Real Life section maintenance (New Crowner 19 Feb 2024)

Calling Stuffed into the Fridge: Added 29th Dec '15 at 09:51:01 AM, 16:0.

Landslide Election is currently at 3.25:1, but last night it was at 4:1, so to be sure it's stable (or at least not going to change enough to matter, which would require 3 more no votes with 0 yes votes) I'm going to wait another 24 hours on calling it.

Pending:

• Landslide Election: Added 29th Dec '15 at 06:42:56 PM, 3.25:1 (17)
• Failures on Ice: Added 3rd Jan '16 at 06:16:19 PM, 9:0

edited 4th Jan '16 7:29:49 AM by Nohbody

It IS perfectly possible to do those kinds of prayer.

to the "clock doesn't start until it gets mentioned in the thread"

to the "complaining" rename

to the entry text

I was thinking more of the prayer having an effect, not making the prayer. My mistake.

Especially if there's more than 2 supporters of renaming and expanding the flamebait/natter/complaining category, Prayer of Malice would fit there just fine.

Would also like a bit more than 2 people's feedback on the timing thing, of making the 48hr clock start when there's a thread post about adding the entry.

Suggested revision of the last line of the crowner description:

edited 4th Jan '16 8:24:43 AM by Nohbody

to both the timing and renaming/expanding the complaining category.

I don't think we need to list people being malicious. It's a bit tasteless in my opinion.

I added to the page a few tropes that were decided to ban real life examples, but weren't put on the list.

Please see this discussion

Seems like this effort has gone past what was intended and some over-zealous deletions need to be reviewed and backed out.

Basically, the issue is that "no real life" doesn't mean that the trope can't be listed for the subject, it means the listing must have some attribution off the wiki. Straw Feminist, for example, would not be listed about the person, but the fact that a news network had distorted the person's position to seem like a Straw Feminist could be listed. The listing would require that attribution. Weak attributions like "Some have said...", or "Popular opinion has it that..." won't cut it. A named person or organization, in a cited, link-able attribution is required.

Thanks for your help!

edited 5th Jan '16 9:12:18 AM by eyebones

Well dude, I don't know what you intended to do by linking to that topic, but it's not giving me a good first impression.

What matters is the conclusion. And yes, this is an official mandate: when we declare something NRLEP, we need to make sure that the examples we are purging are properly separated into sourced and unsourced. Sourced could go under news media or literature (historical writing) or film (documentaries) or whatever is appropriate as a category header, while unsourced would be the usual crop of people asserting so-and-so and would be cut.

This needn't be a huge burden; it should be fairly clear which any given example is from reading it, and if there's doubt, we'll still cut it.

edited 5th Jan '16 9:30:21 AM by Fighteer

I'll be the first to admit that my memory could give black holes pointers on how to suck, but I don't recall NRLEP ever being "except when attributed", and neither the earliest version post-namespacing that the Wayback Machine has nor the full history of the pre-namespacing NRLEP have that requirement.

If it's policy now, then we'll deal, but being chastised for not following a nonexistent policy?

Nobody is being chastised. Sorry if that impression was given. Yes, the policy is being shifted a little. It was never drafted to require attribution before now. That element has been added so it will be possible to acknowledge that controversy exists, while keeping it clear that the wiki is not the source.

Do you remember the flood of condemnation that came in when we temporarily deleted all the Rape Tropes? By seeming to not acknowledge the issues, we greatly magnified the criticism leveled at the wiki. By sweeping away all acknowledgement of real life issues (as the old policy was interpreted) we invite more criticism of that type.

edited 5th Jan '16 12:47:54 PM by eyebones

Does that mean that "real life tropes" on Useful Notes pages must have citations?

Made the change regarding crowner entry timing, since everything there has been announced, and no one opposed the change.

Pending:

• Failures on Ice: Added 3rd Jan '16 at 06:16:19 PM, 10:0

(mostly just killing a few extra hours to meet the 48h requirement, there's no real chance of this not qualifying for NRLEP at 10-zip)

Regarding the citation thing, since those RL elections mentioned in Landslide Election are all easily verifiable (The Other Wiki, if nothing else), would they then not be cut? Because as-is they're taking up a huge chunk of space, and are a majority of the content of the page, and that ratio of RL/fiction doesn't sound healthy for a wiki that's focused on... well, fiction.

I've always made sure to check if the examples would fit in different folders when I clean out RL examples, and I've mentioned them if I find such examples while checking up on proposed tropes.

Sometimes it might seems as if we just delete the entire sections because the section is suddenly gone, but a few of the examples are actually moved to other folders.

One of the more common types is when someone's written a book or included a theory in a book that's an example of the trope. As a plain Real Life example, it would be cut, but since it's clearly sourced to that book, it doesn't actually matter if it's true to the Real Life subject or not, and it gets moved to Literature. I think we had some Utopia or other setting trope recently that had such an example.

edited 5th Jan '16 5:51:32 PM by AnotherDuck

Doctor Cooper: Yes.

On those election examples. I would agree that the Real Life entries weren't adding to an understanding of the trope. Looked like listmaking for its own sake. I'd like to stay away from saying the wiki is about fiction, though. It is about storytelling. Not all storytelling is fiction.

My point was that if RL examples with citations aren't subject to being removed under NRLEP, then there's technically no reason to remove the RL election listing from Landslide Election, even though it comes across as an exercise, as noted above, in list making for its own sake. At most it would just move to Web Originals, or whatever Wikipedia would qualify as, while leaving that obnoxiously large chunk of text unrelated to story telling.

Doesn't that kind of negate the whole purpose of NRLEP as far as LE is concerned?

And hell, "too common to trope" doesn't fare too well against that new policy, either, as long as the examples have cites from elsewhere, which many can with only a bit of digging.

(As an aside, so much for "no citations are needed" on the home page for the wiki... )

Take note that the Landslide Election RL example removal needs to be justifiable by policy, not the policy exist so that it justifies the removal of Landslide Election's RL examples.

Yeah, we can't expect NORLEP policy to justify every example deletion on the site. That long list of tight elections could be removed because the list was brain-dead. We are not robots programmed by the wiki's policies. We can look at something, and say, using our human judgment, "That serves no purpose."

If someone has a problem with a similar deletion, we hash it out in discussion. No one seems to be interested in defending the election list, so let's truck on.

Someone added Accidental Murder.

I agree that we're not required to blindly follow the strict letter of the law, so to speak, but in the *mumble* years I've been a participant in the maintenance of the wiki I have seen more than a few instances of people making a big noise about how X action or page doesn't follow the letter of the law, even if it follows the spirit of it. A certain trope exists for a reason, in short.

(Admittedly, I'm not exactly innocent on that one, even within the context of this thread.)

And by the way, on the subject of letter vs spirit, that massive change you made to the NRLEP page could at least have been mentioned in here prior to making the edit, instead of just up and changing it without a word spoken (well, typed ) about it other than in the edit reason.

I think I understand why you cut the list of possible reasons for an NRLEP listing, but without that the folder names seem to have just been thrown up there for no real reason.

Specifying where they added it, in this case the NRLEP list, would be nice...

edited 6th Jan '16 6:47:04 AM by Nohbody

On to the usual stuff for the thread...

Calling to formalize their status:

• Failures on Ice: Added 3rd Jan '16 at 06:16:19 PM, 10:0
• Landslide Election: Added 29th Dec '15 at 06:42:56 PM, 3.5:1 (18)

edited 6th Jan '16 6:55:38 AM by Nohbody

Just a quick thought on the Landslide Election thing. Would giving the real life examples folders help with the problem or should they be kept deleted due to being %80 percent of the examples on the page.

Good point that the tight election and NORLEP policy tweak discussion should take place somewhere else. I'll try to find a suitable place in Wiki Talk.