So, you want to help clean up Roleplays (or other smaller scale work namespaces) but don't know where to start? Fear not, it's not hard, here's a collection of the basics and rules you should be aware of when cleaning RPs, and the process of doing so.
Determining Availability
Before anything else, you need to determine if the work you are checking is considered to be published and publicly available.
Note that a work is considered publicly available automatically if it is/was mass marketed for sale and public use. If it was sold to the public on even a small scale, it is considered published.
The flow should go something like this.
1. First, check if the page has a functional link to the roleplay, or a Recap page. If it does, go down to Acceptable Archives below, if not continue to the next step.
2. If there is no link or Recap, search for one. Don't exhaust yourself looking for a link, but go through a few pages of Google results, try keywords, etc. If you do find one, check Acceptable Archives below. If you cannot find one, or the page contains a nonfunctional link, proceed to the next step.
3. If you have a link but it is down or nonfunctional, consult The Wayback Machine
, and see if you can locate an archived version of the link. If you can, go to Acceptable Archives below; if not, go to The Work is Absolutely Unpublished farther down.
Acceptable Archives
If the work does have a link of some kind, check the folders below to see whether the link is or is not considered to be a valid archive.
- Discord, IRC, and other offsite chat clients.
- Forum threads or other offsite archives that cannot be viewed without logging into an account.
- Archives that do not contain enough context or information to be troped. (ie: a loose synopsis that contains no dialogue is probably insufficient, a simple recount of events is also probably insufficient).
- Archives that are incomplete or partially missing, to the point where it makes understanding a majority of the work impossible.
- A public forum thread.
- A sufficiently detailed recap page (or pages).
- A writeup that goes into detail about character actions and maybe even dialogue. note
If the work has an acceptable archive linked on-page already, no action needs to be taken in that department. Check out Other Things to Watch For below if you think additional action is needed.
If the work does have an acceptable archive, but it is not linked on the work's page, add it. If you still think the page needs help after that, check out Other Things to Watch For below.
The Work is Absolutely Unpublished
If the work has absolutely no archive at all, or the only archive(s) are not valid, then the work is considered unpublished. As stated on the index, these pages are not allowed on the main wiki and should not have subpages or be linked there. Proceed with cleanup as follows.
1. Check if the page is a stub or not. If it has less than 3 valid examples with context and you can't migrate anything from a Character Sheets subpage, it is a stub; cutlist it and its subpages and kiss it goodbye. Be sure to remove its wicks once the cut goes through. If it is not a stub, proceed to step 2.
2. If the page is not a stub, check that its formatting and general setup are at least tolerable. Standards are a bit more lax on Darth, but if the page is in an absolutely awful state (example here), it may not be worth the trouble of saving the work, in which case you can cutlist it as well. If the page is at least tolerable, move to step 3.
3. Create a page on Darth Wiki, formatted like "Name Of Work Goes Here", migrate all contents that are acceptable to the darth wiki page, a completed page migration should look a bit like this. You can preserve the contents of the subpages on the Darth page, but DO NOT create subpages for Darth Wiki pages.
4. Index the work alphabetically on the Unpublished Works index.
5. Cutlist the main wiki pages.
6. Remove wicks to the main wiki pages.
7. Cleanup complete!
Other Things to Watch For
While cleaning up unpublished/private works is probably the easiest way to help, there are other things to keep an eye out for as well.
A big one is Auto-Erotic Troping, while those who created or are involved in a work can edit the objective main page, they cannot create or edit subpages. Keep alert for workpages made and edited by a single person, who also adds YMMV or other subpages, as these may be cases of Auto-Erotic Troping. Remember to take these up in the thread first before barging in and trying to unilaterally change things.
An occasional oddity of roleplay self-tropers is that they'll put almost all their examples on the Character Sheets, leaving little to nothing on the main works page. When you find a page where this has happened, see if you can find misplaced non-character tropes to migrate.
