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All The Tropes:Style Guide: Difference between revisions
→Adding Tropes to Works: added text
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (→Adding Examples to Tropes: copyedit) |
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (→Adding Tropes to Works: added text) |
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Let's take this one part at a time.
First, there's an asterisk. This creates the bullet point that sets the new trope off from its neighbors. It's followed by a space to improve the readability of the page source.
Second, the trope name, surrounded by double square brackets. The brackets turn the name into a link as noted elsewhere. If when you save the page this is a [[Red Link]], you've done something wrong -- either you've used a trope that doesn't exist on this site<ref>Not uncommon when the editor is a recent refugee from [[TV Tropes]]</ref>, you misspelled something, or you got the capitalization wrong. We have a hints system that pops up a progressive list of possible links for you in the upper right corner of the edit window; make use of that to avoid problems. It's also a good idea to make sure the link you're using is the actual name of the trope you want, and not a redirect, a disambiguation page, or a work. (We have more than a few works whose titles ''sound'' like trope names; every once in a while a mod has to remove a trope entry that points to one of them.)
Immediately after the trope link is a colon (":"). Don't forget it, or you may get a little note from a mod or another user who's had to go in and add them to your work. Don't use dashes or long dashes or anything else here. And it, too, gets followed by a space -- that's a general punctuation rule, not just for readability here.
Finally, the explanation of how the trope applies to the work. This is ''mandatory''. [[Zero Context Example]]s are subject to deletion. Work pages with nothing but Zero Context Examples are themselves subject to deletion if no one chooses to rescue them. One of the most valid criticisms of troping is that what we do is nothing but mindless cataloguing. If you don't explain how the trope functions (and why) in this work, then you're confirming that criticism. Put thought into writing a description that not only explains where in a work the trope is found, but how it works as a part of the story, and what makes it important.
Finally, your trope should be inserted in proper alphabetical order. Most of the time this should be obvious if you're a frequent user of the Latin alphabet, but there are edge
And if you think we're belaboring things here by going into absurd levels of detail... well, no, we're not. Over the years we have had to clean up after literally hundreds of users who couldn't even look at the other trope entries on a page to see how things were done, and just dumped in plain text apparently thinking everything else would be done for them by magic -- or because they thought the [[Wiki Magic]] exists to save them the trouble. Don't be like them.
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