MediaWiki:Editnotice-0

If you have any questions about anything, please check out the Administrivia pages or leave a message for an administrator. We have several Gadgets enabled to enhance your wiki experience. Feel free to enable and disable them at will in your user preferences. We appreciate our tropers, so any feedback on anything will help us help you. Don't be shy in letting us know what's on your mind concerning the wiki. Remember to use the talk page for questions. They don't go in the article. Just click that "Talk" link at the top of every page. When creating or adding to an article, the idea is to make the wiki's pages sound like they were written by the same person -- a person with a good sense of humor, who doesn't talk about themselves with 'I' or 'this troper', or get in arguments with themselves, and who just corrects errors they might have made earlier without drawing attention to them. If you feel the need to preface your example with "Not really an example but..." you know in your heart it's not an example. Don't add it. I can't believe no-one mentioned X yet! Except, you did just now, so that won't mean anything in a moment. Write your example like it's been there forever and we won't tell a soul it wasn't. If you're creating a bullet point three levels deep, take a moment to think about what you're typing and where it should really go. Be sure your new example isn't there already. Did you just catch an error? Fix it rather than just pointing it out. We are not interested in whether or not something is or was popular. Whether or not it was liked has nothing to do with tropes. No matter how popular your favorite show is, there are even more people out there who didn't see it. Listing your example as "Show X! Just... Show X" doesn't work. Always explain how Show X is an example. More than one page-top quote just gets in the way. Use the Quotes page for the rest. Our pages aren't a chatroom. Do not put 'LOL' or emoticons in your edits. If an example is poorly written or overlooks something important, change the example. Commentary in sub-bullet points, parentheses and "however, ..." digressions just clutter the page. "You" when referring to the reader -- sure, you can do that. "You" when referring to the text above you -- Bad Thing! Use spoiler tags when you really need them, but it would be even better if you could manage to write your example without bringing up the sensitive information at all. Want to share your opinion on a work? Try writing a review! Here is an example of word cruft: "Don't forget, actually, as a matter of fact, what really happened is that there's far too much Word Cruft in this example." Don't just drop a bare URL for an off-site link into an example, especially as the only thing in the example. At the very least pothole it with "See here", and give an explanation of what it is. Links to material off-site are not eternal. Describe what you're linking to and why, so if the link breaks someday (and it will!), another troper can find a new one. The description is the place for laying out the general uses of the trope. Examples that aren't from a specific work aren't examples. Don't just write "all anime ever" -- give us specifics. Write in a way that will make sense to non-fans. Describe motives, causes and effects rather than throwing around bare character names and episode numbers. It's good form to Pothole the trope behind the reference (e.g., In the climax of the Alpha mission, Bob resorts to using the Omega Spark). Examples in trope pages should actually mention the name of the work -- a Pothole isn't enough. If they don't, not only are they less readable -- they won't show up in page searches, which will cause repeat examples. Looking for some way to be helpful? Check out Needs Wiki Magic Love and List of Works That Need Summary, or the Community Portal. No Lewdness, No Prudishness. If a work contains sexuality, state the facts and don't gush; but on the other hand don't whitewash it either. "Subversion" is not the cooler version of "aversion". Poor grammar makes for a degraded reading experience; horrible grammar may get deleted outright. Have a look at Tips on Grammar to at least get the most common blunders out of the way. Write out your sentences. Just because there exists an acronym for some commonly used phrase doesn't mean that everyone will recognize what it means. Don't bring fan arguments into examples. Tropes are often similar and sometimes have Sub-Tropes that deal with more specific situations. Read the description and see if you're really adding the example in the best place before posting it. Whenever you mention a work, try to make it a link, at least if you think there's any chance it could ever warrant a page. Even if it doesn't have a page here yet, it may get one later. When adding a link, make sure that the destination is actually the page you want. At the very least, make sure you're not going to a disambiguation page -- and if you are, pick the right destination from there and use it instead. Planning to remove or replace a page quote or image? Take care -- there may be paragraphs or examples which will need to be fixed, because they rely on the reader seeing the quote or image in question for reference. If you can't be bothered to read the whole article, a CTRL+F for "picture", "image" and "quote" will usually catch everything. If you must correct something someone has written, do just that, and no more. Write a polite, brief note in the edit summary field, and do not refer to the whole thing on the page itself. Trying to Edit War with an administrator is a very bad idea. If you have to change the page image or quote, put the old one on the corresponding Image Links or Quotes page, respectively. Start one if necessary. There will always be people who liked it, so be nice and save them the searching time. Avoid wording that will become dated. "The latest" happenings won't be so "recent" in a month or so, let alone in a decade. If it's necessary to establish a time frame for something, use a name, the year it appeared, an episode number or the like. Remember to close your parentheses. Before you hit "save", proofread your entry and/or hit "preview" at the bottom left of the page. There's no need to rush, and no need to keep re-editing the page as you or others find the mistakes after the fact. If you want to continue text at the current bullet point's level of indentation after a quote or other line breaking feature, you can use the ":" markup to do so; use the same number of colons (":") as there are asterisks in the current bullet point. Work titles go in italics. Installment titles (and the titles of short stories) go in "double quotation marks". For music, album titles go in italics and song titles go in "double quotation marks". Both American and British English are fine. Ending punctuation is a good thing. Other punctuation, too. When in doubt, punctuate. People who edit make up just over 1% of all traffic. That is, about 99% of traffic comes from non-editing readers. Try to keep this in mind when editing. If you've finished a complete sentence with a full thought, you can complete it and start a new one, and you don't have to keep adding to the sentence and leave it open at the end, because, well... Brevity Is Wit. Nobody wants to read a Wall of Text. Favor understatement over exaggeration. Do not use either at the expense of clarity. Go look it up; we'll still be here when you get back. Better that than writing "happened in The Honeymooners, or possibly Fringe". "And how!" does not give enough information to someone who hasn't seen/read a work. It should not be used as a complete example. When adding quotes to pages, put them in the quote markup. It's not hard, and it spares administrative tempers. Politics has no place in the wiki. Gutting or vandalizing a page because it disagrees with your ideology is a quick route to a temporary ban at the least. Verbal attacks on other tropers because their tastes are different from yours are juvenile and will gain you a temporary ban at the very least. When writing about Creators, don't comment on their exact ages, like "Older Than He Looks: He looks real good for 57." In 6 months he won't be 57 anymore, and you will have introduced an error that will need to be found and fixed. If you think an element of the wiki's organization -- like a media type, or a persistent pattern in trope naming -- needs to be changed or fixed, go to the forums. Propose the change in the appropriate area, lay out your reasoning, and ask for a consensus. If the user base agrees with you, then you can implement your change. Don't just make your change piecemeal and justify it after the fact. Users have been banned for making changes to how the wiki works without gaining consensus first. When writing an example, always explicitly give the name of the work it comes from. Don't make the only reference a pothole off a character name or other story element. When uploading an image for use on the wiki, always select the proper license (if you don't know, "fair use" is almost always safe), and add categories for both the page it's used on and the work it comes from (if they're not one and the same).