Supertrope/subtrope example sorting

When you are listing examples that fall under a highly organized supertrope, such as Five-Man Band or Competitive Balance, the proper way to sort the examples is in alphabetical order, not by listing the supertrope and then the subtropes indented beneath them.

I just asked Fast Eddie to confirm this and he did, so now I'm going to bring this up as a Special Efforts project. Not because we need more projects, but putting it here has a twofold purpose.

1. To remind people of the proper way to sort examples.
2. To establish a structure for cleaning it up and keeping it clean.

I see this a lot on Characters pages, such as Pokémon Anime - Original Series, and I just had to suspend someone for reverting my previous edit to the article. It's also not the only improper example on that article.

As a reminder, the following is incorrect:

• Five-Man Band
  • The Leader: George
  • The Lancer: Freddie
  • The Chick: Alice
  • The Big Guy: John
  • The Smart Guy: Einstein

The following is correct:

• The Big Guy: John
• The Chick: Alice
• Five-Man Band: George, Freddie, Alice, John, and Einstein
• The Lancer: Freddie
• The Leader: George
• The Smart Guy: Einstein

So, in standard Special Efforts format, let's list articles that need cleanup and/or have been cleaned. Also let's make note of tropers that revert changes we make so that they can be addressed appropriately.

edited 2nd Sep '12 8:47:24 PM by Fighteer

Would that also apply to listing a Super-Trope and its sub tropes on indexes?

edited 2nd Sep '12 11:03:22 PM by DragonQuestZ

I have to ask, why is this necessary? The way people have been doing it seems to make more sense for most of these tropes.

I suspect the reason is so that tropes always appear in their correct alphabetical position and you don't end up with duplicates, and, if it turns out that, say, Five-Man Band has been shoe-horned in (as it so often is), you don't have to rearrange all the subtropes when you pull FMB.

But that's just a guess. Aesthetically, I like the nested version, but not enough to complain if we stop doing that.

Actually, that reminds me - is it even possible to have the Five-Man Band tropes without an actual Five-Man Band? That's never been clear, and recent changes have only made it more confusing.

Yep. There can be all the character tropes, but if they never work as a team then it isn't a Five-Man Band.

@DQZ: I'm mainly concerned with the sorting on work articles. Subtrope-supertrope on indexes is a relatively minor issue, unless it's observed that it's inspiring people to do it the wrong way on work pages.

On work pages and (especially) character sheets, Badass subtropes is the other big violator here, besides Five-Man Band.

I'm with nrjxll, I'd like an explanation of why this is necessary. The nested version looks much cleaner to me. Helps illustrate the relationship between the supertropes/subtropes, too.

Well it would be best to fix them in all pages when we see them, just to make it clear it's not okay, period.

Nested makes sense for Five-Man Band since it's a trope composed of five other tropes. For a normal super/subtrope distinction it looks bad though.

I agree with this.

I suppose I could see other nested only style tropes used. For instance, I believe that Badass and its subtropes are bad examples since that's just a trope and subtrope. Besides which, most badass tropes begin with badass so it's not a problem. Another one I think was mentioned somewhere was Gameplay Balance and stuff like Fragile Speedster, which I think is a bad example because Fragile Speedster is commonly used outside of a gameplay setting.

I don't have any strong feelings about whether we should or shouldn't do this. I do, however, consider it to be about as low a priority as I can possibly imagine. Basically, if this is something you want done, you're on your own, as far as I'm concerned. But I will wave a cheery, "good luck" from the side-lines, while I work on special efforts that actually seem not-pointless. :)

@Deboss: Badass, Competitive Balance, and occasionally Time Travel are ones that I often see used in this manner.

@Xtifr: This is not an emergency. This is just something I want to put out there so we have a reference point for making the cleanup stick.

edited 4th Sep '12 6:41:05 AM by Fighteer

Yeah, none of those fit. That's a standard trope and subtrope relationship and should be in standard order. I think that a trope that is essentially just a group of other tropes (Five-Man Band or Five Bad B And both come to mind) it sort of works since the only way to explain it is to point to the others.

Upon thinking on it for a few minutes, perhaps

• Five-Man Band: Character A, Character B, Character C, Character D, Character X, explanations on entries.
• The Smart Guy: Character X because blah blah blah.

Would be a better method.

edited 4th Sep '12 4:42:54 PM by Deboss

That was my thinking.

I've always preferred grouping. I suppose the difference is whether you want an alphabetical list of tropes, or a coherent list of tropes. For me, on a trope page, the trope with its examples is the important part, not the works that carry the examples. On a work page, the work with its tropes relate to each other is the important part, not the tropes by themselves.

I don't see lumping supertropes and subtropes together any different than lumping tropes concerning a specific character together, or YMMV tropes.

I mean, if you see that a work has a Five-Man Band, you probably want to see who those members are, without hunting through the entire trope list. An alphabetical trope list is good for specific tropes, but a grouped list is better for the overall page.

That looks a little clumsy to me, and it doesn't do anything about the hunting down tropes bit.

edited 9th Feb '13 11:10:42 AM by AnotherDuck

Deboss's scheme here looks okay, though I think it would be better if instead of "Character A" it was "Character A as The Leader". That's just me, though.

This is under Merlin on Characters.Merlin; what do we do with it?

• Superpower Lottery: To be expected with the most powerful warlock ever. Pretty much the only thing he can't do within the limits of human sorcery is predict the future.
  • Playing with Fire / Pyrokinesis
  • Mind over Matter
  • Super-Strength
  • Elemental Powers
  • Time Master
  • Telepathy
  • Pure Energy
    • Energy Ball
  • Blow You Away
  • Making a Splash
  • Shock and Awe
  • Psychic Powers
  • My Significance Sense Is Tingling

List all his powers under Superpower Lottery, delete the rest for being Zero Context.

I'd try to put it into paragraph format (i.e. something along the lines, "his powers include A, B, C, D, ..., etc.). If the sub-listed tropes had context, they should have also been shifted to the top level, but as they're ZCE, there's no point in doing so.