Content Policy Change

"You know it when you see it" is for the best. Taking works on a case-by-case procedure is a far better solution than setting a number of complicated and specific rules that'll need revision whenever a troper has a pow-wow.

Will people who have read/seen/heard the works be given consideration over those who heard a rumor about it? The problem we had before is that we let rumors, hearsay and trolls run this site.

Is there an estimate for when the committee will be up?

edited 14th Apr '12 12:56:00 PM by desdendelle

Sure. Otherwise, it would quickly degenerate into Criticizing Shows You Don't Watch, wrecking the whole point of the policy. And we already had a page cut after having been misrepresented.

Unfortunately, there isn't, but we've already got a list of candidates and voting among the mods is taking place. If we feel that we can pick enough people based on that vote alone, all we have to do is ask the people if they actually want to take that responsibility and be in the committee, which is not a given. So we might have to compile another list of candidates or expand the one we have.

If you wanna put your name forward, I guess it might be a good idea to write an application and PM it to a mod.

We haven't decided on the exact number of people in the committee, but my hunch is that it's gonna be more than half a dozen and less than a dozen.

This is not official, however.

Oh good. Just as long as folks use common sense, it should be alright. While I'm not exactly advocating a free for all, I don't want to have a tvtropes where teens can't read about teen rated material or works of literature or that stuff they are watching on their parent's HBO.

....an application? what would you put in it?

edited 14th Apr '12 1:05:23 PM by animeg3282

Wait, all of Fanfic Recs was cut?

I do not envy whoever ends up on that Council. Many gallons of Brain Bleach will be needed.

Temporarily, I think.

edited 14th Apr '12 1:07:40 PM by ArcadesSabboth

@Best Of: In short, we should wait on our wings, correct?

Booky, This is where the Fanfic Recs cut talk goes to.

As for the council... I don't think I'll be a good candidate, so I will edge out of this.

edited 14th Apr '12 1:11:02 PM by Psyga315

Yeah, basically. Sorry about that but these things take time if we don't wanna be half-assed about things.

Explain why you think you'd be a good person to have around when making calls about whether or not something is explicit or otherwise inappropriate. If you can cite some discussions or projects that might be relevant to this where you have participated, it'd be a help 'cause then we could go and see what you're made of.

You could also explain what kind of standards you would have when making these calls, perhaps giving us a couple of examples of what you would approve and what you'd cut. That would make it easy for us to see how well your views line with our goals.

If we don't know you at all, it's gonna be hard to make a call, but since this is mostly about stuff where mods would have been involved for a long time anyway, we'll probably have seen you before and will be able to make an informed decision after looking at your history.

If you PM your applications to me, it might take a while for them to be forwarded, but I don't think it'll ever be more than 10 hours or so. (I live in a different time zone than most of the users here and I'm currently away from home so I'm offline for extended periods.)

edited 14th Apr '12 1:13:35 PM by BestOf

I am a little worried about the lack of transparency in the proposed solutions. To be fair, it does take time to figure out all the nuances in forming this committee, and until the committee is formed, I am reserving judgement on the manner.

With that said, it seems like the committee is going to be some group of 6/8/10/12/however many people chosen by the moderators to make the kind of judgments regarding what materials are suitable for this site and which works and tropes need to be purged. The thing that I am concerned about is that it doesn't seem like there's any plans in place for the other 10,000-odd members of the community to have any say in the decisions that are made.

I want to be clear that forming a high council of trusted (for whatever value that may be) members is preferable to the moderators and administrators making snap decisions that may be inaccurate. To that extent, I praise the administration's decision to do so. However, what I fear is that all these decisions are going to be made in secret without input from the general community. Although I rarely contribute to site policy discussions due to lack of time to properly do so, I feel that the decisions that end up being made to affect me as a member of the community, in that I do read the articles to learn more about various works, tropes, and the like.

Thus, I am asking the moderation team to consider two requests regarding the high council's decisions on works to be purged:

1) All discussion relating to individual works or tropes to be cut should be visible by all, such that every member (if they so choose) can know the decisions being made in a transparent and timely manner.
2) More importantly, I want the community to have some ability to state cases and provide information for/against a work's continued inclusion on this site. While I respect the council's ability to be final arbiter in the matter, what I don't want is that we have a dozen members (or whatever the size of the council ends up being) making decisions cloistered up in some mod-only forum hashing this out without the rest of the community's ability to state their case. This applies especially for the more obscure works - TV Tropes applies a policy of "No Such Thing as Notability", and as such, I doubt that even with 40 or 50 or 100 people in the council, that their combined knowledge overlaps every work on the wiki. By opening a venue for discussion, we can allow the members who have greater knowledge of a particular work to come forward. I acknowledge that by doing so, fans of a work are going to be biased in favor of their favored works' inclusion, but I believe that the insight provided outweighs these risks.

I ask that the moderation team take these points into consideration when formulating the council and how it will be set up. And I apologize for the wall of text.

I don't really like this policy, but I can live with it as long as it's not too broadly implemented. I'm still suspicious that this will end up cutting a lot of teen-girl manga; I guess I'll wait and see what the council thinks counts as "porn".

Can we nominate people?

@Dark Confidant: See my Mod Hat post on this page. (#77)

@Dark Confidant - Speaking as a non-mod, my take on the smaller council idea is that it eliminates the possibility of mob rule. We've seen how the various threads on this situation have gone - hundreds of posts in a short period of time, many of which were ill-thought-out and reactionary. There were rumors that were actually quickly dispelled by Fast Eddie or other moderators, but because people can't be bothered to read every post in a thread, half the posters didn't realize that the rumors were unfounded. Hysteria pretty much followed, as we all saw.

A small group of individuals selected for displaying generally rational and mature behavior will be better able to review pages and make decisions without a lot of white noise. You're right that even a random selection of 100 or so members are unlikely to have some sort of knowledge of every work on the wiki. That doesn't mean a smaller group isn't qualified to make decisions based on summaries or impressions of the various works, though. Think of it this way - senators and other lawmakers don't have to be experts in every field to make laws related to those fields. When it's something like "is this pedo," for example, a council member needn't have read every chapter of whatever manga or comic book or novel or fic or whatever to make that decision. A paragraph or a scanned page showing the pedo-stuff should be enough.

This alleviates my concerns quite a bit, and I'm glad that transparency is being taken into consideration here.

I would be willing to serve, but my lack of site contributions probably makes me unqualified for the position. Nonetheless, with something this important to the future of the site, I imagine that I will still be weighing in to discussions throughout the length of this, however long this may be.

I understand this as well. I agree with the idea of having a small council of 10-12 members or so, probably including a mod and Fast Eddie. Mob Rule is a problem, and it's best to leave the decision to a small number of people. On this, we do not disagree.

My concerns are/were that the decisions would be made without community input on both sides. To use the courtroom example, while the council would serve as the jury and make the ultimate decisions, one would not have a trial without lawyers and witnesses providing evidence and making claims. I am simply raising the issue that we as members should be able to make claims about the work, the content within, and the artistic/literary merit therein. What the council decides is ultimately up to them, but I want everyone to have the right to be involved in what is one of the most important site issues of the past couple of years.

edited 14th Apr '12 1:28:38 PM by DarkConfidant

I like the idea of a council, but I don't think is is going to be enough. We will also need a way to keep those pages "clean." I can see three ways to do so:

• Wiki Magic bringing the issues to the mods/Ask The Tropers
• People to watch the works/tropes and their "related" links that are brought back
• "Screen" new edits

The first is where we should eventually end up, but we will probably need the "enfocers" for a while. Especially as more works are "cleared" for Wiki use. Can't expect the council to do all of that.

Well, that's my main problem with government in general, but that's waaaaaay off-topic.

While the council doesn't have to be familiar with every single work (an impossibility), I do think they should be familiar, as a whole, with all the different types of media. If that means this council leans a little more on the large side, then that's what it will take.

Screening the Related To wicks needs the implementation of the Tech Wishlist thread about Related To functionality.

edited 14th Apr '12 1:26:26 PM by SeptimusHeap

I was going to suggest lebrel to defend teen girl manga. hahaha!

But we'd also need someone who knows history and has cross cultural knowledge as well, as other countries aren't quite as strict as the US.

edited 14th Apr '12 1:30:02 PM by animeg3282

I have a question: why aren't we putting these changes in Headlines so people won't panic?

I can vouch for that.

@Totemic Hero: Familiarity may be replaceable, to an extent, with willingness to do the research, though. Or at least to check Wikipedia, and maybe do a Google search to see how fans of a work defend it, on and off of TV Tropes.