Well, i guess the first needed thing is clean up the wicks.
edited 16th Jan '12 10:53:02 AM by MagBas
I noticed that a number of the wicks labeled as "Sinkholes" are embedded under words or phrases that imply things said that are debatable or arguable ("possibly", "may be", "varied interpretation", question marks, etc.). Those should be fair Potholes, except for where it conflicts with Examples Are Not Arguable. Anything that may be a violation of the latter should either be deleted or moved to a work's YMMV page.
The reason for this problem it that the Your Mileage May Vary redirect, where most of the use comes from, used to be a separate page before Fast Eddie redirected it last year. It was a useless page that basically stated the obvious that everything in life is subjective, and the page's existence encouraged tropers to link and pothole to it. This has spilled over into the initialism of the phrase YMMV.
YMMV and Subjective Tropes were seperate pages once that reflected the current trope organization long before we devised the YMMV tab. But especially with the YMMV tab whether it is a pothole or a sinkhole it's becoming more and more outdated. I would say zap any pothole on sight.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Zap it in examples (or the entire example in which the page is being linked on the main wiki)? Definitely. I think such a statement as "Your Mileage May Vary" has an earned place as a Predefined Message in main descriptions, however.
edited 16th Jan '12 1:01:48 PM by SeanMurrayI
Any use of YMMV in an objective example list is inherently a sinkhole, either because it's useless and digressive (we care about the trope, not the reaction to the trope), or because it's being used to add subjectivity to the example itself.
edited 16th Jan '12 1:26:05 PM by MyTimingIsOff
Yeah, and . The problem I have with YMMV is that it is supposed to be an index, but simultaneously is:
- A Verbal Tic, a la So Yeah.
- A common substitute for "arguably"
- Should actually be an index.
- Has many redirects that don't have anything more in common with YMMV than the name.
How is YMMV "a Verbal Tic, a la So Yeah"?
So Yeah was thoroughly meaningless, whereas Your Mileage May Vary has always been intended to convey a message to the reader. Bonus Points would be more akin to So Yeah; a message reading Your Mileage May Vary is more like You Have Been Warned than anything else.
A Verbal Tic is more akin to Word Cruft than anything else. One can remove a verbal tic without making an impact on anything else that's on a page; but one cannot remove a notice that certain details or concepts are subjectively applied without significantly changing the message.
edited 17th Jan '12 9:43:18 AM by SeanMurrayI
OK, correcting myself. YMMV isn't a Verbal Tic, it's a Predefined Message. However, it's far too often either Word Cruft or something like "arguably". The YMMV page attracts misuse because it's an index, not a Predefined Message. The redirects to YMMV aid in this misuse because they are Predefined Messages, not indexes.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Your Mileage May Vary actually was originally intended as a predefined message. The original index for subjective articles was called Subjective Tropes, and its content was only fairly recently moved to YMMV to reflect the new subpage banner created for work pages to better organize subjective content, and the old Your Mileage May Vary page was made a redirect to it.
Most existing wicks are likely to be ones that predate these changes.
edited 17th Jan '12 10:22:14 AM by SeanMurrayI
In other words, YMMV got quite a redirect farming.
The problem still is that the page is an index and a policy guideline, but the name as well as the redirects and the wicks are about the Predefined Message (and its misuses). In this context, splitting it by function would be advisable.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
How much of an option is to turn the index's name back to Subjective Tropes and redlink YMMV and Your Mileage May Vary? I'm not talking about the YMMV namespace.
Not much, given that Subjective Tropes specifically links to a page calling it "a contradiction in terms".
We could call the page Subjectives. No contradictions there.
It's a definition issue, really. There is not really such a thing as a Subjective Trope.
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
Oh right. Never mind.
edited 20th Jan '12 8:57:06 PM by FinalStarman
I'm not crazy, I just don't give a darn!
That's why djbj didn't use the word "Trope" or "Tropes" in his suggestion.
@AMNK,
yes, that's what I suggest - moving the indexing and flagging away to a different page and turn the current one into a faux-redlinked disambiguation/disclaimer like This Troper - so as to keep the 9k inbounds and aid getting rid of the wicks.
The new page should keep a "YMMV" in the name, tough, to point out the namespace - maybe YMMV.Home Page?
EDIT: My bad, the page YMMV Index exists already, witha different purpose.
edited 21st Jan '12 1:47:14 AM by SeptimusHeap
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I've already got a proposed text for the faux-redlinked page, this one:
You may be looking for these pages:
- Love It or Hate It: For higly polarizing subjects In-Universe.
- YMMV.Home Page: For the Predefined Message, a list of "YMMV tropes" and the guidelines for them.
If you find any links that should point to these pages, please change them.
edited 22nd Jan '12 5:44:05 AM by SeptimusHeap
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Hmm, I know I've typed YMMV (with no markup) a small number of times (probably only about 5) and never expected it to turn into a link. Now I have to check and see if it does.
Edit: Nope, not a wick without the curly brackets. Good, I'm innocent.
edited 22nd Jan '12 10:14:19 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
OK, I've cleaned out Subjective, Subjectives and Your Mileage Might Vary, but there's still work to do - and splitting, preferrably.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Bumping. Are we going to do anything? Moving? Just cleaning? Nothing?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Re-bumping
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanThe most important thing to realize is remove the misuses. "Nothing" is a bad option.
edited 28th Jan '12 4:42:41 AM by MagBas
Yes, but I doubt it will suffice. We have to point out that Examples Are Not YMMV, which is why I am proposing the changes in #18 and #19.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Crown Description:
Currently, YMMV and its redirects Your Mileage May Vary and Your Milage May Vary suffer from these problems:- The names are Stock Phrases and are used as tropes whereas the page is an index and administrative guideline that is explicitly not to be used as a trope or Stock Phrase.
- The pages suffer from massive misuse in wicks
, both old misuse resulting from the redirecting of Your Mileage May Vary and new misuse despite the existence of a specific guideline against it.
So the YMMV page is an index whose main purpose is to list all these tropes which have to go to the YMMV pages. As such, not many wiks to it as well as to its redirects Subjective, Subjectives, Your Milage May Vary, Your Mileage May Vary and Your Mileage Might Vary are to be expected.
However, the Related To page shows a whopping 7000 wiks to it and the redirects. And as a wick check on admittedly only 80 wiks for YMMV and Your Mileage May Vary shows, most of them is misuse in some way or another:
(and note that "Unclear" means "incorrect, but not specified")
This gives 2 "ghost wicks" and 2 correct uses among 76 incorrect ones - a 95% misuse rate.
In short, it seems that the huge wick count is a result of massive misuse as a Verbal Tic, Justifiying Sentence, or simply Sinkhole.
In turn, it seems that the name of the index (YMMV) suggests it is something like I Am Not Making This Up, or more concisely, that this index needs a better name and wick cleanup to point out that it is an index, not a stock phrase. Any opinions?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman