Improving YKTTW

I know there's a glut of "TRS needs to be fixed" and related threads going simultaneously right now, but I believe I may have identified a significant problem of tropes being gang-fucked for the TRS before they even get out the gate.

A few people have expressed a desire to see TRS become similar in format to YTTKW, and also be located in a separate part of the wiki.

What I'm proposing is that we do the opposite. Move YTTKW to the forums. Make it a subforum, with the one difference from the rest of the forums being that the OP can be edited by anyone, and looks more like a trope page format.

Now, I don't know if this would be very difficult from a technical, coding standpoint, but here's why I think it would help — right now there's a definite divide between people who frequent YTTKW and those who use the forums. I personally have visited YTTKW exactly three times, and I was very turned off by the opaque format and the strange practices of the place. That's why I as a rule never go there. And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.

So what happens is, something gets approved by the YTTKW crowd and launched. Somebody from TRS notices the new trope, says "hey, this thing is six kinds of fucked up," and to TRS it goes. Everybody there says, "how did this even launch, it's so bad!" and we end up cutting, renaming or redefining it.

If YTTKW was a sub-forum, I bet you a bunch of money that many TRS regulars would feel inclined to peruse the topics list every now and again. I know I would. It would bring two apparently different sub-communities of the wiki together on one of the most important mechanisms of this whole place — creating trope pages themselves. And maybe we could nip a lot of these premature or bad launch problems before they become problems.

edited 13th Feb '12 4:30:16 PM by Martello

Of interest: There have been problems in the past with YKTTW "ownership" issues. One of the reasons the new look for YKTTW was put in place was, besides trying to get more peer review for YKTT Ws, to keep people from feeling too attached to "their" YKTTW and making it more like a sandbox that anyone can edit and improve.

I don't think it worked, though, I don't really see people being more likely to edit a YKTTW that belongs to someone else than before the change.

I heartily approve of moving YKTTW here so long as the actual YKTTW is set up in such a way as to discourage ownership issues.

Maybe we could link the OP to a sandbox page for the actual YKTTW (or make a YKTTW namespace) and reserve the first post for tags (Needs A Better Description, Up For Grabs) and a laconic. A sandbox page has no owner or sponsor, and looks like what the final page will, which may make people less afraid to put fingerprints on it.

edited 13th Feb '12 4:31:31 PM by ccoa

I actually am very fond of this idea and we do have the tech to do it right now especially if we just use a YKTTW namespace. The current format of YKTTW has a lot of issues and isn't very collaborative as it's really hard to keep track of more than a few at a time.

"I don't really see people being more likely to edit a YKTTW that belongs to someone else than before the change."

Wait. I thought there was a custom that it was "rude" to edit a ykttw someone else made (especially due to vandals).

Yes, despite all our urgings even when things are up for grabs people won't do what needs to be done and actually edit the things.

We were trying to get people to be less protective of their YKTT Ws, because ownership issues were making people resistant to accepting name suggestions, description changes, or other things that would change "their" trope.

But, honestly, I don't see people being less defensive about it, nor do I see fewer bad launches ending up in the TRS.

The biggest problem I would have with moving YKTTW to a forum format would be that we would lose the immediately visible laconic descriptions. I rely pretty heavily on those to determine whether I'm interested in even perusing the trope, and I'm fairly certain I'm not alone in that.

While having too much of a sense of ownership of a new trope is bad, we don't want to completely negate that sense of "this is something I initially created and can be proud of"—as was discussed in the previous thread on changing YKTTW, that sense of "parenthood" is what drives people to see the proposed trope through YKTTW, go through the trouble of launching it, and often curate it after it's launched. Losing that drive would cripple the process.

An additional technical aspect of changing formats would be the necessity of creating a new way of hooking the original YKTTW to the launched trope's discussion page.

And if this starts to go into any sort of serious discussion, I would strongly recommend putting it into the headlines, as I'm pretty sure there's a good subset of YKKTW regulars who don't use the forums (at least not this part of them), and making major changes to YKTTW without input from regulars there would be a very bad idea.

~cringes~

Hm. Fine. I will break my rule. Once more.

I totally and utterly support this idea and would actually consider helping with YTTKW (and maybe actually doing my own, for once) if it were a part of the forum and consequently not totally incomprehensible...

I think stuff like "Up For Grabs" should be visible on closed ykttw's, so that others can know it's okay to handle.

It should be okay to directly edit them anyway, with the same rules as with a normal page. Adding small clarifications, rewording the description is small ways to make it better, adding examples, sorting examples, adding formatting, and adding compare to/subtrope/supertrope stuff should be free. Major revamps are a no-no, but they're a no-no on a real page, too.

Having a history, like a sandbox or YKTTW namespaced page would have, might help people feel more comfortable about it. Changes are more easily reverted that way if they don't work.

edited 13th Feb '12 6:46:24 PM by ccoa

I do think having a real page history would be a boon and if we put it in the YKTTW name space then we could lock the sandbox and thread when they're finished and hook them to the discussion page so we'd have the same records.

We already have a history function for YKTTW. It's just only accessible if you go to your YKTTW from the main YKTTW list.

That history page, while better than nothing, is pretty bad. It doesn't show diffs; it shows the entire OP after each change, which means that unless an extremely obvious change was made, if you want to see what changed you have to copy-paste the two versions into a word editor with compare changes functionality. It also doesn't record the name of the person doing the edits properly; every change, regardless of who did it, shows up under the name of the original poster.

Having a history like what we have on wiki pages would be nice.

So, back on the topic at hand — does anyone have any serious issues with moving YTTKW to the forums? Anybody else agree or have any further comments or suggestions?

I don't know if it was suggested, but if YKTTW were to be moved into the forums, we'd need the OP/YKTTW on the top of each page in the thread. It would be hell to have to go back to the first page each time.

I'm thinking that we could like the sandbox page just like they're linked on IP and TRS threads. Have the little link up at the top.

I didn't think of that, but it would be a good idea. Although I also don't think clicking on the little "1" button at the top is really all that hard.

Ideally, the thread would only be for issues with the YKTTW - clarification, name suggestions/debates, suggesting that it's too close to another trope, suggesting that it's too broad, too narrow, or trying to be too many tropes, etc. Adding examples, related tropes, and fixes would all go on the YKKTW entry itself rather than as replies.

Since 90% of replies to most YKTT Ws are examples, this would cut down on the size of threads immensely. I would think only really contested YKTT Ws would grow past a page.

It also might help encourage actual debate on the YKTTW since people wouldn't just throw examples as comments so that conversation is drowned out by them.

My only real issue would be it turning into a large thread. It would be nice if it had the equivalent to a discussion page where you could pursue individual topics about it like the name or the description and related to paragraphs. Otherwise, I'd prefer it here. I just find forums much more intuitive.

However, I would really prefer to have a mouse over laconic entry.

It's worth noting that the current YKTTW already has a lot of tech-based...stuff...that's already hooked up to the wiki. The "Launch" system that hooks it to the target wiki page and lists it on Recent Launches, the "Discard" thing that launches it to Discarded YKTTW and adds a "Restore" button to Recent Launches, the Hats of Approval...

Heck, if you make a TRS thread on a trope that has a YKTTW, a link to the latter will show up at the top of the thread! (Assuming you put in the trope's title when asked for it when you created the thread, that is.)

Forum-based YKTTW's would eliminate some of the so-called 'schism' between YKTTW recluses and forum recluses.

Each YKTTW draft would be a forum thread and it would be attached to some article name in a "YKTTW" wiki namespace (like the ability to attach threads in TRS and IP).

The actual posts in the topic can't be edited (standard forum rules apply). The draft, on the other hand, is an actual wikipage which can.

We'd be able to attach AT crowners to a thread, making it easy to spot which ones have them. Final star can also be attached (by mod) as shorthand for Just Launch It Already.

There would be a separate forum archive for launched and/or discarded YKTTW's.

We should have a YKTTW/ namespace, which would be a sister form to Sandbox/. That would be what the threads link to. So someone would make the ykttw sandbox page, and then make a thread for it.

edited 14th Feb '12 10:26:27 AM by DragonQuestZ

Don't get me wrong, I like the forum format better than the YKTTW list format... but I'm hesitant to lose some of the functionalities attached to what we already have.

It would be nice to have something like the YKTTW watchlist showing a list of YKTTWs in a forum-like list, except tracking all of them, not just the ones you've already posted in. That would have a lot of the advantages of a forum format.