confusing title, weak inbounds: Obstructive Vigilance

The article is about people obstructing justice in order to take the law into their own hands. The word "vigilance" in the title is apparently intended to mean "behaving like a vigilante"; too bad it doesn't. I suggest renaming to either Obstructive Vigilante or Obstructive Vigilantism.

This is a relatively new article, so the inbound stats aren't that meaningful, but they're still really bad.

edited 14th Dec '11 1:38:12 PM by Micah

Seconding rename.

Wow. It's not often that we get trope names that are simply wrong like this. Rename that sucker.

Obstructive Vigilante was going to be the name, but vigilance was chosen over vigilante because the person the trope applies do does not have to be a vigilante. So being vigilant about their obstruction made sense (at the time).Rename it if you really want, though.

Obstructive Vigilante or Obstructive Vigilantism is good.

Edit: the problem with "vigilance" is that it doesn't mean the same thing as "vigilante", it means "alertness" or "awareness".

edited 14th Dec '11 10:28:35 PM by Deboss

Yeah, that was the joke of the title. The person is actively alert to the situation, and decides to obstruct the law enforcement, but they don't have to be a vigilante to do so. It wasn't supposed to have "vigilante" in it when it launched to avoid that connection. But since it is a trope usually used in conjunction with a vigilante, it wouldn't be the end of the world if you changed the "c" to a "t".

So, just to clarify, Micah said "The word "vigilance" in the title is apparently intended to mean "behaving like a vigilante"", but it's supposed to mean "being vigilant".

Although, if you want Added Alliterative Appeal, what about Obstructive Observer?

edited 15th Dec '11 10:24:13 AM by nman

I agree with the rename.

There is now a single proposition rename crowner for this trope here.

Obstructive Vigilance and Obstructive Observer have the same root problem: there's absolutely no indication that what's being obstructed is a police investigation. They could just as easily be about obstructing roads, or being an Obstructive Bureaucrat, or any number of other things.

I'm curious why people are voting against this rename. Do they believe that "vigilance" and "vigilante" mean the same thing? Do they feel that 12 wicks and 0 inbounds indicate a healthy trope? Something else?

The title is not currently using "vigilance" to refer to "vigilantes", so that's not the problem. That the trope name is not descriptive is a legitimate problem, and I'd support renaming, but using vigilante/vigilantism wouldn't be good choices, as the trope does not have to apply to a vigilante.

edited 15th Dec '11 3:33:29 PM by nman

They don't have to be a vigilante in the strict sense of "a member of a group that metes out self-appointed justice", but they kind of do have to be a vigilante in the broader sense of "someone who takes the law into their own hands". It's right there in the definition!

I can live with that interpretation.

We may need to make a reference to Obstruction Of Justice (which is the term for obstructing a police investigation if my CSI is serving me correctly).

One of the suggested names was "Obstruction For Justice", which would work if you were willing to stretch the meaning of justice to be relative to the person the trope applies to.

I still think Obstructive Vigilantism makes the most sense.

It's been three days, and that crowner's pretty impressively definitive. Time to call it and swap it out for an alt-title crowner?

... okay, so is now soon enough to call the new crowner?

Looks plausible to me; it's been three days, and there's a name with unanimous support that's way ahead of everything else.

Yeah, calling it in favour of a rename to Obstructive Vigilantism.

edited 20th Dec '11 5:59:53 PM by BobbyG

Is there a way to just redlink the old name, since there are so few wicks?

You could cutlist the page, but there's no real harm in leaving old redirects unless there's been massive amounts of misuse.

Yup, redirects are free.

Ready to lock?

Yeah, the new page exists and all the wicks are moved.

For future reference, you need a mod to move the discussion from the old to the new title. I did it here.

If the old discussion page has a link to the ykttw thread that created the trope, there's no way to auto-migrate that, but anybody can copy and paste that into the new discussion page.

edited 21st Dec '11 12:16:12 PM by MetaFour