All The Tropes:Works Page Guidelines

Tropes have no meaning without works to provide them context. To that end, we have Works pages. These pages document information about individual works and the tropes they use. Any work can have a page if someone is willing to make it.

Work pages are created with the Works template. This template automatically lays out the proper structure for a work page and assigns it to both the Works category and its own category. There are also several other templates -- such as tropelist, franchisetropes, tropenamer, tropemaker and tropecodifier, among others -- which can be used to mark and set off specialized subsections that a work page may contain.

Below are a few guidelines for creating a new works page on All The Tropes. Unlike tropes, there is no vetting or refinement process involved -- if you want to create a page for a work, go right ahead -- Works Pages Are a Free Launch.

New Work Checklist

 * Make sure the work does not already have a page under a different name. Books can get renamed when reissued, television programs can change their titles over the years (check out The Hogan Family for a good example).  Market-Based Titles and Syndication Titles can be very different from the original.  It's not inconceivable that the title you know a work under may not be the original name it had.
 * Alternate titles should be set up as redirects to the main page for the work. See Creating New Redirects for more information.


 * Mention the title of the work somewhere in the first few sentences. Mark it up properly whenever it appears:  movies, books, television series and other "big" works have their titles in italics; short stories, poems, individual episodes of a TV program and other "small" works have their titles inside "double quotes".
 * Also, the first time you mention the title, put it in bold mark-up -- with italics, if the title gets them.


 * Identify the creator and the medium somewhere in the text, even if the medium is already in the page name.
 * Add a corresponding category for the medium at the bottom of the page.


 * Include the year the work appeared. If a TV show, give the years that it was on the air.  If it's still on the air as of the time you're writing, put it as "20XX-Present" and trust to the Wiki Magic to update it when the show goes off the air.
 * Also for TV shows: indicate the network, cable channel or service it first appeared on, and if it's been in syndication after cancellation.


 * If it is a Fanfic or other Fan Work, make sure to identify what other work(s) it is based on.


 * Provide a short but still evocative description of the plot without giving away the ending. This bears repeating:  Don't spoil a work in its description, unless the spoiler is already common knowledge.  And even then, try to avoid it unless it's part of the appeal of the work -- there's always going to be someone who has managed to escape being spoiled up to now, and we don't want to ruin it for them!


 * Optionally, include some commentary on why the work is interesting, or what kind of impact it had, or how it relates to the other work of its creator.


 * If the work only exists online, provide a link to the work. If necessary, link to a copy in the Wayback Machine.


 * Try to include an image representative of the work. Posters for films, paperback covers for books, and title cards for TV shows are all good choices, but anything that clearly identifies the work or gives a sense of its content will do.  Google Image Search will almost always have something you can use.  Wikimedia Commons also is useful, and frequently we can directly include their images in a page without having to upload them to All The Tropes first.
 * Fan works are usually harder -- often much harder -- to find images for. Don't sweat it if there's nothing at hand.
 * Avoid images that are Just a Face and a Caption; for some guidelines on what makes a good page image, see How to Pick A Good Image.
 * It's a good idea to resize images before uploading them; making an image anywhere between 350 to 450 pixels wide is usually ideal. (Image height is far less critical unless it is much wider than it is tall, in which case you might want to consider a different image or crop the one you have.)
 * Make sure images are marked with the category you'll be creating for the work (almost always the same name as work page).


 * Similarly, a good quote from the work can give a sense of its flavor and feel in just a few words. But only one quote, please, and always at the top of the page.

"Image Page quote First paragraph of page text."
 * For best appearance, the top of a page should be built in the following order:


 * Add a category for the work's medium, like,  or  .  There are sometimes also subcategories (like  ,  or  for  ) that might apply to the work; include these along with (not instead of) the larger media category.


 * If the work is a film, add a category for the appropriate decade: we have categories from through  defined.


 * If the work is an anime, add a category for the appropriate decade: we have categories from through  defined. (If it's an anime film, give it both categories.)


 * If the work's title starts with "A", "An", "The" or a punctuation mark (for instance, 'Allo 'Allo!), you will need to add a DEFAULTSORT tag to the page so that it appears in its proper place in the wiki's automatically generated index pages. For your convenience, this tag is automatically placed at the bottom of every new work page under the categories, with commented instructions.  It takes the following form:


 * The sort key will be the title of the work, with the article (A, An, The) moved to the end after a comma (like Honeymooners, The) or the punctuation mark removed (like Allo 'Allo!).


 * Don't forget to create an index/category page for the work when you're done. The category will be the page name as a Red Link at the bottom of the page once you save it.  (If it's a Blue Link, that means some cleanup needs to be done and a disambiguation page probably needs to be created.)
 * Click the Red Link and an edit page will open.
 * From the boilerplate dropdown, choose "Index page", click the "Load" button.
 * Save the page.

What Not To Do

 * Don't create a page for a work that no longer exists anywhere. You can't document a work that can't be consulted and studied, and other editors can't go and check it out.  Don't do it.
 * Exception: Some works from Classical Greece and other ancient civilizations are lost and are only known through summaries and commentaries that survived in other works.  It's okay to document these with what little is known about them.


 * Don't create a work page that consists of one sentence of description and one trope. And definitely don't create a work page that consists of a single trope and nothing else!  (Don't laugh, we've found pages like that which have remained untouched since we forked from TVT.)  If you like a work enough to create a page for it, put a little effort in.


 * Don't use TV Tropes namespacing when naming the page. That's not how MediaWiki works.


 * Don't try to cram different versions of a work into a single page, especially if they vary wildly from one another. Create one page for the book, one for the movie, and one for the radioplay, and distinguish them by adding the media type to each page name:  "My New Work (novel)", "My New Work (film)", and "My New Work (radio)", for example.
 * In such a case, set up the name of the work without a media type as a disambiguation page. For a good example, see Starship Troopers.


 * Do not put multiple works in a series or franchise all in one page. Create a page for the series/franchise with the "(franchise)" media type in the name, use franchisetropes as the header for tropes common to all its installments, and create separate pages for the individual works to link to from the franchise page.


 * Just like examples, Works Are Not Recent. It may have been the hot new movie in the theatres when you wrote the page, but in a month, or a year, or a decade, it won't be.  Write your work page as though the work itself came out fifty years ago.


 * Don't put Trivia, YMMV and the various Awesomes and Fridges on the main work page. Even if you just have one item, put it on the corresponding subpage.
 * Similarly, don't put Trivia etc. for one version of a work on another version's page. It'll just confuse things horribly.