All The Tropes:Works Pages Are a Free Launch

Revision as of 16:41, 26 August 2018 by Robkelk (talk | contribs) (deleted "and are not porn" as per discussion on the Talk page)

One of the few guidelines for this informal wiki is that the Trope Workshop is strongly recommended for tropes pages. It's to get feedback from the Wiki Hive Mind on if these pages are valid (or "tropable"), and if so to get help with refining these pages. It is not a strict requirement, we don't really do many of those here, but there are several guidelines such as the Three Rules of Three to help you make a decent page that won't have to be merged or renamed at a later date.

However, if you want to make a page about a work (a Series, Film, Literature, Video Game, etc.) or about Creators involved in making works, then the fact that There Is No Such Thing as Notability comes into play. As long as these people and their works exist and are published (Unpublished works have their own dark little corner), then they have a right to a page. Do make sure we don't have it already -- if it's part of a series, the entire series might be on one page.

You therefore do not need to get any approval for the page or show that it's been defined to some level. Whether or not it went into the Trope Workshop or the forums would not be considered and may not be optimal -- we don't really have a defined system (neither optional nor mandatory) for how to make a work's page.

For a step-by-step walkthrough, see Works Page Guidelines.

There are several paths you may take:

Options:

Take it to Trope Workshop
This is what somebody chose for Johnny Depp (to get a good description of his landmark films and the right names of the tropes associated with him) but you don't have to and nobody will care. It's also a bit of a pain with entries slipping down the list due to less interest and a system more suited to short discussions. You can launch at any point; you can even leave the Trope Workshop entry running for longer to help flesh things out.
Take It to the Forums
You don't need the officious launch for these pages, and the media forums are probably better for drawing people who would know something about the work. It's also a better set up for collecting longer discussion either from lots of people or two people with a lot of back and forth or, for instance, if you have lots of adaptations and the way to organise them to worry about, or if it's a series of installments, or what should be seen as the proper spoiler level. Posts won't get buried as they are in Trope Workshop. You'd just have to accept that you'll have a longer turnaround time on responses.
Just launch it yourself
There are no Three Rules of Three to think about here,[1] so it's fine to make it a one-man job. Just make sure you have enough for the page to be viable: a decent description beyond a stub, and a list of the tropes in the work. You get less Wiki Magic at first, but your page will still grow somewhat.

Some people might say There Is No Such Thing As A Free Launch. They are... best ignored.

  1. If you insist: Three people would trivially agree on the title of a work (which we admit might be difficult with works that weren't originally in English - but if there's an official English translation, at least three people agreed to use that), the work has been published for three days, and if you've been around here for any length of time, you can probably think of three tropes it uses.