All The Tropes:Creating a Page by Hand

You want to create a page. You've read the New User Guides and the Trope Workshop Guidelines. You already know Works Pages Are a Free Launch, and you've learned how to avoid writing a Zero Context Example. You've found out how to actually create a new wiki page. You've started to create the new page...

But the "Select boilerplate" menu didn't appear at the top of the edit box.

Well, that's something that the Moderation Staff needs to look into, so please let us know. But in the meantime, you still want to create a page.

It's time to do it the old-school way - by hand.

These are bare-minimum page skeletons that you can copy into your new page - nothing fancy, just enough to put everything in its expected place.

Works Pages
Since Works Pages Are a Free Launch and we don't divide the works pages up by medium the way TVTropes does, these can go straight into the main wiki space. Don't put a prefix on your page name.

The minimum Work page structure:

The description of the work goes here

The trope list goes here

You can add more categories, of course. We encourage at least the medium of the work (Film, Live-Action TV, Literature, Anime, Western Animation, and so on) be added as a category.

If the work's title starts with A, An, or The, you can should also add a DEFAULTSORT to the very end of the page. The code for this is. (For example, "The Wind in the Willows" has the tag "DEFAULTSORT:Wind in the Willows, The".)

Works Subpages
Some tropes should be listed on subpages for works - Crowners, YMMV, Trivia, and so on.

The minimum Work subpage structure:

The trope list goes here

That "worksubpagefooter" at the end puts all the required categories and links onto the page. Please ensure it is the very last thing on the page (with the exception of any custom categories you're adding to the page and a DEFAULTSORT tag if the work starts with A, An, or The). A warning: "worksubpagefooter" breaks if you take it more than one level of subpages deep -- so please don't use it on Recap pages. (For now, either put everything in by hand, use a template, or leave the end blank and count on Wiki Magic to add the code.)

Tropes Pages
First, read the Trope Workshop Guidelines. If you're still going to create the page (instead of taking it to the forums), please start it in the Trope Workshop. You can do this by starting the name of your page with "Trope Workshop:".

The minimum Trope page structure:

The description of the trope goes here

The work list goes here

Groups for Examples
If you don't want to get the "Examples Need Sorting" category added to your Trope page, you'll have to sort your works... Here's a list of headers that match most of the broad categories of works (although it would be a very odd trope that would have reason to use them all):

Real Life
If you find you're putting almost all of the examples under Video Games (which is certainly possible), you might want to add this list of subheaders under the Video Games header:

Tropes Subpages
Sometimes, there are so many examples of a trope in a particular medium that it makes sense to split the medium off into a subpage.

The minimum Trope subpage structure: Examples of in  include:

The work list goes here

That "tropesubpagefooter" at the end puts all the required categories and links onto the page. Please ensure it is the very last thing on the page (with the exception of any custom categories you're adding to the page and a DEFAULTSORT tag if the trope starts with A, An, or The). A warning: "tropesubpagefooter" breaks if you take it more than one level of subpages deep - use tropesub-subpagefooter if the page is two levels deep, which is possible if you're creating a page of examples from a particular franchise or other large work. (If the page is three levels deep, you're creating something that we never planned for.)

Once you've made a subpage for examples of a trope, go back to the trope page and add the  tag on a new line immediately before the existing   tag. (If you've moved all of the tropes off of the main trope page, you can delete the  tag.)

Category Pages
You've created a new page, and (assuming you actually did put at the end of the page) you see that the name of the page is in the Category list, in red. If it's a work page, it would be nice to change that to blue and add your new page to the big index.

Click on that red link to create the new category. Luckily, the basic text is exactly the same no matter what sort of page it was that you just created, so just copy and paste these two lines, then save off the new category: