Outside Links Rethought?

I've been looking at outside links; you know, the links that will take you away from this wiki.

It's just that sometimes these are useful - they give context to an example. But sometimes they are something like an advertisement - somebody's not got an actual article in TV Tropes (like their two-page Web Comic), and instead they feel like it's a good idea to link to it.

This is especially common among fanfiction examples - like, there's an example of a trope that happens in a fanfic, which is all well and good, but the Fanfic is not in TV Tropes, so it takes us to Fan Fiction Net or something.

And while going out of TV Tropes is not a bad thing (it's not?!) it kind of... detracts from making it feel like the all-knowing wiki it should be.

So these fan works, if you're going to say they have an example of a Trope, should already have a page. Or make a page for them, so that people can go to all the fun of reading it, then going back and putting all those tropes in! (Thus outside linked fan works can be removed, or have a page made for them, showing that the work, or artist, or writer, is worth the time of having a page.)

I feel like that should be a requirement. That the fandom providing the example should have a page within the wiki.

edited 16th Jun '14 6:06:35 PM by Tightwire

Interesting thought. A couple of points, though:

We aren't an all-knowing wiki and we don't pretend to be.

There are a lot of works which, for whatever reason, don't have a TV Tropes page. One of the main reasons is that making a good-quality Works page takes a lot of effort (Take a look at how many stub works pages get cut in this thread. We'd rather have no page than a half-assed, useless stub.)

Unpublished works (works which are not available to the public) should already have their pages in Darth Wiki, not in the main wiki, since being inaccessible to the public means that only the author can legitimately add anything to it — no one else can, because no-one else can see it.

We already have a policy that dead off-site links should be replaced with working ones if at all possible. If there is no working link, the dead one should be removed. For the purposes of this policy, a "dead link" is one that doesn't go anywhere, results in a "404: Not found" error or a notice that "this video is unavailable", leads to an unregistered domain (whoever had that domain has let the registration lapse and it's up for grabs again), or leads to something that is clearly not what it was intended to lead to.

An unfinished or abandoned work, whether fanfic, webcomic, blog, or whatever is not a dead link, just because the work is dead in the water.

We don't host works. So having a pointer to the work itself, hosted somewhere else, serves a different purpose than linking to the TV Tropes works page. Our page is great for reading the tropes that the work uses. The off-site link is for the people who want to see the work itself. Two different and complementary purposes.

edited 16th Jun '14 6:32:13 PM by Madrugada

We take There Is No Such Thing As Notability seriously. If you want to drop a link to your random fanfic in our example sections in hopes of getting more people to read it, knock yourself out (so long as it's actually an example).

To add a little more clarity to Maddy's "we don't host works" point:

We do not provide special software for the hosting of works, and we do not allow the usage of existing wiki-side software for hosting of works. We do have a section of the fora that is used for running forum RPs, and we do allow work pages to be made for those, provided that they meet the normal guidelines for creating a work page. Most pages of those will have a link to the RP, same as any other web-based work.

edited 16th Jun '14 9:00:14 PM by TotemicHero

Shouldn't works be wicked even if there's no page for it? Links to the outside are fine but they shouldn't replace the wick.

An example like:

• ''[[LinkToFanfic Name of fanfic]]'', context.

Should be changed to:

• ''Fanfic/NameOfFanfic'' ([[LinkToFanfic link]]), context.

edited 16th Jun '14 10:29:35 PM by m8e

Links are inherently a reference material. Outside links are frequently used when works don't have a page here for that reason (although ideally, they should link to the title of the work page anyhow, so that someone who sees the example can start a page easily). I don't ever treat them like advertisements and I doubt that much of the wiki does, either.

Also, definitively no on requiring a work to have an page before we can add examples to it. As it happens to be, tropes are our main concern, so adding examples to tropes is higher up the priority list.

IMO: yes

Yep.

Well, Wikipedia isn't all-knowing...

I was just saying that true, this isn't a fan-works place. But we have pages on the canon of say... Harry Potter, that tell us all the tropes in it, so why not requiring the same for fan works?

While I've no problem with fan works, people should go to them thinking "Wow, this could be good, since somebody actually bothered to make a page".

We don't "require" anything, really, except that a work page should have at least 3 trope examples and compliant with the Content Policy.

I am not sure what you are talking there about fan works, really.

Tvtropes is about tropes primarily. Because of that focus, we are about works secondarily. That's [works]. Be it "Original Fiction", fanfic, fanfic of a fanfic, fanfic of a fanfic of a fanfic, or whatever!

A self-published novel with nine total copies is just as valid a work as a fan fiction with thousands of followers. Both are just as valid as a Hollywood movie based on a TV series, based on a comic book, based on a toy.

If they meet the requirements ~Septimus Heap mentioned, they can have a page. To help them get there, you can Red Link the page. But deleting links because they're "not notable enough" (regardless of what "notability" requires) is against our policy.

edited 17th Jun '14 7:19:51 AM by crazysamaritan

Fair enough.