Real Life People Cleanup Project

As for Slobodan, as mentioned a) lack of media mentions and b) violation of the NRLEP rules. And to be honest, I've noticed that all too often, when a page is launched with such problems, they don't get fixed quickly.

We can take the other UN pages to repair too, but it's not always an issue for this topic. I agree that a lot of these need an overhaul.

I just put in a Locked Page Edit Request to fix the problems with Adolph Hitler. We should be able to use the same procedure to fix other locked people pages.

That's not a problem for this thread? So Milosevic is a problem for the thread, but Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tito, Lenin, Robespierre, and all the other historical figures (and so far I'm just listing dictators; seen the pages for the US Presidents yet?) are not? I'm not following your logic here. If the policy is that none of those pages can contain a trope list, then that's the policy. There's nothing to debate, and you guys can start going through them all now, cutting every single trope. If there is a problem, and you think those pages merit more discussion, then so to does the one for Milosevic. You can't have it both ways.

Glad to hear it. Be interested to see how that goes.

edited 12th Sep '13 10:41:44 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

This thread is about UN pages which don't have enough media mentions. Not about the other problems. They did contribute to the idea of cutting the Slobodan page, but weren't the sole reason. If the new Slobodan page gets enough media mentions then it becomes acceptable by the standards of this thread.

If that's what the thread is about, then why were you bringing up all those other reasons to cut it? You could have headed off this entire discussion by saying that the problem was there weren't enough media mentions, and Lightysnake and I would have had to either fix that, or let the issue drop. Instead you went into great detail about how the issue was the use of tropes on a real person, something which is, of course, prevalant all across this website, on everything from the pages for US Presidents to the various dictators we've been discussing here, and which nobody seems to be in a real hurry to deal with.

In short, you chose to make it your problem by listing those reasons for cutting it.

Septimus, my understanding is that this thread is about all cleanup that needs to be done on any pages (Creator or Useful Notes) that are about Real Life people. Not just about specific problem with all Useful Notes in general. Hence the title. We probably should have a Useful Notes cleanup page, but the title of this thread suggest otherwise.

"When will you be cutting the tropes under Hitler? And Stalin? And Mao Zedong?"

Thank you for bringing other problem pages to our attention. As far as the locked pages go, I will be submitting edit requests at what I think would be a resonable pace.

"If you guys can agree to unilaterally cut all of the tropes under Milosevic with no real debate,"

You don't need debate to fix rule violations.

Ah, I was going off the original thread purpose. My bad.

I in general approve of cutting the trope examples, but we ought to hold off on things like Barack Obama - that one's much more like a work page. Also, I am not 100% sure that "no tropes for UN pages" is policy yet - it seems to me George W Bush was locked by the admin over such a dispute.

No problem. As I said before, I'm not hellbent on keeping the Milosevic page, but if he's got to go, so too do the other pages I mentioned. Otherwise we've got a serious issue with bias here (and that is a problem I've run into before on many sites. People are a-okay with calling Hitler and Stalin evil. Doing the same for say, Idi Amin? Now you've suddenly crossed a line. I'd rather we not be one of those sites).

As for not needing debate to fix rule violations...according to what Septimus just posted, it apparently may not be a rule violation.

Excuse me? No troping about real life people on UN pages—the thing that you guys have spent all morning insisting is a policy—may not be a policy? You didn't check before cutlisting a page?

edited 12th Sep '13 10:59:41 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

The issue is that not all tropes in such lists are "troping of RL people" - for example, Barack Obama mostly isn't.

And the cutlisting had completely different reasons.

edited 12th Sep '13 11:04:32 AM by SeptimusHeap

Quite honestly, if you think there's a lack of milosevic in fiction, you should look that up. He's been covered more than you might think due to the controversy of eerything in the Balkans

I just looked at the page. How, pray tell, is it different? It is a lengthy list of tropes that apply to Obama. Similarly the Bush page is a lengthy list of tropes that apply to, well, Bush. Yet somehow those are not worthy of cutting, but Milosevic is? Maybe I'm missing something, but this is feeling very arbitrary to me.

And Septimus, you listed three reasons for cutlisting. One was the incorrect namespace (easily fixed), one was the lack of media portrayals (which may well be fixable), and one was the troping of real life people. You can't now claim that it was cut for reasons that had nothing to do with troping of real life people, when that is one of the three main reasons you gave for cutting it.

edited 12th Sep '13 11:17:22 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

I would like to point out that "But <this other page> has the same problems and hasn't been fixed/cut/locked yet" is not a valid reason for not fixing/cutting/locking a page with problems. If <every other page> has to be fixed before <this one> can be addressed, there is no page that we can start with.

OK, no. The third reason is "Most tropes are No Real Life Examples Please, i.e inapplicable. ". That is not the same policy as "no troping of RL people".

That said, the issue I have is that while "no troping of RL people" is a good approach, not all trope examples would fall under that - Barack Obama had a big admin note that allows examples under certain terms. I would make sure we draw the distinction.

Also, for what it's worth, cutlisting is a valid fix for misnamespaced pages so as long as the content is copied over, and some people here agreed that it wasn't worth preserving (by copying over).

edited 12th Sep '13 11:24:17 AM by SeptimusHeap

I don't disagree. What I'm not following is why Septimus Heap seems to think that the trope list under Obama is fine, while the one under Milosevic is worthy of cutting. I have no issues with a wikiwide clean up of the pages for real life people. I have issues with an arbitrary clean up of some of those pages, while ignoring others. As long as that doesn't happen, I'm fine.

@Septimus

""no troping of RL people" is a good approach, not all trope examples would fall under that - Barack Obama has a big admin note that allows examples under certain terms. I would make sure we draw the distinction."

Maybe there's something linguistic that I'm missing here. Why make an exception? It strikes me that if we do that, what we're going to have is lengthy lists of tropes under people who we consider basically good (Eisenhower, FDR, various other Presidents), and either no tropes, or worse yet, a list of only the non-awful things they did listed in the tropes under Stalin, Hitler, et al. Would it not be easier to either a) allow the listing of all standard non-YMMV tropes on the UN pages, or b) allow the listing of no tropes on the UN pages. Otherwise this just strikes me as a pain in the backside waiting to happen.

edited 12th Sep '13 11:24:31 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

The Obama list is fine, in my opinion, because rhetoric is a form of storytelling and Milosevic's deeds aren't.

Also, the reason why Slobodan's page came on my radar is because I saw it on the new pages feed. I am monitoring it to find bad new pages, but I am not screening every wiki page.

edited 12th Sep '13 11:35:04 AM by SeptimusHeap

Let me see if I have this right—you're saying that tropes relating to his speeches (rhetoric) would be fine? Because I'm looking over that page and most of it does not appear to be related to his speeches. I'm seeing Conspiracy Theory, Older Sidekick, and a host of others connected to Obama's life. Frankly, I think that it would be best to cut all the tropes under UN pages, or keep them all.

In fact there's a fair amount of discussion on the page about what the right thinks of him versus what the left thinks of him, which at least in my personal opinion (which I know doesn't necessarily count for much) has less business being on the page, than President Evil does being under Hitler (Hitler really did commit genocide, and that really is pretty evil. Obama probably isn't a Kenyan-born Muslim, yet that's referenced in the trope section as being what his opponents claim about him).

edited 12th Sep '13 11:40:55 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Whatever the conclusions are they need to be universal. Several of the faults that the Milosevic page was cut for are exhibited by many if not all of the historical figures pages currently under the Useful Notes section.

Every single page that I have looked at under Useful Notes has tropes listed on them and several pages have few if any fictional works. For example the Idi Amin page has a one line blurb, a list of tropes and a single fictional work listed and the page for Flavius Belisarius only has three. The page for Jacques Cousteau doesn't have any listed nor does Walter Cronkite.

If there is going to be a set standard it should be applied uniformly otherwise it doesn't mean anything and only sets the site up for bias.

edited 12th Sep '13 11:45:52 AM by SophiaLonesoul

Yes, I think that rhetoric is tropeable, but it's my opinion and if consensus disagrees with me that's fine.

These trope uses you reference don't seem to be that, so I'd be fine with cutting.

So what about older historical figures? Most of the Joan of Arc page does not pertain to stuff she is supposed to have said.

I would like to point out that the farther back in history we go the less certain we are of what historical figures actually said. We have physical and digital copies of more recent figure's rhetoric but that may not be the case for earlier ones.

edited 12th Sep '13 11:53:55 AM by SophiaLonesoul

There was discussion on making a namespace for Historical Domain Character, but it petered out.

Furthermore, we get most of our information on many figures from biographies and from reports on them, which are just as subject to tropes as anything else

Yeah, sometimes it's been proposed to treat ancient people differently from recent ones like Obama, in part because of that.

While I can understand that viewpoint, I'm not sure it won't just create more confusion still. I'll also reiterate what I said before. If we remove all of the "evil" tropes (because let's face it, most tropes that are No Real Life Examples Please, tend to have something to do with calling someone evil) what we're going to get is pages for the likes of Hitler and Stalin that either don't have any tropes listed or only list various Pet the Dog moments, while pages for the likes of Obama, Joan of Arc, etc, will continue to have very long trope lists.

Personally, I don't really see the problem with calling somebody like Hitler or Milosevic a bad person either. I know that we want to keep that sort of thing off of the main pages, and that we don't want people listing one of the US Presidents, but when we're dealing with people who committed out and out genocide (and people who did it in the present day, so there isn't as much Values Dissonance) I'm not really seeing the issue. If we've decided that's unacceptable, I get it, but it does leave us with the some problems regarding what goes on their pages.

EDIT: Actually, the act of committing genocide (Final Solution) isn't actually listed as NRLEP. Which means that you could include it on a page for a real person, but could not pass a value judgement on their actions by labelling them as President Evil, General Ripper, etc. That just seems...strange to me.

edited 12th Sep '13 12:24:44 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

@Lightysnake:

Actually, that is what you should have done before you put up that page.

@Ambar: Please, don't insinuate "we" have a political agenda in cutting tropes from some Useful Notes page while they are still there on others. You are one of us, and if you don't like the way things are, you are welcome to change them in accord with our rules and policies.

It would take two minutes to move (for instance) Adolf Hitler to UsefulNotes.Adolf Hitler and zap the trope list. The one reason why I haven't done it just now is point (b) in this paragraph from this thread's OP:

The problem is that, for a historical domain character like Hitler that shows up in fiction daily, there is an astronomical and ever-growing number of tropes which have been used with him at least once. Also, a list of such tropes would obviously contain self-contradictions (since one and the same character may be portrayed in totally different ways) and irrelevant drivel, as under the current wording of the rule, any one instance from an obscure work would justify adding a trope to the page, not regarding whether the trope is in any way representative of the entirety of the character's media portrayals or not.

It is that rule that makes me unsure about whether I can just zap the entire trope list on Adolf Hitler. Checking every trope example for validity will obviously take a lot of time and also smacks of endless discussions of tropers wrangling for the keeping or deletion of a specific trope. I doubt we will ever complete cleaning the Useful Notes pages if we keep that rule. It may be a nice idea in theory to analyze the way a historical character is portrayed in media on their Useful Notes page, but I doubt it is viable in practice.

edited 12th Sep '13 1:14:39 PM by LordGro