Reasons why we think Troper Tales should be removed

A better sense of community can be formed through the forums, in my opinion.

edited 10th Aug '11 1:34:56 PM by Firebert

Some of the last few comments are an example of why this thread has been somewhat distasteful. Not only are you putting reasons in people's mouths, but you're presenting your proposed action as the only proper one to take because you are in favor of it. You are also assuming ignorance or recalcitrance on the part of people voting against the change. These are very poor debating tactics.

Whether it is, in fact, a good thing to do is exactly what we're trying to decide.

edited 10th Aug '11 1:35:08 PM by Fighteer

Forums are areas designed for people to gather, to communicate their ideas, their stories, their feelings. TT is a mere wall you can read and maybe write on, but there is no sense of belonging there.

Can you people PLEASE knock it off?

We're trying to look like intelligent individuals here, not a bunch of gossip hens.

I will admit, when I first started and was intimidated by the forum/wiki, I stayed in the troper tales section (not the badass tropes obviously) and it felt nice there. But now that I've grown in confidence, the forum is much better.

If we want the wiki to be a successful group effort then it really does help to have a community gathering place.

The forum is a great place to gather, but it does have the problem that posts don't last.

edited 10th Aug '11 1:47:24 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

That's what the forums are, GMH.

You of all people should be aware of that, I think.

Yes, go and edit it to include my points.

Bastard. :p

edited 10th Aug '11 1:48:23 PM by juancarlos

Not true at all. Posts last forever in theory, as long as a thread remains active. But is a years-old Troper Tale really worth keeping anyway, if there's no interest in the topic it's posted in?

edited 10th Aug '11 1:53:26 PM by Fighteer

This.

Hell, I know many of us who see their early posts in this very forum as an old shame, and would gladly delete/thump them, if it wasn't because it isn't really worthwhile to do so because they can't be traceable even via post history.

Whereas keeping a TT and finiding it is easy, and now that the new format includes names, it seems that many more old shames and the like are bound to happen.

Not to mention that by now, with the new format, how much of a difference is there between the forums and TT?

edited 10th Aug '11 1:57:43 PM by juancarlos

It really isn't. A bigger question is that is our lives worth troping?

Note that we don't trope individual people's lives either. We trope famous people if there's something worth troping. Like Memetic Mutation. That's about the only special exception we've close to made. And most of their pages are glorified and long Character Sheets, not work pages.

Here's the key point: Our Troper Pages are also character sheets. So what does Troper Tales add then?

edited 10th Aug '11 1:56:56 PM by Hydronix

It is simply not feasible to trope the lives of everyone who has ever visited this site.

Originalhobbit, thank you for providing some examples. I think you're the first to have seriously done so on the anti-removal side.

Which reminds me, I've been seeing a large discrepancy between the number of arguments for and against deleting Troper Tales. For the first 50 or so pages, at least, new arguments in favour of the removal of Troper Tales were being constantly put forward, some admittedly stronger than others, while relatively few have been put forward in defence of retaining them. So I just wanted to highlight what I see as the main arguments in favour of Troper Tales, and address each of them directly.

The one which attempts to directly address the primary concerns of those who want Troper Tales gone is the argument that they are, in fact, fulfilling their official purpose of explaining the tropes, or that they will if given sufficient time under the new system. I consider this to have already been refuted by the tropers who have gone through Troper Tales and demonstrated that the majority percentage of tales sampled have been direct violations of the guidelines, but I have a couple points that I think may be worth adding:

The first is that two good examples to every bad one, even if true, is still a terrible record. That would mean that one in three Troper Tales, or around 33%, are failing to meet the standards the site expects.

The second is that in order to effectively illustrate a trope, a Troper Tale must be held to a higher set of standards than an ordinary example. An uninformative example from a work of fiction, while obviously a bad thing, is nevertheless useful to a reader who is familiar with the work in question. An uninformative Troper Tale is no use to anybody unfamiliar with the troper who wrote the example. If the only information conveyed is "some person on the Internet is an example of this trope", with no explanation as to how it applies, that is of no use to anybody.

So those are my thoughts on that argument.

The other major argument in favour of retaining Troper Tales, as far as I can see, is that they are beneficial to the community, in the form of a just-for-fun troper hangout, similar to the forums.

Now, before I address this, I want to clear up a possible misconception here: I am aware that many users who edit Troper Tales do edit other areas of the site. I am also aware that many of them may well be doing a fine job; while Square Peg Round Trope is a problem on Troper Tales, it doesn't make up the majority of bad Troper Tales entries. So it would be inaccurate to class everybody who posts there as some kind of freeloader, and my intention is not to drive valid contributors or interested readers away from the site.

With that out the way: it would also be inaccurate to treat Troper Tales as beneficial, even hypothetically, to the community as a whole, because the community is fragmented. You can see this on these very forums, where different boards - sometimes even specific threads - have their own subcommunities. They overlap, sure, but the forums are not a single community. The days in which the more prolific posters could be readily recognised in every subforum are long gone. This also holds true for other parts of the site, such as YKTTW, Ask The Tropers and Headscratchers.

In this sense, Troper Tales represent yet another subcommunity, the problem being that this subcommunity is not self-policing. That is to say, those who frequent Troper Tales don't appear to be doing anything about the abundance of bad examples there. They aren't even reporting them. We've recieved a lot of hollers since Troper Tales went up, sure, but the vast majority of those were from a single user on a single scouring of Troper Tales beginning with "A". Of the relatively miniscule remainder, notably, two IJBMers who don't even post Troper Tales were responsible for a number of the reports.

Admittedly, Troper Tales are subject to stricter rules than the forums; they have to be, because Troper Tales are presented to readers as a resource supplementing the main example sections, not a place of discussion. But this makes it all the more problematic that Troper Tales are, if anything, even less capable of any kind of quality control than the forums themselves (itself no mean feat).

So yes, there is a community that enjoys Troper Tales as a hangout. But when that community is irresponsibly abusing that hangout in spite of its purpose as laid out in the guidelines, is it really worth keeping said hangout? I'm having difficulty seeing how the plusses outweigh the minuses here, as far as the wiki as a whole is concerned.

The other argument in favour of retaining Troper Tales that I keep seeing is the argument that it keeps the natter off the main pages. It's been stated numerous times here that it's not doing so very successfully, but regardless, nobody in favour of retaining Troper Tales has actually defended them on those grounds anyway, and besides, if we had a problem with, say, people spamming guro images all over, we'd ban them and delete the guro, not give them their own special Guro Wiki namespace. Not saying Troper Tales = guro, but they're enough of a problem that the same principle should apply.

edited 10th Aug '11 2:09:07 PM by BobbyG

As much as I dislike Troper Tales, don't start strawmanning it. It was never used to document every last trope of every last visitor on this site.

Holy balls, that's a big brick of a ninja.

edited 10th Aug '11 2:08:04 PM by Ramus

Bobby G:

Pretty much agreed with every single word in that post.

@ Bobby G I've gotta agree with you.

Wow, Bobby G, thanks for making my post unnecessary, you mind-reading genius of a ninja.

edited 10th Aug '11 2:15:05 PM by Firebert

Excellently written, Bobby. Thank you for your insightful rebuttal.

Well done again Bobby. I will leave even more sacrifices on your altar.

Re: "Troper Tales doesn't do anything the forums can't": A Troper Tales page with a lot of entries is still one page (not counting the few that were serialized); it can be read in a day. A thread about anything with a lot of posts is, say, fifty pages at least. You're not getting through that in a week. Forum threads are made for conversation. Troper Tales is not; conversation in a Troper Tales page is looked down on (albeit not prohibited). Individual tales are meant to stand on their own. Individual forum posts, for the most part, are not.

The forums and Troper Tales are not like things. Quit saying that they are.

I was expecting ninjas, but the on-topic one was a surprise.

edited 10th Aug '11 2:24:34 PM by Artemis92

Except that they can and should be. I don't know where we got this idea that TV Tropes was ever about documenting tropers' lives — especially on the main wiki.

Same. Isn't that why we have Contributor pages?

At the core, they are. Both are used to share experiences with another person. The other use of the forums is to discuss particular topics. Note that Troper Tales is often used for that too(although it shouldn't be).

Another thing to keep in mind is how many people are gonna looking for your life experiences on Troper Tales, anyway? How many actually care? It's not much different from the forums in general. The forums are more personal as is. So in general, it literally does to the job better.

Eeyup.

edited 10th Aug '11 2:23:41 PM by Hydronix

Thanks , Bobby G, for your insightful post. I agree wholeheartedly with all of your points.

edited 10th Aug '11 2:24:14 PM by tehnubkilr

I don't know where anyone got the idea TV Tropes wasn't for documenting individual lives of contributors!

Obviously TV Tropes needs a rename!

Okay, so, specious argument, but really that seems to be the flavor of most argumentation here. It doesn't matter what you think Troper Tales should be, it matters what they are at this moment because that is at issue. And they're clearly not like the forums.

edited 10th Aug '11 2:25:51 PM by Night

So what are they like?