All The Tropes:Works Pages Are a Free Launch

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

One of the few guidelines for this informal wiki is that the Trope Workshop is required for tropes pages. It's to get feedback from the Wiki Hive Mind on if these pages are valid (or "tropable"), and if so to get help with refining these pages. It is not a strict requirement, we don't really do many of those here, but there are several guidelines such as the Three Rules of Three to help you make a decent page that won't have to be merged or renamed at a later date.

However, if you want to make a page about a work (a TV Series, Film, Literature, Video Game, etc.) or about Creators involved in making works, then the fact that There Is No Such Thing as Notability comes into play. As long as these people and their works exist and are published (Unpublished works have their own dark little corner), then they have a right to a page. Do make sure we don't have it already -- although if it's part of a series, the entire series might be on one page and you can raid that for material for the individual work page.

In general, you don't need to get any prior approval to create a Works or Creator page. There are, though, a couple caveats to that generalization:

  • We do have a few "minimums" required for a work page:
    • You need to write at least a hundred words about the work in reasonably good English, in which you describe what it is, who created it and in what medium, and if it's an electronic work on the Net, where it can be found. It would also be nice if you explained why we should be interested in it.
    • You need at least five to ten tropes.
    • It must follow our Style Guide.
    • It must not be copied from TV Tropes. (See our copyrights policy.)
That's the absolute least you should put into a work page -- anything less than that, and your page runs the risk of being deleted by an admin. We inherited from TV Tropes hundreds if not thousands of work pages that each could be written on the back of a matchbook. We don't need more like them. You can find out more about what we like to see in a Work page in our Works Page Guidelines, including everything you can do to go above and beyond the call of duty.
  • Creator pages don't even require tropes, but they do require you write enough about the creator to tell us why we should care. See our Creator Page Guidelines for specifics.
  • Thanks to persistent vandals and a literal flood of spam Miraheze suffered between December 2019 and January 2020, not to mention Drive-By Updaters who ignore our copyright policy, new wiki members have their contributions go into our Moderation queue for their first few dozen edits or first few weeks (on the average).[1] A queued edit must be approved by a moderator before it will actually be applied to the wiki. We're generally very relaxed about what we let through, as long as it follows the style guide and isn't copyright infringement, but a new works page that doesn't meet our bare minimums won't be approved. We'll let you know that that's what happened, though, and give you advice on fixing it so it does get approved the next time around.

All The Tropes doesn't believe in the sort of restrictions on expression that made us fork from The Other Tropes Wiki, so there's no rule against pages that discuss pornographic works.[2] We do point out that it would be nice if there are at least three tropes on the page, though — if the only tropes you can list are IKEA Erotica and Porn Without Plot, does the work qualify for a page? (Only you can answer that question.)

For a step-by-step walkthrough, see Works Page Guidelines.

There are several paths you may take:

Options

Take it to Trope Workshop
This is what somebody chose for Johnny Depp (to get a good description of his landmark films and the right names of the tropes associated with him) but you don't have to and nobody will care. It's also a bit of a pain with entries slipping down the list due to less interest and a system more suited to short discussions. You can launch at any point; you can even leave the Trope Workshop entry running for longer to help flesh things out.
Take It to the Forums
You don't need the officious launch for these pages, and the media forums are probably better for drawing people who would know something about the work. It's also a better set up for collecting longer discussion either from lots of people or two people with a lot of back and forth or, for instance, if you have lots of adaptations and the way to name them all to worry about, or if it's a series of installments, or what should be seen as the proper spoiler level. Posts won't get buried as they are in Trope Workshop. You'd just have to accept that you'll have a longer turnaround time on responses.
Just launch it yourself
There are no Three Rules of Three to think about here,[3] so it's fine to make it a one-person job. Just make sure you have enough for the page to be viable: a decent description beyond a stub, and a list of the tropes in the work. You get less Wiki Magic at first, but your page will still grow somewhat.

Some people might say There Is No Such Thing As A Free Launch. They are... best ignored.

  1. Once we've noticed that you're a good contributor, we'll remove that restriction.
  2. There is a rule against pornographic images, though - it's in the Terms of Use set by our wiki providers. "Under no circumstances are you permitted to submit information to Miraheze which is illegal to display, distribute, or disseminate in the United Kingdom."
  3. If you insist: Three people would trivially agree on the title of a work (which we admit might be difficult with works that weren't originally in English - but if there's an official English translation, at least three people agreed to use that), the work has been published for three days, and if you've been around here for any length of time, you can probably think of three tropes it uses.