Statler And Waldorf stingers: Part 2

Gah. Reading through the first few on that list solidifies for me that these need to go somewhere else. On the S&W page or in the dustbin, either works for me.

I'll put this here in case anyone wants to help me move the stingers

As per [[ https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=12936841400A70438300&page=8#195 this disscusion,]] all Statler And Waldorf stingers should be moved from their pages to the Statler And Waldorf page

(the space between [[ and http is so that you will be able to copy the link

edited 7th Jan '11 1:39:38 PM by dontcallmewave

I wrote the most generous list I could, assuming any connection should be enough (Anyone Remember Pogs? -> Nostalgia, Tv Tropes Wiki Drinking Game -> They should probably have an entry, etc.). If what people think is that they generally have to go I'm certainly not going to argue with that.

I disagree with putting them on the index.

The wiki is supposed to be fun; stingers are fun. Pure information content is not the only judge of worth.

Also, putting them on the index kind of defeats the point of a stinger, as brought up way back at the beginning of the topic. It'd be like moving all the CIAPHAS CAINs to Ciaphas Cain.

(That said, I do support deleting the unfunny ones.)

edited 7th Jan '11 6:49:28 PM by BlackHumor

Humor is subjective. There is no chance that we'll agree on which ones are unfunny.

Putting them all on one page means that they'll no longer be stingers and will take the humor out of the few entries that actually are funny. And we'll still have the other problems - they diss the wiki, most of them aren't funny, they're too long to be stingers and leaving them all on one page will only create more negative, more unfunny entries. We may even end up with people using the S&W page as a way to stealthily complain about the wiki. Oh, and we'll still get people who didn't get the memo adding S&W stingers to other pages.

The only thing we can do is leave them alone, or delete every stinger and the Statler And Waldorf page and make a forum game about it or something.

edited 7th Jan '11 7:15:58 PM by Redhead

Wait.'Redhead'?

Thought I had banned this bitch.

That was Red Hair (assuming they are not the same).

edited 7th Jan '11 7:17:02 PM by Ghilz

Say something.

Okay.

Please don't kill me.

<Stabs Citizen in the neck.\>

Okay. We are watching hair redness. Do not think we are not.

"They diss the wiki" isn't a problem. Hopefully we can take criticism from friggin' Muppets.

"They're not funny" is a problem, but not all of them aren't funny. Or well, to some people not all of them aren't funny; if you don't like the format of the joke I suppose that's too bad for you. The ones that are just bad timing or something we can improve or cut without messing with the rest of them.

They're absolutely not too long to be stingers; stingers ought to get pretty lax length requirements anyway because they're at the end of the page, but three lines is shorter than the page quotes on plenty of pages. Page quotes, I might add, that are not all funny.

EDIT: Having read a few of these, please put the ones on Blatant Lies and Bizarro Universe back; they're perfect examples of both fitting the format and being actually funny. Especially Blatant Lies.

edited 7th Jan '11 8:04:48 PM by BlackHumor

"They diss the wiki" isn't a problem. Hopefully we can take criticism from friggin' Muppets.

Except they're not just Muppets. They're tropers who are using the likeness of Muppets to complain about the wiki. Having a single page dedicated to them will create a page filled with thinly veiled insults towards the wiki, and knowing how all pages like this turn out, it will have more and more bile as time goes on.

"They're not funny" is a problem, but not all of them aren't funny. Or well, to some people not all of them aren't funny; if you don't like the format of the joke I suppose that's too bad for you. The ones that are just bad timing or something we can improve or cut without messing with the rest of them.

You're completely missing the point. I think some of them are funny, too. But since humor is inherently subjective, there's always going to be disagreements on whether they're funny or not. That will cause flame wars, arguing and headaches for the mods and wiki curators.

They're absolutely not too long to be stingers; stingers ought to get pretty lax length requirements anyway because they're at the end of the page, but three lines is shorter than the page quotes on plenty of pages. Page quotes, I might add, that are not all funny.

That says a lot more about overly long quotes than it does about stingers.

edited 7th Jan '11 8:29:46 PM by Redhead

They're tropers who are using the likeness of Muppets to complain about, mock and belittle the wiki.

You think that the comments being attributed to two fictional characters as a type of memetic in-joke are being made this seriously? Can anyone actually show that tropers adopted these as a subversive effort to intentionally hate on the wiki? They're obviously jokes.

But since humor is inherently subjective, there's always going to be disagreements on whether they're funny or not. That will cause flame wars, arguing and headaches for the mods and wiki curators.

I'm sure sensible people like myself can comfortably ignore most jokes around here that they don't get. I don't have a clue what the stinger on The Stinger page is even supposed to mean, but I'm not going to complain and push for its removal just because I, in particular, am not at all familiar with The Legend Of Zelda.

edited 7th Jan '11 8:35:36 PM by SeanMurrayI

Unfortunately, some people aren't nearly as sensible as yourself.

Well then anyone who isn't sensible can be told by people with sense to calm down and not make mountains out of mere molehills. Problem solved.

edited 7th Jan '11 8:37:02 PM by SeanMurrayI

If it was that easy, there would be no flame wars, ever.

The funny part is the Statler And Waldorf page used to have a paragraph explaining that they should only be used on tropes that are actually relevant to their schtick, but no one payed any attention to it anyway so it got removed.

edited 7th Jan '11 8:44:27 PM by Anaheyla

Worth noting that I don't get why Ganon is in that stinger, and I've played most of the Zelda games.

Anyway, back on main topic. Given the current state of the Statler And Waldorf page (the current fix makes the page just look sloppy and ugly), this whole fix is looking more problematic.

In terms of finding an objective standard, there really is only one I can think of: that the Statler And Waldorf stinger on a trope page actually uses the trope in question as part of the joke. Other factors such as humor and relevance are subjective. So if we want to pick and choose, that's probably the best approach.

As for where they are/were on work pages...well, they probably have to go.

Edit: Did not know that, but I doubt it would be enforceable anyway if we went back to it.

edited 7th Jan '11 8:48:41 PM by TotemicHero

Flame wars don't have anything to do with anything here. They're never get anything productive done for our ends, they rarely have any influence over discussions on changing anything on the wiki (apart from bringing an entire repair or modification process to a dead stop), and they tend to wind up being culled when they appear. They're nothing to be concerned about.

The funny part is the Statler And Waldorf page used to have a paragraph explaining that they should only be used on tropes that are actually relevant to their schtick, but no one payed any attention to it anyway so it got removed.

I thought that message was more to the point about discouraging tropers from placing them on just any page; it was more like a general guideline that served to promote its use (that part of the page even made note about there being only around 7 of 80 pages that were directly related to S&W's modus operandi that they appear on) but encourage discretion to only employ when having something of moderate quality to use.

edited 7th Jan '11 8:57:46 PM by SeanMurrayI

The solution to flame wars is not to remove anything anyone could ever flame about, it's to ban the people who think it's worth starting a shitstorm over a joke.

I haven't seen anyone starting a shitstorm over these, though, so it's clearly nothing to worry about.

And I think I can get behind Totemic Hero's solution.

But that doesn't solve anything. It doesn't address the criticisms the OP and everyone else made.

I honestly don't see most of the criticisms as real problems. Besides that S&W (as Mad pointed out a while ago) is a tiny, tiny percentage of the wiki, you don't need to read them even if they're there. Being critical or long or annoying should therefore not be relevant because it's not leaking out from the stinger and you don't need to read the stinger.

The only real problem with S&W is that sometimes they're not funny, or they don't fit the format of Statler And Waldorf. The first one I guess we can't really do anything about, but we can certainly fix the second.

As I see it, the three main complaints were:

• They aren't funny.
• They aren't helpful to the wiki.
• They are forced in places they don't belong.

We can't do anything about the first (that's as much a function of some people's sense of humor as it is the quality of the jokes), but we can rewrite them and/or cut some of them so that the latter two improve (even though the third one is to a degree subjective).

The main problem I think people had was that a lot of the arguments against Statler And Waldorf focused on the first point and neglected the other two. Hence the back and forth of this thread.

Again, I second Totemic Hero.