This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Gus: The entries Batman Cold Opening and "Professor X..." were cribbed from RS Paulette of Ten Ton Studios
Ununnilium: ...so how does this relate to Born in the Funny Papers, and the rest of the wiki in general?
Ununnilium: Read General Suggestions. Ah, I see. Hmmmmmmm. But what about Born in the Funny Papers, still?
Gus Yup, either those should be dragged over to Comic Book Tropes, or it should be made alittle clearer that Born in the Funny Papers is about tropes that have escaped into the wild from comic books.
Ununnilium: Also, it doesn't link to any higher-up page right now. I assume it's going to?
For right now, I'm putting a Comic Book Tropes link on all Born in the Funny Papers pages. Not sure wether we should cut it or transform it.
Ununnilium: Edited Born in the Funny Papers a bit. Now, one thing: how exactly are we going to differentiate, for instance, Batman (the comics character) and Batman (the eponymous '60s show)? They seem to want to have their own pages, and I'm not sure what tactic we should use.
Ununnilium: Also, there's no direct way to get here from the sidebar, except to go into Tropes and click on one you know links here.
Gus: I was sort of waiting to see if it picked up any speed before giving it a place on the sidebar. I suppose we can give it a fly, though, and see if contributes some speed. I'll do that, while thinking about that thorny classification problem. // ...later: That's in. Such sub-headings as Comic Book Genres and Comic Book Characters will no doubt be called for, as time rolls on. On the classification issue... I'm familiar with Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, and The Flash as TV series that shared a book name. Are there others? There may be no reason to let these five tails wag the whole dog. (Man, I love mangling a metaphor!)
Ununnilium: Well, there's been a slow but steady growth so far. We'll see.
Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Silver Surfer, and X-Men all come to mind, and I'm sure there are others. Though I note that there was never a Superman TV series - the one in the '50s was The Adventures Of Superman.
Ununnilium: ...though there was a Superboy series. And I'm thinking that, for shared universes, it might be easier to track characters than series.
Gus: OK, the list of shows with a comic book name is pretty long. I suppose we want to talk about both Books and TV Shows. How about a convention that an entry about a book is entered as Batman-Book (no italics)? If it gets cumbersome in the text, it can alway be rendered Batman with double-brackets. Also, if the convention is used (the "-Book" part), I can put in a way to make a -Book link look different from other links.
Morgan Wick: On another topic, we need a general solution for the problem where a tropes listing deals with a specific form of trope (comic books, video games, movies...) but is nowhere near sidebar status (a category that, in my opinion, Comic Book Tropes would fall in). Should we have an "Other trope categories" section of the sidebar?
Ununnilium: ...if you can somehow make the -Book part not show up, that sounds good. Though again, you'd more likely have an entry for the character Batman than the "Batman" comic series (which is only one of the ones he stars in).
And Morgan: I agree.
Gus: The more I think about the -Book thing, the suckier it seems. We just need some way to distinguish between Batman the series, Batman the book, and Batman the character. That is what "Groups" do, according to the wiki-way, but we don't like Groups, because they isolate information from the larger topic, tropes...
Back in the early days of this Wiki we used formulations like Angel The Series to distinguish between such things. It wasn't very convenient.
Ununnilium: Maybe... using braces like {} in the name? `.` And putting, say, Batman{comics}?
Gus: Something like that could work for the link. It's the destination of the link that is the problem. The entry title that is being referred to by the link, that is. The idea of "Comic Book.Batman" formulation that Groups use isn't all bad. The "Comic Book." part can be clipped off pretty easily. The thing that needs solving is that we should be able to use "Comic Books.Batman" and have the entry and its changes show up in Recent Changes and searches.
Ah. I can solve that. It'll take a day or so...
Ununnilium: Awesome! Also, something else that might make it a bit more intuitive is having the link be a different color.
Gus: Yup, that would be dead simple, after solving the other thing. BTW, Morgan Wick, could you give an example of a trope that fits the category you are concerned about?
Morgan Wick: Well, Comic Book Tropes is the first thing to come to mind! Arguably Commercials Tropes, even though that's linked to from Tropes. New Media Tropes, once it got pulled back into the fold, pretty much saw all the attention go to its videogames-related entries. But what I'm describing is a mostly hypothetical thing for future expansion, for example, if we decided to do movie-specific tropes, or the tropes that are still specific to stage plays.
Ununnilium: Darnit, I can't do the cool thing. ;.;
Gus: Woops. The change sort of fell off my radar. You can do a Comicbook.Same Name As A Series entry right now. Making sure it shows up on recent changes and pimping up the link color is something I'll get right on.
Ununnilium: Ah, excellent. At this point, I'll wait to do it until the morning anyway.
Gus: I've put in a lot of code changes to support these issues. The nice thing? Recent changes paints faster, 'cuz of my mad programming skillz. The not-so-nice thing? I have no idea if anyone will be able to puzzle out how it works.
Ununnilium: It'd probably be better if it didn't show the "Comicbook." part.
Gus: Working on that. The guy who wrote pmwiki drank not from the object-oriented Kool Aid, so chasing down all the "ifs, ands, ors, and elses" in the code is taking some time.
Filby: I question the necessity of listing each member of the Authority separately and am removing them; readers can check out the page for the team for info. None of the members really have a presence outside of the Authority (or Stormwatch in some cases). If readers want to find out more about the individual characters, they can just go to Wikipedia.
Ununnilium: IMHO, if someone wants to do individual pages for Authority members, that's fine. Until then, though, I agree that the empty links should be gone. (And we should cut down on adding new ones in general.)
Ununnilium: Do we really need a Marvel 1602 universe entry? Maybe one for the series (which is awesome, BTW), but considering that it only has that one miniseries plus the new non-Gaiman miniseries...
Morgan Wick: So when should we break this up into several sub-pages, like we have with Anime and Videogames?
Ununnilium: Good question. The thing is, we need to fill in the entries before they can get their own pages. Perhaps Ages could have its own page.
Ununnilium: Do we have a trope for "mechanical thing that turns off superpowers"? I remember the neutralization collars the enemies of the X-Men used, and City Of Heroes has the Bio-Energy Feedback Inducer, a weapon used by the "Sappers".
Mister Six: I'm an idiot. Someone put Hellblazer in under the "characters" section, but since none of the characters in that comic are called "Hellblazer" it looks a bit odd. I thought that rather than move it to "other comics" I would change it to John Constantine: Hellblazer but I buggered up the wiki code. So sorry for that everyone, I'll leave it alone for a bit. At least until I'm properly awake.
Ununnilium: I'm just moving it to other comic-book series; perhaps we could put a John Constantine redirect in Characters.
Meta4:Having John Constantine in the characters list when it redirects to Hellblazer just screws up the people who are using the Comicbook Tropes bar at the bottom to Archive Binge on those pages. We've already got Hellblazer under Other Series, so I'm removing John Constantine.
Ununnilium: Took Vertigo out of universes, since it covers several different universes.
Ack Sed: Is there any place for 2000AD
? There's a few mentions,but no actual entry that draws attention to the huge amount of characters and series it's fostered (No Judge Dredd? No Rogue Trooper?),not to mention the big names that started/worked there.
Ununnilium: There's plenty of room! It's just that I don't know anything about it, and apparently, neither do the other contributors. Feel free to make an entry and whatnot.
Ununnilium: Okay, I've split the stuff in the floatbox over to a new page, Comic Books.
Chinesecheckers: Scans Daily is down, but there are at least two sites that is trying to rebuild what was lost. We should check entries that have links to it and either weed them out, or update them.
Some Sort Of Troper: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=y9z9ih39aprmb0abvqk43xzs&page=1#20
- The media trope lists are to be made for tropes that belong outright to a medium- that which define the medium and are interwoven to its nature, while tropes that can appear across many media are to be regarded as universal. This should help prevent needless duplication on many lists, account for the ever moving homes of many tropes and prevent index decay. Hopefully the indicies will be more useful and impart more on the nature of the medium itself.
I will be clearing through the list. I will try and take things that belong to the Super Hero genre and note them in index form on the Super Hero page. The page already talks about the tropes and mentions works that fall into it but it would benefit from a genre tropes list. I also figured that since Sequential Art covers a couple more media as well but isn't its own index yet that I would leave the shared tropes here. The other pages appear to have been created on the basis that they were deviations from this page with a list like Webcomic Tropes looking at the Web part more than the comic part. It just seemed more congruent with what was already here but if later people feel that Sequential Art should get all the shared one and then the subindices focus on the difference: book, web, manga etc. well then I'd be all for that. Currently the page is not well cared for so I'm going to take it to the forum first.
