about the 'No Negativity' rule

After accidentally posting in a thread I wasn't supposed to post to, I thought it proper to bring it up in what I hope is the right place for it.

Context for this post:

This was regarding the Content Violations Discussions thread about FATAL, a tabletop game that is pretty bad and has terrible rules such as anal circumference for the purposes of rape and sex and so on.

It appears that its only claim to notoriety is when it's mocked by players of other Tabletop Roleplaying Games, because any serious attempts at playing it tend to fail due to how poor a system it is.

The game does have enough "content" to be considered for a cut according to the new Content Policy, but some people have suggested that the page could be reverted to the old mocking version and locked, for the purposes of both information -for those lucky souls who don't know about the game but keep hearing the name and would like to know what the joke is about- and humor.

This would also have the added benefit of assuaging that, no, we're not humorless censors, but that we're not a bunch of perverts either, both views resulting from the relatively extreme changes the wiki is going through these last couple years.

Tangent: Reasons for the above paragraph:

Right now, the content of the wiki is viewing reviewed, so obviously we are doing something about it, but in the meantime, there is a contrast of "family-friendly" and "unnecessarily gushing" type of contents across the wiki, because the reviewing and cleaning efforts aren't over yet, but to both relatively and totally newcomer lurkers and editors, such a seeming discrepancy can be confusing.

I'm not saying that we should totally base our policies on what other people say, but I think it's worth thinking about how it would look to an outside perspective that hasn't seen enough of the wiki and the community to figure out just what we're going for, as far as goals and policies are concerned.

For example, a newcomer or a person that only sometimes see pages like Big Bad and such, the ones that are commonly mentioned in other websites, likely doesn't know about the P5 and that we're undergoing changes in the wiki, so if they were to come across pages mentioning that we're family-friendly, but then found one on the pages that are pending either a review or a clean-up, and that contain skeevy content, well, they're going to be confused or wonder about what our idea of family-friendly is, because they don't know we're cleaning up that sort of thing.

End Tangent

FATAL:

So, leave a page mocking FATAL, Easy, no? Well, like someone pointed out, there we would be breaking the No Negativity rule.

The rule makes sense — the wiki wanted to move away from the excess of stuff we had that served no purpose other than bashing Popular Show Everyone Likes But That I Dont Like and didn't accomplish anything else, and it did work, so all good there!

But then there are cases like FATAL, where it's not about divided fanbases, or bashing popular works because they're popular, and so on.

This is more about works whose names keep popping up, and it makes sense to at least mention what they are for the curious lurker, but that, if we were to stay completely neutral and avoiding negativity at all costs, it would sound by default that it's something we endorse in some way — we obviously don't, but due to the very atmosphere of the wiki, and the fact that we're not super formal and quasi-scientific like Wikipedia, we can't get away with presenting things clinically.

All this is solved if we can either:

Option a) Make exceptions for the No Negativity rule.

Pro: Gives us breathing room.

Con: It leaves a convenient precedent for the Fan Haters to make a page bashing whatever they want to bash, if we're not super careful about how we word it and what rules people have to follow to qualify for an exception.

Option b) Reword the No Negativity rule to keep its spirit but make clearer what its real purpose is.

Pro: We can keep some pages that would otherwise have been cut.

Con: If we're not careful in the wording, chaos may ensue.

TL;DR:

I propose that we take a good look at the No Negativity rule, since it's causing some problems — not terribly big ones, but considerable enough that it's blocking good ideas and compromises.

It served its original purpose well, but now that the wiki is going through another Big Change, in a way that is affected by this rule, I think that it's time to renew the rule or to find a better one to take its place.

(I'm so sorry for the long post but I wanted to be thorough here and not leave holes in my reasoning.)

EDIT: Also, using works such as FATAL to explain where they were wrong has a great potential to teach people who are trying to learn more about how to create good works:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13345387140A33840100&page=43#1062

This fits very well with the wiki's mission, I should think.

edited 14th May '12 1:40:48 PM by Mazz

Eddie is pretty adamant on the No Negativity rule. I'd love it to be revoked but pretty sure that ship has sailed.

The best I can hope for is the No Negativity rule become a No Negativity guideline.

Ideally, what I'd like to see is some balance between the FATAL page in its current form and the old version - not as outright snarky, but more than just a bare-bones description. My Immortal is a good example of a page that points out the ridiculousness of the material but doesn't (IMO) violate the No Negativity rule, and I think that's what we need to shoot for with the new FATAL page, if such a thing can be done.

Oh, a guideline would be perfect! That is more or less what I was trying to get at with my tl;dr.

Sorry if I came across as if I was proposing that we make a free-for-all bash-everything-you-like sort of environment. That's like the opposite of the kind of site I would like.

I just meant that we consider something that allows a little flexibility to cases like the one I described above.

I didn't know all that, though. Thanks for letting me know.

edited 14th May '12 1:51:02 PM by Mazz

My Immortal approach seems good. However, I don't think that we need an exception to No Negativity just for the sake of FATAL and other questionable stuff.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I don't think we need to praise or gush a work in order to not run afoul of No Negativity. As My Immortal shows, it's entirely possible to state the facts, explain that it's considered a bad work, and move on without bashing the work for -insert any of X different reasons-.

I'd like to see "No Negativity" scaled back, at the very least, too. If there's a significant public opinion that a work has some negative qualities (ie Kipling's works promoting colonialism and racism), no critical analysis (or whatever lists of tropes are) would be complete without at least mentioning it.

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

The big problem is that negativity usually quicly leads to fighting, natter, edit warring etc.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Which is why I'm not saying we should get rid of it completely, just reword or rework it, but still make it explicit that it's not an excuse for natter, edit warring, personal attacks, etc.

Apparently?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/remarks.php?trope=TabletopGame.FATAL

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=TabletopGame.FATAL&more=t

To be fair, the people mentioning that it could stay aren't arguing it should stay because it's a good thing or because they like it, or anything, but rather for the humor and possible educative purposes it could have to teach people how not to write a tabletop game:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13368517820A08920200

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13349331300A11026600&page=109

edited 14th May '12 8:04:14 PM by Mazz

I'm not optimistic about this site's general ability to judge subjective things for itself, but I'd take that over "no negativity", which can be abused anyway.

EDIT: Well, now I know what FATAL is. You're saying people get into edit fights over it, which means there are people who defend things like that? On this very wiki, no less?

edited 14th May '12 6:31:04 PM by BoundByTheMoon

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

I prefer the no negativity rule. Subjectivity is the garbage you can dig up elsewhere. Critics are usually the same.

Fight smart, not fair.

I think he(?) was speaking in general.

Note: In content violations, we were debating whether it should be cut or just have a jokey stub article, and this is why Mazz posted.

edited 14th May '12 9:04:08 PM by animeg3282

I don't think that anyone can actually defend FATAL. Anyone that could "like" it has a series of bizarrely specific fetishes on par of the author. The edit warring was over the negativity; i.e. NOBODY has anything nice to say about this game, so why should the article treat it it has any other value than as an object lesson/geek inside joke?

I mean the only reason anyone knows about this game is because of the hilarious, scathing, in-depth reviews on it. There's not really any other context by which to talk about it.

I'm just saying the world, including fictional analysis (or whatever- should I use a different word for "troping"?), isn't always clear-cut black and white. Pretending otherwise seems cold and, well, robotic. Open criticism and subjectivity are different things.

edited 14th May '12 8:59:31 PM by BoundByTheMoon

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

True, but they're not inherent to the work. Which is what we are shooting for to my knowledge. We are shooting for a description of what is in the work, not what happened after the work was released. Once a work is released, it's generally done and there's very little left to say.

Fight smart, not fair.

Well, what's the point of cataloging works if we're not going to analyze them and their components?

I'm not saying we should open the floods of bashing and hatred, far from it, but there's no harm in analyzing how effectively a work uses the tools that went into its creation, i.e., the Tropes (in fact, isn't that what we're trying to do, collaboratively?) and we can't exactly do that very well if we can only be strictly neutral on something, like The Other Wiki.

And if people start being jerks and try to Rules Lawyer their way out of trouble or something, we report them and sanction them appropriately. We still have the "don't be a dick" rule all across the website for that, after all.

edit: Sorry, I was typing this as you posted; what isn't "inherent to the work"?

Well, in that case, that takes out that argument out of this.

edited 14th May '12 9:41:20 PM by Mazz

Counterpoint: FATAL. Are we supposed to just list all the reprehensible stuff in it, no negativity, no analysis, nothing about why it's even a thing, and call it a day? Or just gloss over the unsavory parts?

Trying to stop people from rules-lawyering hasn't worked out very well so far.

edited 14th May '12 9:20:49 PM by BoundByTheMoon

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

Any sort of reaction and morality is usually not inherent to the work, but to the reaction to the work.

We can analyze them, the problem comes with trying to combine the wikis chosen style and analyzing things which require a reaction from the audience. We're not supposed to discuss, argue, or debate on the main pages in any way, shape, or form. So, we either need to have one universal set that no one argues with, or we need to move it somewhere else. Since the first would require an actual hive mind, the second is what we've got.

That combined with the fact that "how well the trope is used" is an inherently subjective definition because it involves trying to gauge the reaction to the work means we can't really keep thing objective (neutrality and objective are generally related, but not the same thing). For some people, a particular instance of Kick the Dog can have no effect, it can be effective, or it can be a Moral Event Horizon depending entirely on the reader in question.

Yes.

Fight smart, not fair.

Er, I'm not talking about things like audience reaction tropes. Some things are objectively badly done or badly written. It's when you start getting closer to the averages between terrible and excellent when the waters get muddier and debates start over whether something was well-written or badly-written.

You can't tell me that My Immortal uses English well. You can, however, take a look at other works of its type (Fan Fiction) and tell that it's emulating so many of the "bad" elements (and also of the English language in general) at once that it's statistically unlikely, if not impossible, that it was that poorly written by an earnest writer, instead of a troll.

I mean things like that.

"Are we supposed to just list all the reprehensible stuff in it, no negativity, no analysis, nothing about why it's even a thing, and call it a day?

Yes."

I— Really? What's the point in doing that?

No, things are not objectively done badly or done well. They are done well or poorly to satisfy a set of criteria. What those criteria are is not constant, and thus subjective.

Using English is not a trope. Unless it's Gratuitous English. So the point is moot to begin with.

We're documenting tropes. Past experience has shown that if allowed to put any kind of opinion on a work on the page, some editors (often uptight assholes) will cover it in negative crap. Our readers are not so stupid as to not be able to make judgement calls on stuff. Give them the information, they can draw their own conclusions. Having had to wade through a mountain of such garbage, I'm perfectly comfortable cutting off the very option of putting any negativity to save future editors the effort of having to clean such trash up.

Fight smart, not fair.

We could seriously just code a wiki bot to do that. Do you understand the point of the humanities at all?

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

I think we're misunderstanding each other in some fundamental way that I'm not quite sure how to address.

Yes, exactly!

edited 15th May '12 7:18:16 AM by Mazz

It's the difference between quantifying a piece of work, and assessing its quality. One is just a list of conventions and events that happen in media, and the other seeks to discuss why these conventions are used, and how they are used in a specific piece.

With the No Negativity rule in place, that cuts out a hell of a lot of analysis right off the bat, because we either have to be neutral or positive. We are unable to say why FATAL is utter crap because doing so breaks the rule. That leaves us only with the option of either being super happy about the work, or merely listing the tropes and leaving it at that.

Do not be so quick to make foolish offers, Daemon. Araghast too once thought I would be an asset to his cause. Look what has become of him.

Not that half the pages here are anything more than that anyway. But you're right, there should be more.

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

You are talking about review and analysis. You are free to do all of that you want in Reviews and on the Analysis page.

The works pages list the tropes used. We write enough description of the work to make it clear which one we're talking about, then list the tropes.

In the trope descriptions we describe the tropes and its storytelling purpose. If you want to analyze why it works, go for it. On the Analysis tab.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty