Why are we moving Fanfic Recs to Reviews?

I was told to move the discussion from Ask the Tropers to here.

I don't see how putting 5-word descriptions on a fic into review format is anything but clutter.

It was decided a long time ago that Fanfic Recs pages were getting too cluttered with opinions on the fics. Also, if a fic has a wiki article, then having the recommendation get reviews would be redundant. An administrative decision was made that all reviews of a work, be it a fic or official, should go in the Reviews section.

The FanficRecs.Team Fortress 2 page was an utter mess as fan works were sorted by medium (as opposed to the genre the fic was), a large portion of the recs didn't even have a review button underneath the synopsis area, the comments section was getting long on some fics (actually, the comments section shouldn't have been there anyway), some of the fics were clearly in violation of the P5 guidelines and the page itself was nearing 200k characters in lengthen.

I asked in Ask The Tropers if it was okay to split the page into Fanfics/Fanart and Machinima/Voicemashups and got the go-ahead. While I was at it I figured I'd clean the pages up so that all the fics would have a review section, move all the comments to the reviews as that should have been done a long time ago and sort the fics by genre again.

Couldn't those old comments go under some kind of grandfather clause? Also, "cluttered"? It may be improper, but having to use a link to another page just makes it more difficult for people to use. Especially since the quote-endquote "reviews" are ten words long.

Edit: And if we really wanna get rid of the clutter, why not just delete every description but the really detailed ones for Natter? Without converting them?

edited 18th Oct '14 5:30:07 PM by Delfage

You might as well ask that to the people who came up with the system years ago.

Also, have you tried to edit a page as long as the fanfic rec pages are? It's not simple or convient. You have to search though at least a hundred thousand characters to find the fic you want to comment on before you even start typing. You still even have to hit a button to do it. At least with the reviews you don't have to slog though the contents of the entire page to leave a "ten words long" review.

And we're not deleting comments because people's opinion on how good the fic is (even if it's short) is helpful for people who are trying to decide if the fic is worth their time or not.

1: If I did, they'd stonewall me and say "It's on the backlog, maybe soon".

2:Um, Ctrl-f? Copy-paste? Those could help speed up your editing workload easy.

Also, couldn't we find a way to put small "edit certain sections" pages on each fanfic rec, like on Media Wiki?

3: So TV Tropes has no problem deleting discussion on Wallbangers, Headscratchers and Dethroning Moments, but a three-word review? Naw, we can't delete that! Let's just clutter the review page instead and make it harder for people to search through stuff because of all the reviews of pages that don't exist. It's the equivalent of the bot ads that show up on liveblogs all the time.

[strike]Speaking of which, there's a bot liveblog there right now, for the past three days. Why hasn't it been deleted?[/strike]

Edit: Oh, it's gone? Then never mind this last quip. Guess I didn't look at the right time.

edited 18th Oct '14 7:46:25 PM by Delfage

There are no flagged liveblogs right now. Did you flag it?

I nuked it. The Liveblog flags are not something that jump out at you unless you visit the mod console.

Maybe they should-for the mods, I mean.

We're getting off-topic, though. Since you're here, Dear Leader, what do you say about all this?

edited 18th Oct '14 7:48:36 PM by Delfage

According to the history of both the Team Fortress 2 fanfic rec pages, the only person editing them for the past week is me.

I have no clue what the Media Wiki you mention is. TV Tropes only lets you edit the whole page content as it is, not small sections of the page.

But I'm not deleting comments, I'm moving them to where they should be. Widespread comment deletion is usually only done after it's been discussed in the forums.

"I have no clue what Media Wiki is"

• sigh*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Tropes

Look at the title of every section. There is a small "[edit]" button to the right of them.

"I'm moving them to where they belong"

Except reviews are for things that have an actual page on this website. Not random SFM videos and Sturgeon's Law fics.

edited 19th Oct '14 12:21:33 PM by Delfage

Another argument here is that recommendations are well, recommendations. Things that don't record negative opinions on them. Or discussion of the quality of the work.

Also, for what it's worth, we do use another wiki system (PM Wiki) which has been modified to the point that our software doesn't resemble the old one anymore much. That one doesn't allow section edits, although it may come in the future.

I know you use Pmwiki. (Though the validity of your other claims can rasily be challenged, if not for the fact that your friends thumped them for redirecting to ED)

What I'm asking is why not edit something like that into your site?

To be fair, an argument that we shouldn't have reviews for works we don't have pages for is reasonable enough, since it makes finding those reviews very difficult (which kind of defeats the point of having those reviews at all).

There's no need to be so belligerent about it, though.

The beligerence is that we're shooting two things in the foot at the same time.

We're destroying content on the Fanfic Recs pages while turning the Reviews page into a overcrowded dumpster full of spam.

And we even have a fanfic recs page on the forums, too..

Are we even on the original topic anymore?

You were thumped for completely off topic and for inflammatory language. You have made little to no constructive discussions in your very short tenure here; your tone is bad and you are only interested in shit-stirring. After some discussion with the other mods, you are permanently banned.

This is incorrect. Reviews can be for any work, including ones without pages, as long as the work doesn't fall afoul of the Content Policy. There Is No Such Thing As Notability applies here.

I wasn't around for the original decision to move rec comments to reviews, but it cuts down on thread mode and hopefully it encourages people to write more comprehensive comments. You can't argue that good content is being destroyed and that reviews are turning into spam, since the content is what is becoming the reviews.

(Finally, to my knowledge there is no policy against negative comments or reviews on fanfic recs, as long as the reasoning is explained. The same goes for reviews on other works.)

Enough. Other sites (like the aforementioned ED) might condone blatant ad hominem attacks in the guise of constructive criticism, but we don't. Delfage/Dalsene can go troll somewhere else.

I can totally get behind the idea of cleaning up the Fanficrecs pages to get rid of clutter.

Moving all the comments to the reviews section, however, just takes the clutter there, where it's probably worse. I mean, some of these "reviews" that are getting posted are three-word things like "That was awesome." That's not a review. That's a comment. When someone writes a review, generally they're trying to get their thoughts in order into something where a reader, looking at their entire review, has an idea of what's going on. This isn't that. What's happening right now is we're getting a lot of things like:

"This is one of the funniest TF 2 mashups."

or

"Dubbing the music over the original song's video makes it even more entertaining."

This is not solving the problem of clutter. This is just moving the clutter somewhere else, where it's pushing down other reviews and discussion on those reviews. If we want to get rid of clutter, I would suggest simply deleting them, rather than taking useless comments and making them into useless reviews.

Also, the person posting them repeatedly spells "Anonymous" as "Anoymous."

edited 20th Oct '14 9:01:26 AM by Pannic

This smacks of people trying to gain special treatment for fanfic over other media. While it's true that we wouldn't accept a three-word review of a major film, why should we also accept such a review of a fic?

I would rather ban such comments entirely than entertain them in the current format.

That said, Fanfic Recs could stand to become a formalized section of the wiki that has its own particular style: a rec would be posted in a manner similar to a Discussion thread, with the ability to add comments. The wiki format is not really conducive to the idea.

edited 20th Oct '14 9:04:19 AM by Fighteer

I remember ending up in a dust-up over the issue in my early troping days. In hindsight, I think that converting comments on fanfic recs to reviews can be done only by asking the person who posted them to post a review instead. So my idea would be to delete all comments in the rec pages without moving them anywhere.

Back in the day, when this issue was first coming up, I did a mass conversion of the comments that were on the Evangelion fanfic pages to reviews. It wasn't a terribly popular move from what I can remember, but I got very little (if any) response from people that I asked about moving their comments on their own, and at that time I judged preserving the comments to be more valuable than losing them. Now, that said, I'd be fine with going back through those reviews and pruning the least effective ones...I know some of mine were fairly terse but I at least tried to say more than a few words.

Strange thing is, both the regular reviews and the Fanfic Recs reviews for Shinji And Warhammer 40 K have been lost, and I know there were several fairly substantive reviews in each.

EDIT: I found the links to the old FanficRecs review page and the FanFic/ reviews via Wayback Machine...I wonder if these can be restored.

edited 20th Oct '14 9:59:37 AM by Willbyr

Personally I think calling it a "Review" verses a "Comment" makes all the difference as well as making it it's own button. This is more about dealing with old backlog, not current reviewing practices. I'd say leave a "no comments" line on the top of the page and see if that fixes the problem.

I'd say that fanfics need reviews even more then regular works to because they're such a subjective medium and there's no barrier for entry. Actually, the comments/reviews were what alerted me to the fact that there was probably content violations being linked to (which meant I had to go read every single fic on the page).

The content violations are a problem as well, since we have no way to police the recs aside from someone clicking on them who is both aware of the policy and willing to report violators.