Cleaning up the Laconic Wiki

For a while now, there's been a bit of a Broken Base on this wiki about what exactly qualifies as an "unclear" title. There has been much yelling on both sides, and very little has actually been resolved.

However, recently a compromise was suggested: If the wiki can be made to show the Laconic version of the trope every time someone mouses over a bluelink, we can get the best of both worlds, allowing us to keep some of the more interesting titles that are still working, while making sure everything is as clear as possible. Fast Eddie has confirmed that he is able and willing to do this.

There's just one problem. Right now, about 90% of all Laconics are crap.

So we need to clean them up as fast as possible. Remember, clear, concise, and witty, in that order.

Once that's done, we can start going through the Laconics individually. If you see a bad Laconic, fix it, and post it here. You don't have to post the actual changes, we can see that on the history page. If you see a bad Laconic you don't know how to fix, bring it here and we'll figure it out. If it's really bad, we'll open up a separate TRS thread for it.

That sound good to everyone?

edited 26th Jul '11 5:41:46 PM by Discar

Don't forget to pothole Surgeon's Law in there. And include a link to Laconic Wiki.

I started by fixing Dude, She's A Lesbian. Now I'm going to check my watchlist to add or fix Laconics.

edited 24th Jul '11 12:29:54 PM by chihuahua0

Its worth noting that sometimes the redirects will have a laconic, such as where the title was changed. These should be looked at for potential inspiration and also cutting as redundant.

If this is going to be efficient, shouldn't there be some kind of order to it rather than just randomly fixing things?

edited 24th Jul '11 12:33:05 PM by CaissasDeathAngel

In terms of what we want from a Laconic, we should go with Eddie's guidelines for titles: Clear > Concise > Witty. Given that this is Laconic, we should keep the entries down to a sentence or two if possible, but the most important thing is that they accurately capture the essence of the trope: something that is misleading, but concise, is of no use to us.

The list of all Laconic entries is here. Ideally, we should have at least two people check each one and systematically make our way through.

Edit: We also have to figure out what to do with Laconic work entries. Last time the issue came up, it was decided that Laconic for works got to be silly, since there was no serious use for such Laconics. This may be contributing to the decay of the Laconic trope entries, which are supposed to focus on accuracy over humor. As such, we may want to reevaluate the criteria for Laconic works entries.

edited 24th Jul '11 12:37:23 PM by Ironeye

Well, if a laconic is over 20 characters, then we can't actually display it as alt-text on the majority of browsers. Even older versions of Firefox had that issue without a plug-in.

Actually, I'd like to ask about Touhou. Should we even have laconics for works? And, if so, I have no idea how to make this one more useful.

Touhou could be "Bullet Hell video game series with Moe style characters." Which is pretty much what the current two word version says without the pun,

I don't see why we can't have laconics for works, if the work has enough unusual apsects to it that the laconic isn't just an attempt to put a plot summary in a sentence. "Normal" works could probably do without them.

Laconic for works do exist and can be quite helpful IE: Mahou Sensei Negima

edited 24th Jul '11 1:52:34 PM by Raso

If mouseover alt text is functionally limited to 20 characters, that will render most laconics either useless for mouseover text, or useless as a clear definition of the trope.

Only the very simplest tropes can be accurately described in 20 characters including spaces and punctuation; for instance The Hero, one of the easiest to define briefly: The main Good Guy. is 18 characters. How do you define "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight in 20 characters?

edited 24th Jul '11 2:39:49 PM by Madrugada

Either way, cleaning up the Laconic pages is a good idea.

Oh, I agree that it is, but if there's a 20 character limit on mouseover text, trying to clean them up so they can be used as alt text is pointless.

edited 24th Jul '11 2:41:26 PM by Madrugada

I think we should clean up the laconic wiki. I just want to be realistic about what we can do with it.

As per post #9, I changed The Hero to "The main good guy." The previous was "The guy we're supposed to be rooting for," which is The Protagonist.

...and I just broke my own rule about not needing to explain the changes here, but oh well.

I am not aware of any official size limits on mouseover text, however exact implementation can vary by browser.

But generally, if you can't Tweet a laconic, it's too long.

edited 24th Jul '11 6:58:20 PM by Stratadrake

The Protagonist's description not mentions rooting:"The Protagonist is the main character of a story. Most are Hero Protagonists but not all of them are. Beyond any and all other traits, whether they are a Villain Protagonist, The Hero, or simply an Innocent Bystander, and whatever the stories POV may be, you can generally tell who the protagonist is because the story is about them. Present in the vast majority of all fiction, marking it as one of the rare Omnipresent Tropes."

edited 25th Jul '11 2:54:33 PM by MagBas

And The Protagonist 's Laconic doesn't mention that, so its fine.

Where the heck does the 20 characters limitation information come from? The information I have states the tooltips and/or acronyms have a not-hard-but-agreed limit somewhere near 2200 characters; with 512 characters limit appearing in some old implementations. Then again, for any non-textmode, non-mobile browser, a CSS-only solution based on a relative positioned div for the "tooltip" can be used. Anyway, 512 characters looks like far more than enough for good Laconics.

Also, if it turns to be relevant: F*CK IE 6. We shouldn't have to or need to support it. How are organizations going to feel the pressure to update their browsers (or better, switch to Opera) if we're complacent with them?

EDIT: xkcd alt-texts, for example, barely go over 150 characters.

edited 25th Jul '11 4:25:42 PM by SilentReverence

I'd really prefer that we stay far away from any hard-and-fast, graven-in-stone rules about what Laconics must or must not be, whether it's a character limit, an "only one sentence" limit, or anything beyond "Clear and accurate; as concise as you can make it; and witty is cool if you can manage it."

I'm with Mads on this one.

Looking over everything, I agree. Ironhard rules won't work here. Edited the first post to reflect that.

EDIT: I worked through A-Ab. I was surprised at how many were, if not good, at least adequate. Here's the list of the ones I messed with:

• Laconic/A-Cup Angst
• Abandon Shipping
• Abhorrent Admirer
• A Bloody Mess
• Abnormal Limb Rotation Range
• Aborted Declaration of Love
• Above the Influence
• Abridged Arena Array
• Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder
• Absent Aliens
• Absolute Xenophobe
• Absurdly Youthful Mother
• Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female On Male
• Abusive Parents

And added Love Confession, since I needed it for a bluelink in Aborted Declaration of Love.

edited 26th Jul '11 6:05:08 PM by Discar

Nice work. I like that you got rid of potholes where you could. That's probably another good guideline: don't define the current trope in terms of other tropes.

I do think that Abuse Is Okay When It’s Female on Male still needs work, since we do have "Rape Is Okay When Its Female On Male" as well, and what you put on "Abuse..." is about rape. I tweaked it to "It's not really abuse if it's a woman abusing a man." But I think it could still be better.

edited 26th Jul '11 6:14:45 PM by Madrugada

What happens when people here start fighting over small details of the trope? It'd be a good sign that the page needs to go to the TRS.

edited 26th Jul '11 6:34:19 PM by SpellBlade

^ Yep. That'll be a very good sign that the main trope page needs to be worked over, if we can't agree on the fundamental, core elements of it.

edited 26th Jul '11 7:05:07 PM by Madrugada

I think one of my tropes had that. I want to say Laconic.Guilt Free Extermination War was a long one, but I couldn't think of a way to say it shortly.

That one is decent. There may be a 'better' way to say it but it doesn't need to be fixed.