sort is canon if you want it to be. Suddenly, we have some stories endorsing the "Strangers from the Sky" First Contact narrative, and some endorsing the one from Star Trek VIII. The FASA roleplayers suddenly have an equal claim to legitimacy as every television series. Enterprise and Voyager will be canonized and decanonized and recanonized and redecanonized on the whim of writer-producer-fans. Now, granted... this already is a pretty fair representation of the online Star Trek world, a reality of various contradictory canons permenantly at odds with one another. However, we all know which canon is "real". Can you imagine what life would be like if all this insanity leaked onto the television series? If, all of a sudden, half a dozen historical narratives of the universe were being endorsed at any given time? If some characters were alive, then dead, then had never been born, then were suddenly on the main cast?
It would be total madness. Trek would become gibberish, the canon reduced to mob rule, a hundred thousand fanboys jockeying for their own vision to become the most recognized and thereby rule for a day.
So, yes. We all have our personal continuities. And canon itself can be bent, reshaped, broken, thrown out the window for a short time, even. I'm a big supporter of the new movie, for instance. But threads like this, that purport to declare a something part of the officially recognized Trek universe not by seeking official recognition but by the fiat of the people... it may be democratic, but it's also a dangerous attitude for the fandom to adopt.
My $0.04. Forgive me if I overstated anything.
