Hello. As per Topic:Xyoydjifr48gfru2, because you didn't reply in nine days, we've quietly removed your mod hat. This is not punitive and does not bar you from getting the mod hat back later; we're simply cleaning up the control lists.
User talk:QuestionableSanity
In a nutshell, I think trope and work pages should move away from the format of "description of thing, followed by comprehensive list." Instead, main pages should present a smorgasbord of things: trope name, laconic description, slightly more detailed description, between 5-10 prolific examples, deeper analysis of the trope and its relation to other tropes, demonstration of common ways this trope can be Played With, etc. Comprehensive lists of examples and works should be relegated to subpages.
Before I continue, I will address the fact that I hardly ever participate in the upkeep of this wiki. I know it's probably a major faux pas to suggest a radical change in wiki policy to a wiki I don't really contribute to anymore. Nevertheless, I'd like to put forth my proposal, because I would like nothing more for All The Tropes than for it to leave the shadow of its pregenitor and come into its own as a distinct entity. I hope that you will take the time to consider my ideas, and possibly even agree with one or more of them.
I believe that we should take steps to restructure the content of the wiki in order to further differentiate All The Tropes from TV Tropes. In its current state, the wiki is little more than a clouded mirror of TV Tropes, with increasingly outdated content. But with a simple change of presentation, it can become something greater. Note, I am not suggesting any change to the actual content; no censorship or restricted topics or anything of the sort. Just changes in how the currently existing content is presented.
TV Tropes is designed as a browser narcotic, drowning people in minutiae to stave off boredom, and shoving the more meaningful analytical content into subpages. TV Tropes is primarily motivated by ad revenue, and this structuring of content is conducive to wiki walks, which expose users to more ads, and make TV Tropes more money. All The Tropes, by contrast, is a not-for-profit project motivated by the desire to educate and make information freely available. The unfriendly design that we've inherited from TV Tropes only undermines these functions.
In the case of tropes, the main page should strive to give the reader a crash course on all the essentials of the trope, structured in a way that each section imparts greater understanding without threatening to overwhelm with minutiae too early. To that end, the main page of a trope ought to be structured as follows:
- Trope name
- Subpage menu
- Image (if applicable)
- Laconic description: The essence of the trope in 70 characters or less. Important for helping the reader judge if the topic on this page is of interest to them or not. A quote may be used here, if and only if it encapsulates the trope more elegantly than a quarter-Tweet could.
- Abstract: A paragraph or two expounding upon the laconic description. While not to the extent of the laconic description, the abstract should remain as straightforward as possible, and avoid tangents or inside jokes. A new reader should be able to read these paragraphs, and feel like they've got a solid understanding on how the trope is played straight.
- Examples: A list of 5-10 examples, all from highly popular works, covering as many forms of media as possible. 95% of all readers should be able to recognize at least one example, and relate it to the abstract above. Not all examples have to be written; in the case of primarily visual tropes, an image gallery should be substituted. Below this short list, a link to More Examples should direct the curious reader to the comprehensive catalog of examples, images, and quotes that tropers have collected.
- Deeper Analysis: Now that the reader has expressed interest in the trope, learned about the trope, and connected the trope to at least one familiar example, they're ready to go deeper. This is the section which gets into the weeds, discussing its place in the cultural zeitgeist, implications unfortunate and otherwise, etc. Breezy language, weird asides, inside jokes, and the like are encouraged here. If a trope has an especially large amount of ideas to unpack, this section should limit itself to about 5 paragraphs, and then link to an Analysis subpage at the end of the section, where there's more liberty to go into great detail.
- Playing With: Here is where we list generic examples of how the trope can be exaggerated, subverted, or otherwise modified. Only the most obvious ways in which a trope can be played with should be listed on the main page. Particularly wild or meta ways of playing with the trope, such as Deconstruction or Zig-Zagging, should be relegated to the Playing With subpage (linked at the end of the section). Exceptions should be made on a case-by-case basis; for example, you can't describe the Humongous Mecha genre without touching on Deconstruction.
- Just For Fun: This is where the trope page is allowed to go completely off the rails, with humorous quips, haikus, headscratchers, and whatever other irreverent things tropers come up with.
- Related Tropes: Finally, to cap things off, a list of relevant tropes should be provided for further reading, including but not limited to supertropes, subtropes, and sister tropes.
This is just one way that a trope page could potentially be organized. Work, Creator, and Useful Notes pages could also get similar treatment.
Anyway, that's the end of my long-winded ramble. I really do hope that at least one of my ideas is received well, or at the very least I hope I've sparked at least one person's interest in giving All The Tropes a distinct identity from TV Tropes. @Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @Robkelk @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak
...you know, you're really on to something, and this is honestly an elephant in the room that the project would have to tackle sooner or later.
I've only casually skimmed this since I'm about to sleep but from what I saw at a glance it's pretty damn well-considered.
I'm going to have to give this some thought before replying at length. And it's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, so this might end up needing to wait for a bit... at least on my to-do list.
It's not Thanksgiving in the US, but this is a hell of big proposal. And a hell of a big job -- we have 21,576 trope pages as of last count, and every last one of them will need to be entirely rewritten -- at one a day (which might be optimistic, especially for the bigger trope pages), it would take a single editor more than fifty-nine years. We'll need a dozen or more editors doing nothing but this every single day to accomplish this in under five years.
Not saying it's a bad idea, just that it's a much bigger task than you might be anticipating.
I echo Looney Toons on this one. A good idea, but the feasibility of getting it done in anything resembling a timely manner is quite another.
We might be able to automate things... but that would require some good bot-coding, and we'd need to agree on what needed to be done and in what order. It would also require using existing page and subpage text, so there would still be human intervention required in places where we don't have that yet (such as the "between 5-10 prolific examples" page section if we as a whole decide we want that).
Well, the reception to my idea was more positive than I was anticipating, so I'm glad for that. Since the main objection seems to be a matter of time and resources, let's scale back my immodest proposal, and set a goal that can be accomplished within three months or so.
There are currently 83 Featured Articles on this wiki, which are the most likely to be visited by newcomers. Let's collectively focus our efforts on creating modified versions of those articles, then roll out the changes all at once and poll the userbase to see how they feel about the new structure.
If the reception is too negative and we can't agree on a middle ground, we'll revert the changes, and abandon the idea. But, if the users like the new direction of the wiki, then we can think about ways to incentivize users to restructure other pages in a manner similar to the Featured Articles.
My thinking is, the hardest part will be changing all the Featured Articles, and getting people onboard with the idea. After that, spreading the changes to the remaining 20,000 and change articles will be much more of a breeze, as more and more tropers join in on the effort.
Yeah, what you proposed here is an incredibly big ask - far from a bad ask, but boy howdy is it big.
The Featured articles might well be the best place to start with this.
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Comprehensive lists of examples and works should be relegated to subpages. |
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We might want to start with the tropes listed at Category:Pages with examples on subpages, then, since that part of the work has already been done. There are 293 pages listed there, so a single Troper could do that subset in a single year (at one trope per day) and still take time off for Christmas.
Assuming, of course, that we want to do this. :)
OK, I've made a rough draft of what a newly restructured page might look like, located in my sandbox. User:QuestionableSanity/sandbox/Laugh Track
I'm unsure why I imagined something more drastic in the draft itself, it's a draft after all - that said, it's a pretty good starting point for the concept. My current pondering is about working templates into and around a format like that, provided it's adopted.
I see that you're the person who created this page and redirected it to One Piece. I'm wondering why you didn't create it as a disambiguation page, considering the most famous meaning of the term is with regard to British Communism.
Hello!
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This privilege comes with a responsibility: You also have Moderation rights. Whenever somebody makes an edit that requires moderation, it will appear at Special:Moderation until somebody with Moderation rights either approves or rejects it. Please pitch in when there are posts waiting for moderation. I trust that only spam will be rejected. 😀
Hi! File:Princess69.jpg has gone 404, and there aren't any URLs in the summary text for me to find a copy of the file on the web. The page history says you were the one who uploaded it in the first place. Do you still have a copy, or (better yet) know where it can be found?
Never mind - the file isn't being used any more.
What do you want to rename Template:Presidents to? We can't use that template for the Presidents of Germany, the Presidents of Brazil, the Presidents of Mexico, the Presidents of ACME Corporation, etc., etc., etc. ...
Forgot the ping: @QuestionableSanity
Template:POTUS is the shortest possible unambiguous name. As far as I know, that acronym has no other definitions besides "President Of The United States".
Sounds good to me. I'll redirect the current template to that name; we can delete the redirect once it's no longer being used.
Thanks.
Way back in March 2015, you asked that "The self-demonstrating and plain english versions of the article need to mirror one another in what they say" on Blind Idiot Translation. I finally got around to doing that - you can thank Google Translate for the odd phrase choices.
Back on 12 March 2015, you added the category "Pages Needing Cleanup" to Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Case 5: Turnabout Substitution/YMMV. Do you remember why?
I'd like to replace the bald Category tag with a Cleanup template, but that template requires a reason be given.
While we're at it, on 11 March 2017 you added the Cleanup template to Assimilation Plot with the reason "Examples section needs cleanup." Simply putting the template on the page tells us that much... Do you remember why the Examples section on that page needs cleanup?
And you added the "citation needed" template to Pokegirls/YMMV, which added "Pages Needing Cleanup" to that page automagically. it seems unreasonable to me to ask somebody else to justify an opinion on a YMMV page (which by definition is nothing but opinions), so I've removed that template.
By any chance did you confuse the "citation needed" template with the "context" template? It's completely reasonable to ask for more information (which is what "context" does), it's unreasonable to suggest on a YMMV page that somebody might be wrong (which is what the "citation needed" template does).
Truth be told, I haven't been participating on this site much at all, let alone for administrator reasons. I don't remember the reasons for why I did any of those things, so if you feel that any of those changes are unwarranted, feel free to undo them.
The process is pretty simple, if tedious. Use the source button on the Wayback Machine copy to get the raw page. Be aware that the Machine's crawler doesn't always grab the source when it grabs the page, so make sure it's giving you a source from before the cut-off; and compare your finished page with the TVT page to make sure you haven't missed any important edits.
A lot of the style markup is the same and don't need changing. Mostly what you need to update is links. First do a search and replace on "{{" and "}}" and turn them into "[[" and "]]". Then go through and fix the Camel Case links. If you do that inside the wiki's editor with the link suggestions gadget turned on, it'll save you a fair amount of time. Ptitles will need you to check the TVT page as rendered to find the text they're supposed to be. Do a preview and check for redlinks -- these will mostly be page names where we changed the capitalization or added punctuation.
Spoiler markup has to be changed, from "[[spoiler:hidden text]]" to "{{spoiler|hidden text}}".
Convert text inside a hottip to a <ref></ref> markup.
Save the image(s) on the page directly from the Wayback Machine to your machine, and upload them if necessary. Then just replace the TVT image/caption markup with ours.
Most TVT indexes are now ATT categories, so all you need to do is change the container around the index name. Oh, and always add the "Banned on TV Tropes" category when restoring a censored page.
Oh, and while you're doing all that, it wouldn't hurt to fix any spelling and grammar errors you come across.
That should cover just about everything you should encounter on a typical page. Anything not covered here, you have editing experience -- you should be able to know how to code something here to get the same look there.
It's been over a month now, you've shown yourself to be on good behavoir, so I handed you back your mod hat.
Welcome back to the club and re-add yourself to our page of sysops if you aren't there already.
Thanks!