Topic on Talk:Magnificent Bastard

Not any more, thanks to Utini501.

So I was browsing the Fire Emblem page and realized that one entry (that fell short of this trope) was copy-pasted from TV Tropes well past the 2012 cutoff date. And after spending a bit more time comparing pages, a lot of entries are copy-pasted from TV Tropes circa 2017 to now. Here are links for reference: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MagnificentBastard/FireEmblem https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Magnificent_Bastard/Video_Games/Fire_Emblem

And keep in mind, this is just the Fire Emblem page alone. There's a lot of copy-pasted entries that violate this site's copyright rules, so I think a cleanup's in order. I don't want to just throw this at the mods since you guys are busy, but if people are okay with it I could make writing new entries something of an ongoing cleanup effort. Emphasis on "ongoing" because as my sporadic activity on this site will show, I'm a pretty busy guy myself, ha ha.

Regarding the Fire Emblem page, given that it was created in its entirety only 15 months ago, I think the best solution might be for you to make an offline copy to work from after which we nuke it to protect the wiki. I'd rather not let infringing material stay on the site any longer than it absolutely has to.

As for other infringing material, delete it outright as well.

CC: @Labster, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative, @SelfCloak, @GethN7

Alright, so I've copypasted everything from the various franchise pages onto a word document, so I can edit them until I come up with new versions that don't infringe on copyright.

When it comes to the genre subpages however, I have an idea that could save us a lot of time and headaches: I feel like a douche for calling a specific user out, but it seems the sole offender of copypasting entries from TV Tropes is the user DocColress. So what I was thinking is, what if I were to revert the pre-Colress edits to restore the pages to back when they were freshly ported from TV Tropes back during the site's founding? Would that be okay?

Do it. They wanted to do something that they should know better for, then or now, it deserves reversion.

Alright, I've knocked out all the genre pages. I'm pretty sure legit entries without plagiarism were caught up in the purges, and later on I'll go through them and restore the valid ones while removing redundant entries that are on franchise pages such as Dragon Ball, the MCU and the like. But for now, I'm going to focus on rewriting the plagiarized franchise entries. Thanks for giving me the okay to do this!

@Utini501, thank you for volunteering to take on this project.

Considering how long I've been spending years on identifying licenses for the images that don't have them and I'm only halfway through the job, I think we can give you the time you need to do this. :)

Just popping in to say good on your for this undertaking, @Utini501 - this leather pants gushing was something that should've been excised long ago in retrospect. I still wish it didn't result in the Example Sectionectomy of an otherwise fine trope, but the trouble just wasn't worth it, and I'm hoping it can be restored to something remotely resembling "normal" in the future.

Alright, as of today, consider this trope plagiarism-free! Sorry it took longer than it should have, it was surprisingly draining. The mods definitely deserve props for dealing with this kind of work on the regular!

Now if there's one last suggestion I'd make regarding this trope, I'd honestly say that just about every image on its various pages needs to go. One recurring thing I noticed aside from the plagiarism was images running into "Face with a caption syndrome", likely from the same guy posting all those plagiaristic entries. I can't say I really fault him though since this trope is very hard to capture in an image. I do like this image from the Sonic page, though! I'd actually request making it the main page image since it actually conveys what this trope is all about, but if the mods would rather leave it on the Sonic page, I'd understand.

@Utini501, thank you again for doing this.

As for the images, I have no objection to getting rid of the "just a face and a caption" images. Mind you, I was the one who tagged them as JAFAAC to begin with... so it might be a good idea to get other people to weigh in here.

Let me second Rob's thanks. You've done a hell of a job here, and we really appreciate it. We should have been on top of this from the start and kept people from dumping so much plagiarized material into those pages, and we're very grateful that you just stuck in and took care of it.

As for images, yeah, anything that does not immediately and obviously illustrate the trope, as opposed to just showing someone who is an example of it, should be ruthlessly purged.