Forum:Wiki Talk

With regards to the Magical Minority Person category, I feel like the name "Magical Minority Tropes" would be much more intuitive, since the category doesn't cover JUST Magical Minority People, but also the qualities and traits frequently associated with them. I'm also pondering if Dragon Ball Abridged shouldn't be renamed to Dragon Ball Z Abridged, as that IS the work's 'official' title and what it's referred to as in the majority of its mentions online.

I'd like to know your opinions on the matter, and I would especially appreciate learning how the admins would call these situations.

@Looney Toons @Robkelk @LulzKiller @Labster @DocColress @GethN7 @SelfCloak

I've got no problems with it, honestly.

Noted, hoping to get some more input before going forward with it.

Sounds good to me. I like indicative trope titles, and we should be using the same names that works' creators use.

Some series such as Star Wars have a separate page for each entry in the franchise. Others, such as Anne of Green Gables have one page for the entire series. Likewise, some series have the original and the adaption on separate pages (e.g. Sailor Moon ) whereas others have them on the same page, for example A Certain Scientific Railgun.

I believe it would be best to split work pages into multiple entries as it would allow tropers to add examples for a work without fear of seeing spoilers for other works in the same series.

Or they could just use spoiler tags.

I guess I mean I want to see more arguments here.

Usually this has just happened on a case-by-case basis. You mentioned Sailor Moon, but the anime and manga happened more or less simultaneously, and they're both on the same page. Sailor Moon Crystal has its own page though, because User:Looney Toons felt like making one.

Ultimately, it's going to be some kind of of balance between duplication of work, and desire to organize. I'm lazy, but if you feel like organizing more works, go ahead.

Spoiler tags don't hide anything when the user is editing a page. Though, I suppose simply having separate sections for different adaptations and entries in a series would also accomplish spoiler protection and be much easier to implement.

Regarding Sailor Moon while the original anime and manga technically share a summary page . They have separate trope lists. As well as a page listing tropes used in both works. Every other version has itsown entry.

Would it be alright to rename Sailor Moon/Tropes Two to "Sailor Moon (Anime)" and Sailor Moon/Tropes Three to "Sailor Moon (Manga)" and include summaries of the anime and manga in the appropriate page? I'm aware that Sailor Moon (manga) currently redirects to Sailor Moon, but that page is really about the franchise as a whole rather then just the manga.

Likewise, would it be acceptable to rename Sailor Moon/Tropes One to "Sailor Moon/Tropes" and use it for tropes common to the franchise as whole (as opposed to using it for tropes common to only the anime and manga)?

I think that breaking out the various incarnations of a franchise into separate pages is a good and proper thing to do. That is at least one reason why we have disambiguation pages, after all. I just did this very thing for Starship Troopers yesterday and The Tick (animation) a couple days ago; both were horrendous messes, with tropes for three or more (often highly-variant) versions of the story side-by-side. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy desperately needs exactly this kind of cleanup, too.

The misspelled word "villian" (should be "villain") occurs a lot on both TV Tropes and this Wiki.

Will some admin please do a global substitution for this typo?

If we still have a page about typos, the page should of course be excluded (or rather the page should be edited to break up the word with comments so it won't be found in a global search). I don't recall if TV Tropes had that page either now or as of 2012. Also, "vaudevillian" should not be substituted. The Ambush Bug character Villian the Villain is an intentional invocation of the misspelling, but I can't find a mention of him here.

Long, long, ago on TV Tropes global subttitutions were actually done. But it hasn't been done in a long time. Surely we can do it here (upon manual intervention by an admin). At least there should be a thread for typos where people can post common typos, and admins could look them over and decide which ones are common typos and can be globally substituted without messing anything up. There are a lot more than just "villian"; it's just the most obvious one.

That can be done easily with the magic of a bot program.

I'll make sure to gin up a macro for that and get on it sometime tomorrow.

If you notice anything else that need fixed globally, let me know so I can add it to the bot macro.

In fact, draw up a list of what needs to be changed and skipped so I can set up the macro to the best of my ability to avoid screwups.

Trying some random words, "recieve" gets 288 hits ("villian" has 475). "sequal" has 85 hits. "beleif" only has 6, but looks safe to change. "embarass" has 24 and "embarassment" another 128. "Posess" has 71 and "posession" another 101. But there's no way I could list everything possible/

I found the page of typos. The_Big_List_of_Booboos_and_Blunders. "villian" is not on there; let me add it. Obviously this page should be excluded from all substitutions.

Don't forget not to change the text on the talk pages....

Excellent, that gives me a good place to start.

A comprehensive as possible list of all pages to be excluded would also help so I can tell the bot to skip them if need be.

If you intentionally want to use a misspelled word, you should be able to hide it from a global substitution with a comment:

vill<!-- -->ian

Generally, the bot hits main pages by default unless I specify other namespaces like talk pages, and aside from the pages you mentioned, I plan to set up the bot to hit all those word you mentioned and I'm adding a rule to match the case of the work so nothing in uppercase is affected (i.e. - misspellings that are intentional proper nouns are left alone)

Geth, I am wary of this -- I dislike automated spell-correction because it inevitably runs into the Cupertino effect.

That is a real concern, and the reason I have yet to start the bot was a worry I might fall prey to the Cupertino effect, so can you think of any alternatives that would be less of a potential hazard?

Not really, at least not so far. I'm presuming the bot will work off a dictionary list of misspellings and corresponding corrections, which should avoid the worst of the Effect. (If all it would do would be to run a spellchecker on every page it opened, I would be very vocally against it.) If my presumption is correct, I would suggest we go over the list very carefully to eliminate any potentially ambiguous targets, and hand-correct those.

Beyond that, nope, nothing really to suggest.

I don't think the examples above have legitimate uses (except on lampshadings, such as Villian the Villian, and on pages about errors, and in "vaudevillian"). So you won't be "fixing" any legitimate uses. If someone types "villian" when they mean "vanilla", your bot would replace the error with another error, but you haven't increased the number of errors since it was an error anyway, and you would have genuinely fixed hundreds of errors in the meantime.

Also, there's no need to ignore uppercase examples. What if the bad spelling starts a sentence? (You won't catch Villian the Villain because 1) it's on a page about errors, which you should skip anyway, and 2) I stuck a comment in the middle, so the bot shouldn't find it.)

Mm. The "vaudevillian" example raises a point. We're going to have to be careful to search for whole words and whole words only.

If you do that, you'll miss examples like villians and supervillian.

I honestly can't think of any other legitimate uses, even as part of another word.

Then we spend some time thinking on the list and making sure we have as many compound forms as we think likely.

I'm going to throw out pages like Naruto Veangance Revelaitons and My Immortal where we probably wouldn't want this. Or in any quote that has sic anywhere nearby.

I'm worried about the feature creep of the requirements here, because we're starting to approach the stage where we're trying to use regex substitutions to parse natural language. I'm not real hot in general about the idea, even though it would probably fix more things than it would break.

You could handle that by ignoring all pages in the fanfic category.

Really, if you want to get it perfect, we have to have a bot which looks for a word and presents instances of it to the bot user, asking for manual confirmation on each one. Of course it's easy for me to say since I'm not writing or running the bot. But we needn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I mostly use AutoWikiBrowser, which has a GUI interface, so I could approve each page edited and which edits are made one by one if need be, albeit it would be rather tedious. Vorticity mostly uses the MediaWiki Bot script provided by Perl, which does not have this feature, though it is somewhat more flexible with exception rules for fully automated editing.

It feels to me that occasional minor typos are less bad than having a very small amount of atypical examples where autocorrection goes all wrong. Quotes with [sic] are a good example.

By a complete happenstance, I just learned that To Aru Majutsu no Index, a work unfamiliar to me, has a character called Princess Villian, and that's apparently not a typo. I repeat and strengthen my call againt careless search-and-replace.

I don't really edit on this wiki, but I noticed that you guys had a user gadget called "HotLicense" that allowed users to quickly add a license template to a file page using a dropdown menu. It's enabled by default for all users, but I'm not seeing a dropdown menu anywhere on any file page. I exported it to another Miraheze wiki hoping to use it there, but I'm not seeing a dropdown menu there either. Is the tool still being maintained? Or is something just wrong on my end?

I think it would have stopped working in 2017 with the MW 1.29 update, as that's when a whole bunch of js functions got removed (sajax_init_object, importScriptURI). It would need a lot of work to get running again.

Hi everyone. I’m Cyberpower678. I primarily reside on the English Wikipedia but am deploying InternetArchiveBot to other wikis I feel may benefit from the bot’s services. InternetArchiveBot is a bot that routinely checks all articles, looks for non-functional links, and then attempts to repair them by adding an Archive URL to them. Would this be something of use? IABot is deployed to almost 2 dozen Wikipedias.

I don't edit here much, but this sounds fine to me.

Sounds useful to me. If you'd be kind enough to assist us with that, we'd deeply appreciate it.

I would be happy to assist. I just need to know how to acquire the bot flag on this wiki.

I just need to know how to go about getting the bot flag.

I signed InternetArchiveBot into ATT.

I have granted the bot flag to your bot.

If someone starts a thread in a forum, and I'm confident the issue the thread is resolved; Can I mark the thread as "resolved"? What about provide a summary?

Sure, I don't see why not. And if you mark it resolved, you're prompted to enter a summary but it's not mandatory.

I have just created Category:Images imported from TV Tropes without an identified license. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

There's no need to manually update the category - images are listed there because they have our "These files were imported from TV Tropes ..." notice on the file description page.

If you have a moment and the inclination, please update the license terms of one or more of these images.

Now that the category has automatically propagated across the wiki, I see there are slightly over 50,000 files that were imported from TVT and still don't have license information updated. I've updated 50 of them today -- approximately 0.1% of the list.

Obviously, this is not a one-person task.

Apologies if this is in the wrong place or I'm beating a dead horse. I haven't been here in almost two years, and I've never used the forums.

I'm doing a college project on TV Tropes. It occurred to me while writing the rough draft that I really don't know much about it, so I decided I needed to do some research. I've seen it criticized for not providing proper literary analysis (e.g.), but I never thought of it as analysis at all -- I assumed it was just meant to classify the patterns called "tropes". When I looked into it further, though, it turned out that the reality wasn't that simple. From what I gather, it is meant to analyse tropes to an extent but is considered to do a poor job of it, or something like that. Given that, I'm wondering where All The Tropes stands on this. Is this site primarily for classification or analysis? Is the analysis found here comparable in quality to that found elsewhere? How do you differ from TV Tropes in this area?

I'm sure I should know all this already, but I don't. (The project is due tomorrow, so I'm not here to get help with it. I'm just curious.)

Our intent has always been to focus more on Analysis than TVT had. Hence our very basic Mechanics of Writing section where we began a structuralist approach to the creation of fiction and the use of tropes. Sadly we are somewhat hampered by a much smaller userbase and the habits formed, even in those of us with other intentions, by a decade of TVT. Analysis is always much harder than cataloguing; the latter is simply pattern-matching, while the former requires considerable thought and the time to both analyze and to write about the result. The often inconsistent literacy of the average troper acts against us, as does the fact that most tropers have tended to be on the young side -- say, under thirty -- and thus probably lack sufficient experience in analysis to start with. Plus, while we can say what we'd like to see, we can't force anyone to write anything, so we get what people want to contribute. It makes it hard to direct the wiki as a whole in any particular direction.

So, any plans to make 'em different from Tv Tropes? I know that we probably need the forums for something big, like the Paint the Hero Black article. Also, is it safe to add the Wiki Witch and some of the pages that I see in the Wayback Machine (I figure some of those pages are unique only to Tv Tropes and I'd like to avoid them.), if not how about some new characters for the new att-tan to wrangle with?

What's this gifting system and how does it work?

It's part of the SocialProfile extension and it's for thanking people for various reasons. A message can be added if needed. There's two ways of giving gifts:

1) Go to someone's user page (you may need to click the "Social profile" link first) and click "Send a gift"

2) On the sidebar, under "Troper Tools", click "Gift a Friend". You can either choose from a list of friends or type the user's name.

At the moment, there's only two gifts, including one I just created (the candy cane one). Only administrators can create gifts, though requests can be made for more.