All The Tropes:Works Page Guidelines: Difference between revisions

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Work pages are created with the [[MediaWiki:Works|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. The easiest way to start a page with the Works template is to use the [[All The Tropes:ATT Page Creator|Page Creator]] (which can be found in the "Troping Utilities" section of the menu which appears along the left edge of every page). Simply go to that page, enter the name of the work in the bottommost field (where it says "Enter new work name") and press the "Create Works Page" button.
 
There are also several other templates – such as {{tl|tropelist}}, {{tl|franchisetropes}}, {{tl|tropenamer}}, {{tl|tropemaker}} and {{tl|tropecodifier}}, among others – which can be used to mark and set off specialized subsections that a work page may contain. We also have a stock spoiler warning template, {{tl|Unmarked Spoilers}}, for pages which need it. (For more information on these and other templates, see the page [[All The Tropes:Our Custom Templates]].)
 
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]].
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* Similarly, a good quote from — or about — 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. (If you have more than one good quote, put the rest onto the work's "Quotes" subpage.)
 
* And most importantly, try to haveHave at least five to ten tropes on the page. The wiki doesn't exist to simply catalogue the existence of a work — IMDb, IBDb, Wikipedia and a few other sites are sufficient to that task. What we are about is how the fundamentals of story construction — tropes — are used to build the story. If you can't add even one trope to your work page, you're not looking at the story like a troper. We want readers to be able to understand how the story functions, not just acknowledge that it exists.
 
=== Proper English Grammar and Usage ===
This is ''important'', perhaps more important than anything else on this page: Make sure your writing would pass a ninth-grade English class -- this means spelling, grammar, punctuation -- everything. If your new page reads like it was written by ChatGPT, Google Translate or a dyslexic ten-year-old (or any/all of them working together) it will either get rejected (if your edits are still being moderated) or reverted<ref>Although any user who is not subject to Moderation ought to be writing in proper English already -- it's one of the requirements for leaving "Moderated" status.</ref>. Although wiki admins have been known to step in and do their best to translate user contributions from whatever they were written in to proper English, it is ''not'' their responsibility to do so -- it is that of the user(s) who want to see their page go live in the wiki. If your text is so badly written a reader can't figure out what it means, or your examples are so garbled their relevance to the trope or work you've added them to cannot even be guessed at, it has ''failed'' at what it is supposed to do, which is ''communicate clearly and succinctly'' something about a pattern in storytelling.
 
Illiterate contributions ''will'' be rejected. And refusing to improve your contributions when this is pointed out to you is grounds for a ban.
 
=== Notes for if You're Creating a Subpage for a Work ===
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* If you copy a work's description from Wikipedia or another source that has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (which is just fine; we use the same license here), don't try to pass it off as your own work. It's okay to say "I got the description from Wikipedia" in the edit summary instead of on the work page, but if you don't give credit at all, we could get into some legal trouble.
** Copying a work's description from a source that has a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike or Attribution-ShareAlike-NoDerivatives license, such as TV Tropes, is '''''not''''' fine; those licences are not compatible with ours. We could get into some legal trouble even if you do credit the source. (No, CC licences are not all the same.)
 
* Don't cram multiple versions of a work into a single page. If you're creating a page for a novel which also spawned a film, a miniseries and a Saturday morning cartoon, each version of the work gets its own page; stuffing them all together just makes a mess, especially if there was considerable [[Adaptation Decay]] involved.
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* Don't create a work page for an incomplete work of your own to use as a notepad or development space. That's what your Sandbox is for.
 
* Don't create a page for a work that hasn't been released yet. We've had pages created from film trailers or book previews before the matching films or books were released, only to see the troper lose interest in troping before the work was released, leaving behind a page for a work that was changed between the time the publicity materials were released and the work itself was released. Again, that's what your Sandbox is for.
 
* 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 had remained untouched since we forked from TVT.) If you like a work enough to create a page for it, put a little effort in.
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* '''Do not link to TV Tropes in order to include a trope we don't have documented here.''' If the trope is ''so'' important that you just ''must'' have it in the work page, propose it in the [[:Category:Trope Workshop|Trope Workshop]] and then add it to the page when it passes muster. We ''do not'' link to TV Tropes for any reason — some of the staff there still go into fits of frothing apoplexy at the mere thought of our existence, and we don't want to stress the poor dears any further than they already are.
 
* Don't create trope entries for tropes we don't have, period. Even -- ''especially'' -- if you don't put link markup on the would-be "trope name". The whole point of a trope entry is to provide a reference to the more detailed description of what the trope is and how it functions which can be found on its page. Entries for tropes that don't exist might as well be nonsense made up out of whole cloth. If you're automoderated, they will be deleted as zero-context examples. And if you ''aren't'' automoderated, edits attempting to cite non-existent tropes will automatically be rejected in Moderation. Again, if it's ''so'' important you ''absolutely must'' have it on the page, propose it in the Trope Workshop first.
** Maybe you're trying to cite a trope that we've renamed. It's your responsibility to find the right trope name in that case. You are allowed -- encouraged, even -- to ask mods and other users if you aren't having any luck, though.
 
=== Namespaces and Media-type Suffixes ===