Topic on Forum:Trope Talk

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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).