All The Tropes talk:Trope Workshop Guidelines

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

If you want to find a category to add to a page, but search isn't working

Sometimes, the search bar doesn't work properly... or at all. You'll have to go look for them by eyeball. Here's how:

  1. Under "Tools" on the menu at the side of the page, select "Special Pages".
  2. From the list you get, select "Categories" in the section Lists of Pages.
  3. On that page, use the Contents bar at the top of the page to narrow down the list to the first two letters of what you think the category might be called. (For example, if you think the category might be named "Drawn to this Index", select "Dr" - you'll see in the list that it's called "Drawn to This Index".)

With the descriptive names that many categories have here, you're bound to find one or two appropriate categories reasonably quickly. --Robkelk (talk) 16:43, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Why a trope definition is important

Defining the trope tells people what the trope is about, what qualifies as an example, and what doesn't qualify as an example. Without a definition, everybody else has to guess - and people might guess incorrectly.

For example, if you were to just name a trope "Cool Bike" without giving it a description, you'd have no call to be upset when another Troper adds the Ariel penny-farthing bicycle as an example. You never said that the trope wasn't about that kind of bike.

Define your trope candidate before other people define it for you - possibly in a way that you didn't want.

--Robkelk (talk) 16:54, 24 April 2020 (UTC)