removing 'this troper' from sugar wiki and nightmare fuel.

It's best if somebody who is a fan and who cares about it takes it as their responsibility. I know zilch about skyrim, and I'd make a wretched work of it. So it's no from me. Perhaps you could ask at the forum for the work or something.

Same. I haven't played Skyrim, so I can't help.

Awesome.Mitadake High is only troper tales. I don't think it's acceptable even for that kind of games but I want to be sure.

edited 5th Apr '13 5:02:11 PM by Lophotrochozoa

I've read about four first entries. The page is awful. I think it happened because its first editor wrote an entry in that style, the others simply followed the leader.

However, I don't play video games and I don't know the style which tropers use for it. I think that page is hardly OK and hardly would be approved.

Personally, I would remove most of it, if not all. Awesome moments should relate to the story in the game, not your experience.

If someone is going to purge the page, they should ask mods before methinks. That much of deleting might look like vandalism.

edited 5th Apr '13 5:23:37 PM by XFllo

I do actually have some experience with that sort of thing - the Awesome.Video Games page itself used to have several rather large folders that were nothing but troper tales for online games of various flavours; I put them to the sword last summer. There was even a subpage that consisted solely of two troper tales which I also torched, but I understood that the page should not be cut in case an actual programmed moment of awesome is deemed worth adding.

Honestly, though, that page should be burned to the ground. It's troper tales and nothing else. If any mods are reading, have we your permission to clear pages that consist entirely of troper tales as long as we provide adequate edit reasons so as to make it clear that it is not an act of page blanking as vandalism?

EDITED TO ADD: ... hoo boy. The Funny, Heartwarming, and Tearjerker pages for Mitadake High are also all troper tales and nothing else. Perhaps, rather than blanking them outright, we should leave commented out notes explaining that they are not troper tales pages?

Again, if any mods are reading, does this sound acceptable for pages that are troper tales and nothing else?

edited 5th Apr '13 5:56:10 PM by mlsmithca

Considering that the game doesn't have much of a narrative, there's really no moments to be had that aren't troper tales. I don't see how blanking or cutting the pages isn't the solution.

I agree that the pages as they now stand ought to be cut from top to bottom - I think the only concern as such is to ensure that it isn't perceived as page blanking as vandalism, hence waiting for a mod ruling before proceeding. Again, perhaps just leaving a commented out note that no moments should be added that are troper tales.

And if that means no moments can be added at all, well, we can ask for a mod ruling on cutting the pages. I strongly suspect they wouldn't be cut, though, for two reasons: because if they were cut, someone would eventually try to re-create them or demand to know why they've been locked, and because perhaps, after all, we can't totally rule out the possibility of non-player-created moments of awesome, funny, heartwarming, or tearjerking.

EDITED TO ADD: This is likely going to be a problem with any page dedicated to MMORPGs and the like - games that don't have the sort of narrative that can furnish awesome, funny, heartwarming, or tearjerking moments that aren't entirely player-created. We may want to enact some sort of policy to apply to such pages that, again, won't be perceived as page blanking as vandalism.

If it's just a matter of cutting almost the entire page, I do remember doing that when Dronejam was changed to NPC Roadblock to focus on games deliberately putting characters in the player's way - and nearly two-thirds of the examples on the trope page did not fit the new definition. I almost obsessively checked with the mods every step of the way to ensure that no, the mass deletion I was undertaking was not, in fact, vandalism.

edited 5th Apr '13 8:14:28 PM by mlsmithca

You can holler your post. It's the yellow triangle, and it basically means reporting the post (and the thread) to the staff. You can do it when you see rude posts or content violation, or when you want to hear a Word of Mod on the issue.

Hm. I certainly knew hollers could be used to report trollery, spam, or general not niceness, but it hadn't occurred to me that they can also be used to request mod rulings on points of order etc. Holler sent.

Uum, guys, you do realize that the "no Troper Tales" principle has always applied to example writing and not the actual example, since there is no way to tell whether the example is Troper Tales or no?

Also, as a fellow page cleaner, deleting 90% of a page for being misuse is OK, because ... it's not really uncommon.

edited 6th Apr '13 2:20:26 AM by SeptimusHeap

Deleting 90%, yes. Deleting 100%? That might raise eyebrows for the wrong reason.

Why would you want to delete 100% of a page, anyway?

Because it's 100% wrong? Because nothing exists there but Troper Tales? Sometimes you really can tell that there isn't an example hidden in them. Take one short entry on the Awesome.Mitadake High page: "This Troper once got handed the Death Note by a friend of Kira and played keep away with it the whole game...without ever using it and without dying." That's an awesome achievement, but it's a troper tale and not to do with an awesome moment within the game, something incredible happening at the culmination of the plot, etc..

If/when I do large-scale removal of items from a page, e.g. scrubbing BerserkButton.Real Life a while ago (that's been growing back ever since; need to do it again) I try to do it a few items at a time, so that I can explain bit by bit — even if most edit reasons are the same — that yes, these specific entries are wrong or do not belong on the page. Many consecutive edits aren't usually something to aim for, but I think they make it a lot clearer and harder to dispute or call vandalism.

On times when I have emptied a page, though those have only been when it is, say, a Trivia subpage with nothing but Shout-Out listed that needed to me moved to the main page, I add a note to my edit reason saying something along the lines of "Note: Although this page is now blank, this was not vandalism and the page is still valid, we just haven't found anything to put on it yet.".

edited 6th Apr '13 9:25:01 AM by Telcontar

For the record, I have emptied pages for the same reasons too. I don't feel particularly well when doing so.

Which is why we're hoping to get a mod ruling before proceeding, because I'm sure this issue is not limited to the four Mitadake High "moments" subpages, but rather pervades the "moments" subpages for any game with limited intrinsic narrative but considerable scope for player-created moments of awesome etc. Better to have a policy in place rather than blanking pages indiscriminately and finding oneself in the "Edit Banned" thread before one can say "But they were all troper tales!"

The more I think about it, the more I think some sort of commented out note would be helpful in case a random editor goes to the page, finds it blank, and opens the edit window planning to add a personal moment of whatever. (Yes, sometimes the more stubborn editors simply delete the commented out notes and make edits contrary to their instructions anyway, but if said commented out notes are mod-sanctioned, such issues could presumably be resolved with less fuss.)

The problem with all of this is that "it's a troper's opinion" is not a reason for deleting content on moment pages - they are all opinions, we would have to delete most of the content of all wiki YMMV pages if we tried to enforce some arbitrary "It needs at least X people to agree" standard on all of them - neever mind the effort that would be needed to tell apart bad from good examples. Sure some pages have it (like Unfortunate Implications), but not those under discussion here.

Incidentally, the "no troper tales" rule about Nightmare Fuel was meant as a full ban on anything in first person or This Troper. It isn't a ban on rewriting examples.

Septimus, the problem isn't that "it's an opinion", the problem is that the examples are "I did this awesome/funny/heartwarming/sad thing with my character"—personal anecdotes about things which are entirely dependent on how the person played the game, rather than about plot points written into the game itself. That's why they're being referred to as troper tales and why they don't belong on the page.

edited 6th Apr '13 11:35:27 AM by Nocturna

I am not seeing why you want to cut them, though. I have never heard of any such wiki policy.

Because they're troper tales, and troper tales aren't allowed. They're approximately the equivalent of an example saying, "I had just lost my grandmother, so this (perfectly happy) scene in X movie that talked about her favorite flowers made me cry."

Well, taking stock of Mitadake High, I would just leave the lovermost example over.

I'm not even sure that one should be kept - it may not be phrased using first person, but it is still a moment that only happened because the people playing the game at the time played it a certain way, not because it was intrinsic to the game.

And, again, Funny.Mitadake High, Heartwarming.Mitadake High, and TearJerker.Mitadake High have the same problems. The entries all boil down to "I did this funny/heartwarming/sad thing with my character" (or "I was part of a game where the other characters did this funny/heartwarming/sad thing"). None of them are intrinsic to the game - they all depend entirely on the players involved and how they played the characters, as is typical for multiplayer online games. (A lot of them are even "signed" so that we know exactly who "this troper" is.)

However, simply blanking the pages altogether would not only look like vandalism, but also not stop future editors from adding tales of personal awesomeness etc. rather than tales of awesomeness built into the game. If a commented out note is the best way, or at least a good way, to prevent this, we should perhaps decide on how best to phrase such a note.

edited 6th Apr '13 2:41:26 PM by mlsmithca

I feel like using a commented-out note.

Hm. Well, how about something like this for commented out notes for pages which are essentially blanked for containing nothing but troper tales or "meta" examples (as in "I found this moment awesome because it reminded me of something in my own life"):

"Please remember this wiki is about tropes and the works that use them. This page is for awesome moments that are provided by the work, not personal tales of your own awesome moments or of how a particular awesome moment resonated with your own life. Such moments go on the forums, not the wiki."

With "awesome moments" to be replaced with the appropriate category as needed, and perhaps "the work" in the second sentence changed to "the film/series/game/etc." as needed.

Editorial suggestions most welcome.

edited 6th Apr '13 11:12:12 PM by mlsmithca

Again, the game has pretty much no built-in narrative. I don't see how any moments for Mitadake High would not be troper tales. Just kill the pages and get this over with. (Also, there's a tool for deleting pages without looking like a vandal.)

If the game gets a sequel or update that adds a proper story mode, then fine, but there's a thread for unlocking the page if that happens.

While those specific examples do sound bad, are all of the 'moments' pages pretty much troper tales anyway?