The Troper Tales Great Hunt

(Move this to a separate subforum if necessary)

There's a lot of whining about Troper Tales on the forums (and off this site, for that matter). Admittedly, there is some ridiculous stuff on those pages. However, I think the theory behind Troper Tales is sound; as this site is an exploration of tropes, discussion about how they occur in Real Life is a natural evolution of this mission. Sadly, many of the pages in the namespace are frankly horrible.

It has occurred to me that TV Tropes is, if nothing else, a community-driven enterprise. Thus, the solution to the issues plaguing TT must be a community response, rather than simply whining until the admins nuke pages that you dislike.

Thus, I propose the Great Hunt. The Great Hunt's mission is to carefully maintain various Troper Tales pages, cut out Natter, self-indulgence, and tomfoolery, and keep each page rooted to its stated goal: to describe uses of X trope in people's daily lives.

To join the Hunt, you should take at least one Troper Tales page under your wing. Set it on your watchlist and check up on it every few days. Purge it of unnecessary crap and maybe send P Ms to some of the contributors who posted on the page previously, constructively criticizing their output.

The difference between this and normal corrective editing is that this is a long-term, continuous group effort. It will take time and the contributions of many Tropers, but I think that together we can bring Troper Tales back up to the same standard as the rest of this site.

NOTE: Though this is my idea, I cannot lead this project. In two weeks, I'm leaving for the summer, where my Internet access will be limited at best. After that, I start my sophomore year at university. So, I'm going to be very busy. Do we have anyone who'd be willing to coordinate this endeavour?

I am actually already doing that for several pages.

We'd need more moderators for this. Does anyone have anybody they'd like to suggest for the position?

edited 18th May '11 12:25:14 PM by EnglishIvy

Keep up the good work, and scrounge up some recruits!

I'd love to volunteer, but as I said before, I'm rather indisposed. I don't know who all the mods are off the top of my head, so I don't have any suggestions. Of course, the idea behind this project is that it's a community thing, so we should try to get as many non-mods behind it as possible.

I approve of this so hard I think I sprained something. Anything to knock TT down a few pegs on the embarassment scale, I'm all for.

I'm not sure if this will do anything to improve the wiki's reputation, but getting rid of the creepy is getting rid of the creepy, so sign me up.

I already curate several Troper Tales pages. It's not that much work to do after the initial clean up. None of mine get edited constantly.

edited 18th May '11 2:25:36 PM by shimaspawn

Count me in.

I dust off some pages once in a while, so I'll step that up.

EDIT: About the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment: If someone else adds their TT back in later, I should probably leave it alone, right?

edited 18th May '11 2:38:02 PM by BoundByTheMoon

I believe taking it to the discussion page would be the appropriate course of action.

@ Neo: The reputation's an issue, but it's secondary, frankly. Our main concern is making this site as good as it can possibly be. Making our selves look more appealing to other sites should not be as high a priority. Let's make our community happy before we try to please other people.

You've got it backwards. If we sit here and just pander to our own base, we'll stagnate as have so many other sites. TV Tropes lives and dies by its attractiveness to the Internet community at large. Inbounds are our measure of success as a wiki.

That's not what I meant. I just meant that we shouldn't feel obligated to bend over backwards if some guy on, say, 4chan criticizes us. We should be open to new users, but we should avoid making TV Tropes an extension of other online communities. Accessibility is what we should aim for, but I don't think we should pander to our critics.

The trick is in establishing a workable compromise between accessibility and maintaining our own identity. Despite my earlier posts, I'd hate for TV Tropes to become a thoroughly insulated community. I just don't want us to feel like we have to appease chaps like the guys who made This Troper (who frankly don't seem to like us much to begin with).

So, how should I trim the Badass Bystander and Author Appeal pages?

edited 18th May '11 3:31:19 PM by chihuahua0

Just take out stuff that doesn't fit the tropes. The idea isn't so much to shorten the pages as it is to remove unneeded crap. If every example on the page fits the trope and isn't flame bait or self congratulatory nonsense, then the page should be fine at its present length.

So, I should remove the Natter from this:

Natter is natter, wherever it may be.

I think in Troper Tales we could go a little easy when it comes to natter. Not too much though, just not on the standards of the rest of the site.

Awesome. I've been looking for an excuse to go through and prune ThrowItIn. More than half of the examples are along the lines of "X did Y once during our production of Z play, and it was really funny," but said Y wasn't actually kept in subsequent productions. (The page history's going to look like a massacre when I'm done.)

This is fantastic. I'll go ahead and prune the "Badass ______" pages.

EDIT: I cleaned up the Took a Level in Badass page. Holy Christ, the ego-stroking was almost unbelievable.

edited 18th May '11 7:07:54 PM by OMalley

Can I suggest the words "Do not add yourself to this page" added to each Bad Ass page that lacks it? It really seems to help keep the egojerking off the page...

Uh, guys? Under these guidelines, pretty much the entire section is to be condemned.

edited 18th May '11 11:37:40 PM by EnglishIvy

Should there even be a Author Appeal page? I mean, it would invariably refer to potential Troper Works, and we already have pages for those.

Frankly, it might be a good idea to cull down the number of actual Troper Tales pages, especially those that don't really lend themselves to any but ego-stroking, wonkery, or bizarre sexual content. The first seems to be especially common, and it's been one of the major criticisms of Troper Tales. Not to mention, it'll make it less problematic to actually keep the section clean, since right now, it's colossal.

edited 19th May '11 6:22:03 AM by Miijhal

So, does this mean I have permission to call down an Exterminatus blank all of the pages? All of them?

edited 19th May '11 8:24:25 AM by Icarael