Complaining: Author Tract

Author Tract currently has a notice warning tropers not to use the trope to complain about either authors or messages that they don't like, yet the examples themselves indicate that people are ignoring it when they add examples. Quite a few examples go out of their way to show how the views expressed in a particular work are faulty, with plenty of snark stuffed in.

Also, when a troper agrees with a particular message, they tend to feel the need to include a disclaimer along the lines of "oh, but Tropes Are Not Bad, and the author conveys his message well," which exacerbates the above-mentioned snark by implying that the snark is the proper default for the trope.

Lastly, doomsday524 claims on the Discussion page that the page is biased agaist right-wing messages, with snark being reserved for the right-wing messages and defensiveness being reserved for the left-wing messages. I haven't really applied this particular litmus test to the page, but I do think doomsday524's feelings on this have been influenced by the tone of the page, and I'd suppose that cleaning up the examples (and, if necessary, the description) would take care of all this.

I think it could do with a more direct piece of text explaining that any qualification or commentary should be excluded. If other people don't think it's a good enough example, they can just delete it. Perhaps something like:

'When adding examples, please restrict them to explaining what the tract is about and how this is shown. We don't want arguments.'

edited 21st May '12 1:17:08 AM by abloke

^I went ahead and added this to the bolded notice.

One other thing I think will help is a more neutral quote than the current one. Anyone have ideas?

Should stand-up routines be included? A lot of comedians deliberately exaggerate their own beliefs for comic effect.

Is there any plans to do any further work on this trope?

It definitely needs it, but if there's no interest in doing the work (I'm sure as hell not going to solo this, even if I was familiar with all the works listed) is there need to keep this thread open?

There's a separate thread in Special Efforts for bashing/negativity cleanup, if that's the only remaining issue. But as long as we have it in TRS, I think it's worth asking if the description needs any further modification.

Clocking due to lack of activity.

Locking.