Content Policy Change

I really hope it's not an Omniscient Council of Vagueness. Tropers which hold such power should also be held accountable for their decisions.

I guess I'm confused because I'm getting mixed messages. #136 says, "The general idea is to get rid of straight-up porn. Not works that happen to contain explicit sex." And yet #179 says, "I think their issue is that we can't trope things just because they have porn or paedophilia in them, regardless of other applicable tropes. "

We're very close to determining the final makeup of the council. It's looking like it's going to be 5 tropers. Small enough to work fast. An odd number because ties suck. We're just working right now on making sure we have a diverse and responsible group.

But progress is being made.

This is because we are dealing with two separate standards here. Stuff that happens to contain sex is fine. Stuff that happens to contain pedophilia is not.

Awesome.

edited 14th Apr '12 6:11:47 PM by Chimaera

This.

Cryptic Mirror wrote in #226: "Eddie has already defined that. Its any sexual activity involving one or more participants who are under the age of 16."

Anthropomorphic animal characters that are civilized or lower on the scale probably have parents under 16 years of age, if only because the species' lifespans are shorter than humans' and fertility ends before 16. So the mere existence of a character is evidence of sex before 16 if you think about it. I won't name specific works because there are too many of them even among children's literature. These are not graphic, and they're not sex between participants of greatly different ages, but they're still sex under 16. And even if the blanket ban on sex under 16 is the standard for fan fiction, as lu 127 suggested, that in effect puts a Fanwork Ban on works with animal characters.

FastEddie clarified that "The laws have to do with the difference in ages between the partcipants". But that'd hurt science fiction that depicts a species of sequential hermaphrodites, where (say) all younger characters are women and all older ones men, and a difference in ages that's bizarre to humans is not bizarre to them.

Is the committee expected to finish its job by December?

5 is a small reasonable number. Hopefully they are a varied group of people.

edited 14th Apr '12 6:12:09 PM by encrypted12345

This is why we have a council. To determine exceptions to the policy like those.

edited 14th Apr '12 6:13:04 PM by Chimaera

TV Tropes is huge. The council will exist as long as it needs to but we're hoping that they can jump in and deal with the majority of things quickly. Being a wiki though, this sort of fight is more of an ongoing thing than something that is one and done.

Varied it one of our goals. That's why it's taking a bit longer.

edited 14th Apr '12 6:14:04 PM by shimaspawn

Can I reiterate, here, that School Study Media are outreach? Student assigned those works look up info about them on the Web, they find their way to TV Tropes through that.

Your point?

An excellent point. Hopefully the council will keep that in mind.

And Shima, has the way the council will operate been decided?

edited 14th Apr '12 6:17:50 PM by Chimaera

@Chimaera

Ok, I would understand that. So it means that this site's being clean in the sense of porn/pedophilia but not necessarily sex/nudity?

Exactly.

@361: That I probably can't stop some of those pages from being cut, but hopefully someone other than me will think it's a bad idea.

edited 14th Apr '12 6:20:09 PM by HersheleOstropoler

Outside of Lolita (which isn't really studied in school anyways), which of those works actually include pedophilic/pornographic content (and are studied in schools)?

This too.

edited 14th Apr '12 6:21:24 PM by Firebert

What's your reason for it being a bad idea? Just curious.

Lolita is, in fact, studied in school; I don't want to name the other work I was thinking of because it hasn't been cut and I don't want that to change.

Here's my reason for thinking it's a bad idea.

But wait, aren't there other sites and offsite media to be used as sources? Why would they have to rely on this site?

Yeah, this site really isn't a good resource for such research.

I don't believe we're cutting anything right now, before the council's set up. You might as well name it, as chances are it'll be on the list of Questionable Works anyway.

Is it American Beauty (which I'm don't think is studied in school anyways)?

Varied in what capacity / by what standard?

Varied in opinion, probably.

I'm not going to play a guessing game on this, I'm not having that derail on my head.

edited 14th Apr '12 6:32:17 PM by HersheleOstropoler