Does the mere existence of tropes define a work as a "work"?

This may sound a bit broad, but its coming up in the debate over Toon Makers’ Sailor Moon. For the uninitiated, this is a works page for a "show" that doesn't actually exist in any form that can be viewed outside of a short bootlegged music video you can easily find on Youtube. In the early 2000s, an anime website tracked down someone that worked on it and the only other details we have on the show revealed that a pilot was made (but cannot be seen) and the interviewer was still very hazy on a number of details. Nonetheless, the music video exists and currently the crowner suggests that because we can get tropes from watching a music video out of context, it's a legitimate work that should not be merged into the larger works pages of Sailor Moon.

Well, this begs the really obvious question of how official of a "work" do we need to declare a work a work. Theoretically, you can get tropes from anything, finished or not, produced or not, and the existence of an HeadOn page proves that.

But by this standard, I should be able to look at, say, the entire 2011 Wonder Woman pilot that was unfinished and not picked up, and give it an entire works page for "Live Action/Wonder Woman (2011)" despite a single episode never airing. Or to go even further, this 5 minute concept pilot for a 1967 television production of the same character that was passed on could be "Live Action/Wonder Woman (1967)". Hey, I can easily get at least three tropes from that alone! And even though it's not on the Wonder Woman page index, Wonder Woman and the Star Riders got as far as toy prototypes, an extremely limited (but easily bootlegged online) promotional comic, and tons of concept art. Yep, I can easily get three verifiable tropes for that too (actually, far more than Toon Makers Sailor Moon since I can read a comic of it).

(...why there are so many failed Wonder Woman projects is out of the scope of this thread.)

Oh, and to get off Wonder Woman, I can come up with tons of concept art for Nelvana's aborted Doctor Who aniamted series - and at least three verifiable tropes based on it that are not pure speculation. Is that enough to start Nelvana Doctor Who?

So the real question is - what defines a work that should have its own standalone page? If I can conceivably write at least three tropes for it, is it now a work regardless of how incomplete it is?

edited 13th Sep '12 4:08:49 PM by Rebochan

Given There Is No Such Thing As Notability, I'd think that a video about fiction alone is page-worthy. It's "published" after all as under our definition.

There's nothing on that page that determines what "publishing" would be. By definition, a pilot is not "published", nor is concept art. Even a Fan Fic is self-published. Heck, even the Sprite Comic example on that page would have been self-published by the authorfor Internet distribution and the fact that it died after seven strips is not different than a TV show that got canned after airing one episode (like Heil Honey Im Home). A bootleg not intended for public consumption that leaks to the public? Well, that's not published by definition.

I also discovered there's a page for The Day The Clown Cried, just to blur the line even further since the movie was never released or completed, and short of Jerry Lewis becoming a troper, unviewable by the sites contributors. You can read the screenplay, but it's not known if that was the shooting script since the film was heavily altered during production. It's more significant as a running joke amongst film buffs than something that could be troped without speculation.

That's the other problem - pages based on pilots or concept pitches are purely speculative. We don't know what the plot "is" because the point of these are just to give money men an idea of what they might want to do. The 2011 Wonder Woman pilot had visual notes in the pilot itself explaining decisions that needed to be made about how to proceed with the show had it actually gone to series. It seems to encourage people creating pages for speculative works, then filling it with examples that can't be easily verified, requiring them to be locked almost immediately or regularly policed. The Toon Makers Sailor Moon page has a plot summary for the show despite no plot summary every being distributed by staff or given in the bootlegged music vide.

edited 13th Sep '12 4:55:39 PM by Rebochan

A screenplay is a work. Questions about provenance don't really matter. The screenplay can be read. It is published by our standard.

The music video is viewable. That's published.

The pilots and pitches ... if they can be found, they are works.

Yea, but is a screenplay a Film? Is a chopped-up music video really the same as full live-action TV series? Neither one of them is representative of a work in its complete form, but they're being categorized and presented as if they are.

Furthermore, is an interview in which a guy describes something that might have been in the show acceptable when there's no evidence of it in the music video we actually can watch?

edited 13th Sep '12 6:24:14 PM by Rebochan

A novel isn't a film either. A screenplay is a work, as is a play, whether it is produced or not.

A remix of a video is a work.

edited 13th Sep '12 7:15:39 PM by FastEddie

Well right now, we have screenplays classified as films, and in the case of Toon Makers Sailor Moon, a short music video and an interview classified as an animated series because there may be a pilot. So that's a bit of a problem - do we have any way to index works that are unproduced pitches or pilots? Right now, there is the One-Episode Wonder trope that does index pilots like this, but the standard that is about to be set by Toon Makers Sailor Moon suggest that there should be complete works pages for them as long as they can be viewed in any form and thus categorized within their intended genre (whether they made it that far or not.)

Anything that is available for study and critique can be considered a work, regardless of the format and especially regardless of the difficulty in locating it. The only thing that would not count as a work is mere rumors or even press releases on the development of a work, as I would consider it an unwritten rule that a movie or tv show should be in actual production before making a page on it (thereby ensuring information is accurate including the title).

I personally think it is a little unnecessary to have a page on, say, James Cameron's unproduced Spiderman script but if someone felt so inclined there isn't anything stopping them.

The indexes it's on at the moment are fine. Franchise.Sailor Moon — I doubt anyone will argue it doesn't belong there. Western Animation — it's the right medium, but the description limits it slightly. I don't see any reason to limit it like that, since an animated short complete in and of itself would probably be put there anyway, so change the first sentence to "Animation and Animated Shows originating in North America, Western Europe, Australia or New Zealand. Some of these entries are actually compilations of theatrical shorts assembled for broadcast; the vast majority, though, are original creations made for television."

There's nothing stopping anyone from making a page, but of course anyone can cut it if they feel so inclined.

Somehow we've extrapolated a two-minute music pitch video into a full-blown animated series (that doesn't exist...), so I guess really I need to take all those concepts I mentioned and make pages out of them.

...sorry, I don't think it's going against the theme of the wiki to suggest a work actually be published by someone (as opposed to the pitch getting leaked) to count as a completed work worthy of its own page. Or to suggest there be some kind of minimum standard for a work to get its own works page beyond "at least three tropes", because that's a gimme on anything.

edited 14th Sep '12 12:24:45 AM by Rebochan

We used to have an Unpublished Works namespace in Darth Wiki.

Not sure which side that supports.

The pitch is published. We can trope the video itself. Troping the show beyond that is speculation and would belong on Darth Wiki in an unpublished work page if anywhere, but a short animation that is available online is a work which can be troped.

It's rather disingenuous to continue to campaign to have this page cut here and in the TRS thread. Either make the topic more broad/theoretical, or this needs locked as a duplicate.

I was explicitly told to move discussion on the broader topic here. In that thread.

Yes. I was who said that. Discussing one page is TRS work. Discussing the policies about what gets pages is Wiki Talk work.

But you have shifted focus from the broader topic to the specific. We don't need you trying to get the same page cut in two different threads.

By the wiki's definition of a work, and according to There Is No Such Thing As Notability, there is no limitation on what can be given a wiki article as long as it actually exists and doesn't violate our other guidelines.

For the sake of sanity, however, we try to keep information consolidated when it's under the umbrella of a single major work. A script is not independent of the film it's used to make, nor is its fifth revision during the course of production a distinct work.

A pilot of a portion of a larger work that was never released for publication is not an independent work by my reckoning, any more than the trailer for a movie is a work independent of that movie, or the introduction to a novel is a work independent of that novel.

When we want to trope individual parts of a serial work, we use subpages, such as Recap, or do a split out into individual films in cases like Star Wars. If I have a page about a single large body of work, like Heralds Of Valdemar, I am not going to launch a separate article for an unpublished short story set in that universe. That would be ridiculous considering we don't split the main page into the separate novels.

If material is part of a work's Expanded Universe, we generally create an EU page for it and list all that material there, unless it becomes too big and requires a split.

edited 14th Sep '12 9:21:32 AM by Fighteer

I agree with Fighteer. We aren't going to make a separate page for the trailer of the English dub of Naruto, for instance.

But that's only because no one has done so. We have plenty of series that are split into individual works pages. Discworld and Kingdom Hearts, for example.

It comes down to the Lumper Vs Splitter mentality and where it's sane to draw the line and when it's okay to have it either way. In general, we can trust people to use common sense about it, though. I hardly think that it such a widespread problem that we actually need a detailed policy on when to split off a work from its parent franchise.

edited 14th Sep '12 10:07:37 AM by ccoa

Of course, if we do have an article split in that manner, then it's appropriate to add a new page for a distinct work in the series. I thought I said that.

What I'm saying, though, is that if we don't have a franchise or series split by sub-work, and someone comes along and makes a separate article for some obscure unreleased thing, it makes the whole system look schizophrenic and inconsistent.

edited 14th Sep '12 10:11:23 AM by Fighteer

Sorry, it didn't come across that way. ^^;

I think the U.S. Copyright Code provides a useful prism for looking at works. Copyright covers:

"original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device."

It's intentionally quite broad, but certainly excludes stuff that's just rattling around in one person's head, or oral storytelling (including, e.g., memories of someone's RPG campaign) that hasn't been recorded or transcribed in some fashion.

Around when Troper Tales was cut, there was a bit of a question being raised about how we handle tabletop roleplays. There was agreement that something should be done with them, but not what, and it never went anywhere.

On the other hand, any (non-pornographic, of course) forum roleplay is probably fair game if you think it's interesting enough to trope up.

The problem with roleplays is not notability, but verifiability. Unless it's published somewhere, there's no way to check that an example is valid.

In my mind, an anecdote, "In my D&D session, we totally played Orcs as Always Chaotic Evil," is no more valid than any other troper tale and therefore irrelevant to the wiki.

edited 19th Sep '12 8:08:09 AM by Fighteer

So it's better to do something recounting them, like the "Counter Monkey" videos on The Spoony Experiment.