Topic on Forum:Trope Talk

Done

Safe Harbor (Useful notes) and Watershed seem to be the same concept - broadcast regulators demanding that over-the-air terrestrial stations *bleep* all of the f-ing expletives from content until about 9PM or so, after which they adopt a slightly more lax stance. The presumption is the brats are asleep, so their whiny )(*&$# parents will stop (*&$# complaining about the ($#)@*$ bad words on the (*&$# telly once its past their (*&@# bedtime.

By either name? The end result of this little bit of paternalism may well be the feature film before the late news having the cuss words inexplicably bleeped from just the first half of the picture, with the rest of the dialogue left intact.

That said, Safe Harbor (Useful notes) is not a good page title. It conflicts with a work's page Safe Harbor (TV series). Its spelling is non-standardised (it's "harbour" in English) and the use of a different term from the standard "watershed" was only done because an obscure FCC regulation uses the different name. Also, "useful notes" is usually used as a category tag (to distinguish a page which doesn't contain an actual trope) or as the name of a "notes" subpage, not as a disambiguator in a main article's title.

The end result in this instance is two articles on the same topic. Unless there's a difference in substance (and not merely in name) there's no reason to separate "safe harbor" from "watershed". They're basically the same article with just a little more Ofcom after watershed.

I propose to merge them, with watershed as the destination article, and a hatnote on Safe Harbor once it's simply redirected to the work Safe Harbor (TV series).

We inherited both articles from TV Tropes, and they were substantially more lax with duplicate articles that we are. Considering that Safe Harbor (Useful notes) is "Watershed in the USA", I'd be inclined to merge the two into Watershed. But I'm only one mod; I can't speak for everybody.

(Similarly, we have "Takahashi Couple", which is "Belligerent Sexual Tension written by Rumiko Takahashi". We have a discussion going to merge those two pages. No doubt we have more examples of this.)

That said, I see a few techincal inaccuracies in your post:

• The category is "Useful Notes", not "useful notes". Pagenames are case-sensitive.
• There is no conflict between "Safe Harbor (Useful notes)" and "Safe Harbor (TV series)". We have the MediaWiki "disambiguation" system to distinguish between them if if becomes an issue.
• While it is true that the word is spelled "harbour" in British English, "Safe Harbor" is American. They drop a lot of "U"s.
• All The Tropes doesn't do hatnotes. Instead, we add a "Not to be confused with..." line just before the list of examples or tropes. (We don't have this documented anywhere. This needs to go into the Style Guide.) And there's no reason to add either to a redirect, since the vast majority of people will never see the text.

Actually, we do mention that we don't use hatnotes several times in All The Tropes:Creating Disambiguation Pages -- in the third paragraph as well as the section on "Not To Be Confused With".

But yeah, putting it in the Style Guide as well is a good idea.

How do I fix the "Wikipedia" link? The page header for Watershed links to wikipedia:Watershed (a disambig page) when it needs to link to wikipedia:Watershed (broadcasting).

I'm also unsure about Category:Safe Harbor; do we normally create categories for individual disambiguation pages?

You code it like this: {{Useful Notes|wppage=Watershed (broadcasting)}}

Don't forget to add the Pages with Working Wikipedia tabs category.

Yeah @Carlb, we do create categories for disambig pages.

Also I recommend you follow the wppage advice, as we are heavily interlinked with Wikimedia anyway, especially the Commons.