The growing problem of inscrutable titles and text

I was being semi-sarcastic, but this has turned into a better illustration of the futility of attempting to impose "titles should be totally clear" than I ever imagined.

A 'clear' name would probably be Incomprehensible Without Extra Materials or something. >_>

Doubt that would ever catch on, though. And I don't want it to.

Might make a good redirect, though.

You know, I just realised that we have a lot of titles that do require reading the article to fully understand them, such as You Require More Vespene Gas(What gas?), Skill Gate Characters(What's a skill gate?), Karl Marx Hates Your Guts(Why?], Battle Royale With Cheese(Fight with cheese?), Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap(Huh, real ones don't cost anything...), Offscreen Villain Dark Matter(Dark matter, ooh! Wait, it's about villains supplies...) etc. etc.

Also, once person has once read the article, does s/he need to re-read it again when he sees it again? first time you see, let's say Dojikko, you click it, read it and be on your merry way. Next time you see it you don't need to click it to understand it.

So, we're back to square one.

All the other ones have titles that at least hint at their contents and thus help bring to mind what they're about. Thus, when I see them, I can remember what they are. But every time I see Dojikko I have to click on it because it's just a random nonsense word. Every Damn Time.

Isn't that more a flaw with your memory if you can't remember one word? =/

Why should he have to remember some word in a language he doesn't speak in the first place?

Why should you have to remember any word? Thats still a silly objection.

I think Dojikko is a bad example, because it's not actually a trope. It's a Japanese Fan Speak article, and we would obviously want Fan Speak articles to have the appropriate name for whatever we're defining.

Examples of Dojikko go on the Cute Clumsy Girl page.

edited 8th Aug '11 12:25:42 PM by Meeble

^^Words in English are words the readers of this wiki are expected to know. Words they shouldn't be expected to know should only be used if another term can't be found.

^Ah, well, that's different, then.

edited 8th Aug '11 12:24:59 PM by INUH

Why do you remember words in other language? Because you just do. I bet you know what Bonjour, Guten Tag or Senor mean and I bet you do not speak those languages(if you do, apologies).

So what does MacGuffin imply? Thanatos Gambit, unless you know story behind it? Überwald? Götterdämmerung? Gesundheit?

I ask you seriosuly, do you forget word you read in five minutes? I bet that if you see word few times, you are going to remember it. Especialy if it is used a lot. That's how you learn them.

I hate to use this, but I am going to invoke Tropers Law. TV Tropes has personality, which sets it apart from others. Going to "dumb"(quotes because it's closest I got currently) to point where you no longer need to read articles strikes me stupid. That's what some of the arguments feel.

edited 8th Aug '11 12:32:58 PM by Mandemo

The thing is, that we need titles to know what the content of the trope is. That's what titles are for. If we're not gonna care about titles and them being comprehensible for the average English reader, then we might as well call them "Trope 1", "Trope 2" and the like.

Titles should serve as a way of identifying articles and knowing their contents same way they work for books, encyclopedias and the like.

I believe Mandemo said it best here . Its completely impossible to make every single title perfectly understandable just on its own. So if we can find a good pre-existing term for it, we should use it, even if its in another language.

Also, Eddie said he could make Laconics show up when mousing over bluelinks, which would solve most of this problem outright. Please contribute to cleaning up the Laconics here.

Okay, let's do some number crunching, because this thread needs moar maths.

For a point of comparison, I decided to compare The Libby (a trope name that's clearly problematic in quite a few ways) with Drives Like Crazy (a trope name that seems to match almost all our criteria perfectly). Keep in mind The Libby has multiple redirects and Drives Like Crazy has none, and I can't tell exactly what effect that has.

Inbounds:

• The Libby: 6,606
• Drives Like Crazy: 382

Wick Count:

• The Libby: 2,118
• Drives Like Crazy: 593

Accounting for the fact that more works use The Libby, I did a ratio comparison, using Drives Like Crazy's wick count as the baseline. Accounting for that usage, The Libby should have only 1,364 inbounds if the wick count of both tropes were identically proportionate to inbounds.

But they clearly aren't. The Libby has nearly five times the usage it should have under those numbers, meaning either Drives Like Crazy is underperforming, or The Libby is overperforming, or both. I'm inclined to believe in "both".

So, going by this, clearly our rules as they stand aren't what draw people in, and there are other factors involved. The questions being, what are these other factors, and how far away from our rules would it be to try and harness them to our advantage?

edited 8th Aug '11 1:21:53 PM by TotemicHero

There are thousands of tropes, a plain english name makes it easier to remember.

All I can say is a lot of factors go into wick counts, and a lot of factors go into the amount of inbounds a trope gets, and two tropes is not a meaningful sample, let alone a controlled experiment. "We looked at two tropes, and the one with the more unclear title had more inbounds -> Unclear titles are catchier and more memorable" does not follow.

edited 15th Aug '11 9:55:07 AM by TripleElation

Then do more checks similar to the one Totemic Hero did. I'm pretty sure he's the first one who ever actually published an actual comparison, instead of just stating his opinion.

I never actually concluded anything, other than what you said about there being more factors as work.

And now for some more analysis: I just looked at the numbers for The Obi-Wan.

Inbounds: 980
Wick Count: 1162

Using the same ratio from Drives Like Crazy as before, the expected inbound count would be 748. Even accounting for the fact that Drives Like Crazy under-performs, this doesn't tell us too much. So I used the number ratio from The Libby, which gives an expected inbound count of 3624.

Considering the trope namer for The Obi-Wan is probably much more culturally recognizable than the trope namer for The Libby, I think we can safely say the name being iconic isn't the real factor for why The Libby was so successful. (Neither is it being a "The X" named trope, which was a theory I briefly entertained.)

So what is going on here?

edited 15th Aug '11 10:47:23 AM by TotemicHero

Perhaps people consider the trope formerly called The Libby important or interesting?

I never really got how good inbounds are a commentary on the title to the same extent that bad inbounds are.

edited 15th Aug '11 3:08:27 PM by INUH

It would be really nice to actually get to see where the inbounds are coming from. Maybe that could tell us the story of how Libby out-inbounded Obi-Wan.

I apologize for the uber-newbie question, but is there a way to have a look at that? I recall stumbling upon a "weird inbound of the day" feature a long time ago...

Maybe the wick ratio thing is introducing noise? Wicks are not quite a measure of how common a trope is; they're more of a measure of how popular a trope is with our editors - and even that gets distorted by Entry Pimps and the like.

edited 15th Aug '11 3:16:50 PM by TripleElation

My main guess is that inbounds are more about the actual content of the trope, not so much as the name.

Certain subjects are more popular because of the content, not so much the name.

Here is a slow as molasses quick-n-dirty referral history tool. Change the trope name in the url to whatever you are interested in. This gives you a row for each distinct link from a given site. That site might have many links to the wiki.

neat

It seems stumbleupon is the best thing ever in terms of publicity.