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The Star Trek canon is usually defined as being comprised of the television series Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Enterprise, and the ten motion pictures, and excluding everything else. However, the official Star Trek website acknowledges that this definition is not set in stone, but that the notion of what constitutes canon is fluid, open to interpretation and debate. Indeed, there are many disputed areas of uncertain canonicity within the Star Trek franchise.

TV Series

As a rule, all live action Star Trek TV series that aired are considered canon, while the cartoon Star Trek: The Animated Series and the planned but cancelled live action Star Trek: Phase II are not canon. However, this policy does not make clear which version of the live action shows is the canon one. This is problematic, as there exists longer and shorter versions of several episodes. For example, in the 1960s during the original run of TOS, an hour-long show was actually 51 minutes excluding commercials. Today, an hour-long show is only 42 minutes long. The canonicity of the missing nine minutes of material in modern airings of TOS episodes has never been addressed. Likewise, when special two-hour-long episodes are aired as two one-hour-long episodes in syndication, several minutes of material have to be cut to make time for the duplication of the opening and closing credits. The canonicity of this cut material has also never been addressed.

To further complicate matters, it has been noted that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was something of a revisionist when it came to canon. People who worked with Roddenberry remember that he used to handle canon not on a series-by-series basis nor an episode-by-episode basis, but point by point. If he changed his mind on something, or if a fact in one episode contradicted what he considered to be a more important fact in another episode, he had no problem declaring that specific point non-canon.

See, people can easily catch us, and say "well, wait a minute, in 'Balance of Terror', they knew that the Romulans had a cloaking device, and then in 'The Enterprise Incident', they don't know anything about cloaking devices, but they're gonna steal this one because it's obviously just been developed, so how the hell do you explain that?" We can't. There are some things we just can't explain, especially when it comes from the third season. So, yes, third season is canon up to the point of contradiction, or where it's just so bad... you know, we kind of cringe when people ask us, "well, what happened in 'Plato's Stepchildren', and 'And the Children Shall Lead', and 'Spock's Brain', and so on — it's like, please, he wasn't even producing it at that point. But, generally, it's the original series, not really the animated, the first movie to a certain extent, the rest of the films in certain aspects but not in all... I know that it's very difficult to understand. It literally is point by point. I sometimes do not know how he's going to answer a question when I go into his office, I really do not always know, and — and I know it better probably than anybody, what it is that Gene likes and doesn't like.

Read more at Wikipedia.org