- Prune the examples: Editors review the example list looking for ones that are poorly written (or off-topic) which can be removed from the page, leaving behind the good examples.
- Kill it with fire: Delete the entire article as having poor focus. If it's determined that we don't want the page to ever come back in any form either, it joins the Permanent Red Link Club.
- Create a set of subpages for it: Useful if the page is sufficiently popular, and also sufficiently objective, that deletion is undesirable. (The results may possibly be put under Sugar Wiki or Darth Wiki if not objective, and sufficiently popular and straightforward (e.g., Crowning Moment of Awesome, So Bad, It's Horrible).)
- Leave the trope where it is, but make the example section a separate page, sometimes on the Sugar Wiki or Darth Wiki.
- Rename a trope. Sometimes it's the title which can cause the whole mess. See Everything You Wanted to Know About Changing Names for more detail on that front.
- Cut and prohibit all examples from the page: The course of action for which this page is named — what's left is a readable definition and some scar tissue saying "No examples please. This only defines the term." Everything else goes in the wastebasket. note
Examples of articles deleted entirely:
- Basically any member of the Permanent Redlink Club (aside from This Troper, and other deliberate redlinks.).
Examples of articles split into multiple pages:
- Any page that was on Multipage Tropes back when we listed those.
- Fridge Logic → now largely located in the Headscratchers namespace → Now combined with other Fridge thoughts in its own section.
Examples of articles cutting and prohibiting examples:
- 8.8
- Accidental Nightmare Fuel
- Album Filler
- Anatomically Impossible Sex
- Attraction to Outliers
- Award Snub
- Awesomeness Withdrawal
- Backtracking
- Badass
- Base-Breaking Character
- Baka
- Bile Fascination
- Black Hole Sue
- Bishoujo
- Canon Defilement
- Canon Sue
- Character Death
- Character Development
- Comedic Underwear Exposure
- Constructive Criticism
- Copy Cat Sue
- Cult Classic
- Dojikko
- Epic Riff
- Explicit Content
- Fake Difficulty
- Favorite Trope
- Fetish Fuel
- The Firefly Effect
- Gorn
- Happy Ending
- Hype Backlash
- Intended Audience Reaction
- Internet Backdraft
- Jerk Sue
- Lemon
- Like You Would Really Do It
- Lime
- Lolicon
- Macekre
- Mistakenly Banned
- Moral Dilemma
- Original Character
- Orwellian Editor — also permalocked
- Panty Shot
- Perverse Sexual Lust
- Pet Peeve Trope
- Protagonist Title
- Parody Sue
- Purity Sue
- Relationship Sue
- Rule 34
- Shipping
- Shipping Goggles
- Shock Site
- Shotacon
- Silent Majority
- Snuff Film
- So Okay, It's Average
- Sturgeon's Law
- Squick
- Sympathetic Sue
- Tainted by the Preview
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot
- Trope Enjoyment Loophole
- Unpleasable Fanbase
- The Untwist
- Video-Game Movies Suck
- Villain Sue
- Vocal Minority
- Waggle
- Wangst
- Writer Cop Out
- WTH, Casting Agency?
- Yiff
Examples of segregated examples:
- Narm → DarthWiki/Narm Which was later moved back to Narm.
- Aversions of The Problem with Licensed Games were moved to SugarWiki.No Problem With Licensed Games.
Examples of Renamed Tropes:
- Boring Invincible Hero → Invincible Hero
- You Fail X Forever Pages → Artistic License - X (e.g. You Fail Biology Forever → Artistic License – Biology)
Examples of dumping the examples list on another wiki:
- Fetish Fuel
- Troper Tales, although that's long gone. Today, the Troper Tales are all but Lost Forever.
Mixed examples:
- Mary Sue received somewhat of a 2/4 hybrid, with the article being (almost?) completely re-written and losing all the examples. Though now it seems the new page is a stitched-up combo of the two versions a-la Frankenstein's monster... We're not sure what to call it.
- You Fail Logic Forever initially had a spin-off page (Insane Troll Logic) for listing non-specific examples as the page had become rather bloated, and a release valve for non-specific examples was thought desirable (type 5). And then the original page was reorganized so that all the fallacies contained therein were spun off into their own pages (type 3), while the original spin-off had developed through a sort of reverse Trope Decay into a full trope in its own right note .
- Everything listed in No Real Life Examples, Please! counts as a example of a partial Example Sectionectomy; the scar tissue differs in that it contains "No real life examples, please!" rather than "No examples, please. This only defines the term.", as Real Life is the example subsection most prone to need pruning, for various subtly obvious reasons.
- Nightmare Fuel was originally High Octane Nightmare Fuel, with Accidental Nightmare Fuel (see above) originally being Nightmare Fuel. Needless to say, the change was a little confusing for in-wiki links, but necessary due to people using the trope to describe anything they personally found scary. Even with the name changes, Nightmare Fuel pages for individual works still tended to get bloated with poor examples that just happened to coincide with a single person's fears (it's supposed to be things that are frightening to the entire general population), so the examples were tentatively removed — this sparked a rather large backdraft. Currently, the Nightmare Fuel pages for works operate under Example Lobotomy rules — examples are allowed, but hyperbole, purple-prose, and other forms of flowery page-bloating cruft are kept to a strict minimum.
Non-TV Tropes examples:
- Wikipedia's "in popular culture" sections were heavily cracked down on at one point as a reaction against "Fancruft" and rampant Entry Pimping, of the kind satirised in this
xkcd cartoon. A lengthy Edit War about how much attention the depiction of Madame de Pompadour in a Doctor Who episode should have received on her page may have contributed.
