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All The Tropes:Works Page Guidelines: Difference between revisions

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All The Tropes:Works Page Guidelines (view source)

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* Make sure the work does not already have a page under a different name. Books can get renamed when reissued; television programs can change their titles over the years (check out ''[[The Hogan Family]]'' for a good example); [[Market-Based Title]]s and [[Syndication Title]]s can be very different from the original. It's not inconceivable that the title you know a work under may not be the original name it had - especially if the work was originally released in a language other than English.
** Speaking of languages other than English: We are an English-language wiki; please use the English-language name for a non-English work when an official title exists. (For example, use "[[A Certain Magical Index]]", not the original "とある魔術の禁書目録", the romanized "Toaru Majutsu no Indekkusu", or the hybrid "To Aru Majutsu no Index". It took us from 2018 to 2020 (not working only on the cleanup) to clean up after somebody decided to change that one without asking first.) If the people who read All The Tropes are a typical cross-section of the English-speaking world, then the wiki's audience who only speak English is much larger than the audience who are willing to learn the original names of non-English works.
** Alternate titles should be set up as redirects to the main page for the work. (Certainly, go ahead and redirect "[[Toaru Majutsu no Indekkusu]]" to "[[A Certain Magical Index]]".) See [[All The Tropes:Creating New Redirects|Creating New Redirects]] for more information.
** When naming a work page, if the considerations above do not have you doing otherwise, the name Wikipedia uses for the work is almost always good (although see "Namespaces and Media-type Suffixes", below). For one thing, it makes the "Wikipedia" button that appears at the top of the page work perfectly. If you're not using the Wikipedia page name for some reason, add it to the page template markup using the "wppage" parameter (which would look like <code><nowiki>{{work|wppage=Wikipedia name here}}</nowiki></code>). That way you get to use your name, and still have the Wikipedia button work.
 
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* Mention the title of the work somewhere in the first few sentences. Mark it up properly whenever it appears: movies, books, television series, record albums, and other "big" works have their titles in ''italics''; short stories, poems, individual episodes of a TV program, individual songs, and other "small" works have their titles inside "double quotes".
** Also, the first time you mention the title, and ''only'' the first time, put it in '''bold mark-up''' –— ''with'' italics, if the title gets them.
 
* Identify the creator and the medium somewhere in the text, even if the medium is already in the page name.
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* If it is a [[Fanfic]] or other [[Fan Work]], make sure to identify what other work [[Crossover|or works]] it is based on.
 
* Provide a short but still evocative description of the plot ''without giving away the ending''. This bears repeating: Don't spoil a work in its description, unless [[It Was His Sled|the spoiler is already common knowledge]]. And even then, try to avoid it unless it's part of the appeal of the work –— there's always going to be someone who has managed to escape being spoiled up to now, and we don't want to ruin it for them! (A case in point: one of the admins discovered in 2017 that an online acquaintance had never heard of ''[[Scooby-Doo]]'', a franchise that had been on the air for most if not all of said acquaintance's life.)
** If you want to give a longer (more than a single paragraph) description of the plot, or a description of the plot of a single episode of a TV series, you can put it on a "Recap" page. Please note that Recap pages for episodes need the recaps and can optionally also have tropes specific to the episode.
 
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* If the work only exists online, provide a link to the work. If necessary, link to a copy in the [[Wayback Machine]].
** Do not pothole the link to a/the work's [[Title Drop]]. Put it in a separate sentence --— we usually place them at the end of the main text --— reading something like "You can find ''Work Name'' here[https://example.com at example.com]."
** If the work is hosted on a website for which we have a separate page, do ''not'' just link to the website's page or say "see/go to website X". Provide a direct link to the work, even if you must register or subscribe to reach it.
** If the work only existed online but has disappeared even from the Wayback Machine, add the {{tl|MIA}} tag to the page, immediately after the {{tl|work}} tag. (Although we'd rather that you not create a work page for a missing work - see "What ''Not'' to Do", below.)
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* Try to [[All The Tropes:Uploading and Adding an Image to a Page|include an image]] representative of the work. [[:Category:Lobby Card|Posters for films]], paperback covers for books, and title cards for TV shows are all good choices, but anything that clearly identifies the work or gives a sense of its content will do. Google Image Search will almost always have something you can use. Wikimedia Commons is also useful for public-domain and Creative-Commons-licensed images, and we can directly include Commons images in a page without having to upload them to All The Tropes first.
** Fan works are usually harder –— often much harder –— to find images for. Don't sweat it if there's nothing at hand.
** Avoid images that are [[Just a Face and a Caption]]; for some guidelines on what makes a good page image, see [[All The Tropes:How to Pick A Good Image|How to Pick A Good Image]].
** It's a good idea to resize images before uploading them; making an image anywhere between 350 to 450 pixels wide is usually ideal. (Image height is far less critical unless it is ''much'' wider than it is tall, in which case you might want to consider a different image or crop the one you have. We aren't Wikivoyage; we don't use images as page banners.)
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** For more detailed information about how to upload (and embed) an image (and what we need from you when you do), see our page [[All The Tropes:Uploading and Adding an Image to a Page|Uploading and Adding an Image to a Page]].
 
* 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 have 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.
 
=== Notes for if You're Creating a Subpage for a Work ===
The various subpage types are set up for specific subsets of information, so we expect to see those types of information on the subpages. If a "Headscratchers" page doesn't list things that puzzle a Troper, or a "Recap" subpage doesn't have a recap of the work, or a "Heartwarming" page doesn't list examples of things in the work that give at least one Troper a Warm and Fuzzy Feeling, (to name three examples), then readers are going to wonder what's the point of having the subpages.
 
If you set up a subpage, please make sure that the page has the type of information that a casual reader would expect to find on that sort of subpage. Please don't just list tropes on a subpage (not even on a "YMMV" or "Trivia" subpage -— please give some context as to ''why'' they're subjective or trivial) –— unless a work has so many tropes that we've spun off the work's trope list onto its own page or pages, and not even then if there's an option to add descriptions to the tropes.
 
=== Minimum Requirements ===
 
Yeah, that's asking a lot. But it's for a good reason and a good cause. And to be honest, we'll be okay with a work page that doesn't hit all the points above. But there's a level beneath which a page is unacceptable and is likely to get rejected in Moderation or deleted by a staff member. There's no hard-and-fast rule on this, but if your page is lacking most or all of the necessary markup, doesn't have tropes, doesn't have much in the way of a description of the work and/or completely ignores our [[All The Tropes:Style Guide|Style Guide]], you can be pretty confident it's not going to last long. Basically, the more it looks like it was dumped into the wiki by a [[Drive-By Updater]] who didn't care about our look-and-feel or our mission of communicating clearly and well, the more likely it is to be deleted.
 
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