All The Tropes:Examples Are Not Local

All The Tropes is not specific to any particular location; it is a global resource.

While it is not as common an error as calling an example "recent", you will still occasionally see examples written as though All The Tropes only exists in and for the contributor's home town. For instance, an example that as of this writing could be found on the Consumer Conspiracy page flatly informed the reader that


 * A local law firm that specializes in disability rights literally starts with "I'm going to tell you a government secret."

Sorry, Troper, we have no idea where you live -- indeed, all these years after the fork from The Other Tropes Wiki, we have no idea who you were -- and consequently, we don't know what area was "local" to you.

This is not a good practice.

Like its temporal cousin, this is a form of Fan Myopia and/or Creator Provincialism; the writer either unconsciously assumed everyone reading would always be from the same geographic location as he was, or would somehow automatically know what was local to him when he wrote it. Unfortunately, the result is instead the closest thing you can come to a Zero Context Example and still have a description -- for all anyone knows, this could be a completely bogus example because there's no real information on the example allowing you to find and actually review it, and no way to find any short of burrowing through Google until you get a hit.

In general, unspecific anecdotal examples like these are little better than inserting "There was this guy that did this thing", and the proper response to them would be Kill It with Fire. To keep that from happening, remember that no one will know where you're posting from when they read your example, whether they're reading it in ten years or five minutes. And the extra 25 or 50 keystrokes it takes to specify a location is not an insurmountable barrier.

Also, when specifying a location, please make sure that what you add is unambiguous. ("The tri-state area" doesn't help - as of late-2020, Wikipedia listed twenty different tri-state areas just in the United States of America.) At the least, please provide a city name.

No Examples, please. Especially not "local" ones.