Description is too long: Determinator

Brevity is cool. That's why we have the Laconic Wiki so everyone who wants to be brief has a place to go to be cool.

However, brevity is not an essential necessity to main pages. Tropers have every freedom to go into specific details about a trope's application, function, origins, and related concepts—all of which can be very useful in fully understanding what a given trope is. And if you really want to organize a massive overhaul of dozens of page descriptions, it's more compelling to have a reason for doing such a thing out of basic necessity for maintaining what is important to the wiki (such as fixing page concepts when they are more than obviously broken)—not because it's "cool".

edited 9th Jun '11 10:55:25 PM by SeanMurrayI

I have no problems with the way the writeup is now.

Applications and Function should be on Analysis, not the main. Origin isn't particularly important and is pure word cruft for the most part. It's little better than Natter in a number of ways.

Any modest trope description should answer all of the following no matter what: (1) what the trope is, (1) what the trope does, (3) where the trope shows up. None of those things will be answered if a trope's application or function are absent on the main page, leaving tropes with very incomplete practical explanations.

The description for Analysis pages doesn't even match with what you say they are supposed to be used for. Most significantly, they appear to have been intended for work pages, and Analysis pages for actual tropes don't even touch on any practicalities of a trope itself, such as application and function, anyway.

edited 9th Jun '11 11:17:18 PM by SeanMurrayI

I assume point three is actually "conditions under which the trope shows up" rather than "series that like this trope".

We may have had a misunderstanding of terms though. By application, I assumed you meant something like Playing with a Trope and Function as why the author puts a trope in a work as a form of symbolism.

By "application" I mean "how the basic, straight trope is applied in a work" (for instance, Applied Phlebotinum is applied to works as "a versatile substance").

By "function" I mean "the purpose that the trope serves, what it is that the trope does in a work" (in this case, Applied Phlebotinum "causes an effect needed by the plot").

Yeah, I was thinking too meta. Meta doesn't go on the main page.

The problem's not length, it's "oh and another thing" mode - that is, lack of integrative writing and perspective. If you read a lot of metaphors about what a Determinator is at paragraph 1, you don't want to have to suddenly read through another one tacked at the end of paragraph 4. Having to constantly follow a new shiny train of thought is tiring, hence the fatigue and the sensation of "length".

Observations like "shmup bosses do something sort of like this", which must be some kind of subsubsubsubsubsubsubsubsubtrope of what that part actually needed to say, were also jarring.

I tried my best to help. Hopefully that's making progress.

edited 10th Jun '11 6:32:59 AM by TripleElation

Much better.

Thanks. The problem is not the length, but it is not well written. You did make the whole thing "shorter" not by deleting information, but by compressing them in a more readable paragraph.

A good solution for many "too long" tropes here. It is better to improve a trope by removing Word Cruft instead of deleting clarifying information, that can't be sorted into a subpage like Analysis.

Are we done here? It looks like it. That's a nice clean tight description now, much easier to read and to understand.

Much better. Locking this.