Force YKTTW comments with "Motion to Discard" and "Tropeworthy?" tags

This might just be me complaining, but I've seen too many YKTTWs with nothing but constructive comments and discussion, but a handful of "Motion to Discard" and "Tropeworthy" tags that are in no way addressed by the discussion. They're completely unhelpful. Nobody can fix issues with YKTTWs if the only indication of a problem is a meaningless tag that basically says "This is not a trope" with no explanation.

I don't know if this would be the best solution, or even if it would be possible, but my tentative suggestion would be to require comments when these tags are added. Even if the comment is "lol ur stoopid ur YKTTW is dumb", at least it'll make it obvious who added the tag and that it shouldn't be taken seriously.

Maybe disable the tags for users who haven't commented, and when a user clicks the tag, display a message like "You haven't added a comment to this YKTTW. Please add a comment to enable this tag."

edited 5th Dec '14 2:55:01 PM by SolipSchism

The tag system has a lot of flaws, and forcing comments for any tag, or at least Mt Ds, has been proposed in the past, but I wouldn't expect any major changes to YKTTW (ie, anything that would require a lot of coding) until the site overhaul is put in place.

My suspicion is that a number of seemingly unsupported Tropeworthy tags are put up by the OP genuinely asking "Is this a trope?" "Do We Have This One?" or "Should We Have This One?" Tags can only be removed by mods (another flaw in the system) so a lot of tags can stay up well past the point they're useful.

Good point. I'm not sure why I didn't get an update on my watchlist when you posted, sorry if it seemed like I was ignoring you.

Well, did you actually add it to the watchlist or did you expect it to be added automatically when you started the thread? Were you checking the thread watchlist or the page watchlist? Perhaps you opened the page after my post went up and didn't notice it, or started loading the page after my post went up and it aborted for some reason?

^ Actually, I'm just stupid and thought I had added it, but I hadn't. But it's added now. :p

And then there's a problem with fellow tropers treating then tagging system like a voting system. It doesn't help that duplicates of the same tags are allowed and that one of the tag's names is "Motion to Discard".

Well, the problem then would be that if one jackass who couldn't be bothered to leave a comment thinks it should be discarded, then that YKTTW has a MTD on it permanently (unless removed by a mod). At least with duplicate tags, three MTDs make it clear that more than one person thinks there is an issue. Which is something. But it would be much better to require those three people to explain why they think it should be discarded. Too many times I see tags with nothing explaining the tag.

I think that tags should be used as an addition to a comment. You post a comment AND add a "Tropeworthy" or "Motion to Discard" tag to it. This way it's easier to see and acknowledge any reasoning for or against.

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

That's... actually brilliant.

Probably not a bad idea to just apply that system to all tags. I'm guessing it would make the programming easier if all the tags work the same way. Instead of applying tags to a YKTTW, tags are applied to comments on YKTTWs. That would also eliminate the problem of multiple tags.

My only question is, currently, tags are anonymous. Is that deliberate? Because applying tags to comments instead of YKTTWs would make the poster plain.

...Of course, requiring comments for MTD and TW tags would also eliminate anonymity.

I'm not sure how important tag anonymity is, though. I mean, after all, we're already on the internet; how much extra privacy do we need?

All in all I think the above suggestion is brilliant and I would only tweak it to apply to all tags.

It's not clear to me what the point of anonymity is. I've never seen someone being insulted over a tag or complaining about being insulted.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

That's what I was thinking. I mean, the tags are anonymous, I'm just not sure if that was deliberate, or if so, if it's necessary.

I think that YKTTW needs a dramatic overhaul anyway in terms of functionality. I couldn't say what this would look like, exactly, but the system as it stands is a horrific kludge of mangled ideas.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

There is also a large number of bugs. We'll have to discuss it in the near future, I think.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

and This makes me happy. I mean, the overhaul, not the horrific kludge of mangled ideas and bugs.

There have been several attempted overhauls of YKTTW over the years that haven't done more than add iterative features in an attempt to get closer to whatever idea animated each thread. Part of the problem is that YKTTW has been broken ever since it became separate from a wiki page with YKTTW 2.0, and every attempt to fix it has made it even more broken.

With trying to put everything on the same code base and the database overhaul upcoming, we should probably rewrite YKTTW from scratch, but that would have to wait until we're talking about the database overhaul. I have Ideas, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Is there a thread around here discussing the definition of YKTTW, what its purpose is, what would make it better, what would be best dumped, and so on? Defining such things would go a long way towards figuring out the best possible revamp or rebuild. There's a reason the architect is consulted before the construction workers.

I personally think the hat system should have at least a checklist indicating why the troper thinks adding a hat is a good idea. There are far too many bad want-to-be tropes that got five hats, which really makes me wonder how much thought some people put in before they click. Having to check a 'why this is launchable' box might help.

Two YKTTW forms would be useful -one for tropes, one for works. Cut down on people who stick up "Work Pages are a Free Launch" without actually reading why the page is being developed in YKTTW. Even a color differentation might help.

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. -Terry Pratchett

It might be nice to create such a thread. I'd have some very concrete suggestions to offer. What I'd like, essentially, is to bake the process of creating new articles — all new articles — into a formal system.

edited 7th Jan '15 8:32:25 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The purpose of YKTTW is to serve as an incubator for new tropes, and possibly other types of pages. What, exactly, that has meant has changed as the wiki has matured, and there are hints of that lurking on the wiki.

The introduction to YKTTW reads:

This gets the purpose of YKTTW as it exists today exactly backwards; you can't start a new YKTTW entry without already having some sort of title. YKTTW is mostly about collecting enough examples that the trope will be able to survive on its own once it leaves YKTTW, and also making sure your proposed trope is actually a trope and one that doesn't overlap too much with one that already exists.

Which brings me to the Home Page, which does not seem to have changed much in ages, and says:

And what is Wiki Magic? This never happens these days to any entry once it's left YKTTW. Launching is a seal of approval that the trope is valid, and therefore doesn't need any more "proving" that it's valid.

When the wiki started, anyone could come to a nonexistent page and start writing about something they'd noticed in media, and whatever examples they could think of. The wiki was small enough that most people could reasonably read most of the pages and as such happen upon your page, the definition of a trope was loose enough that anything would fit as long as it didn't duplicate an existing trope, the troper base was small enough that everyone had an implicit understanding of what the definition of a trope was, and the works that were covered were limited enough in number and context (this was when it was still TV Tropes) that most people were reasonably familiar with most of them, allowing Zero Context Examples to be the norm. YKTTW was, as its introduction suggests, more about coming up with names than anything else, because that was the main thing people would need help with before even starting a page. Everything else could be left to the Wiki Magic.

We don't trust the Wiki Magic anymore. The wiki is too big for someone to be familiar with every entry; just going on an ordinary Wiki Walk is going to lead to TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life, so we need to maximize the chances that someone will come across the entry by maximizing the number of links leading to it before releasing it into the wild, which means having a pretty large number of examples just to start with. This also means we need the troper hivemind to make sure it doesn't overlap with anything else, and since the definition of a trope has been tightened and codified, we need to make sure it fits that definition. So YKTTW now serves as a centralized place for people to see proposed new entries and help contribute to putting them in a state where it can survive in the wild, or conversely, nip ill-fitting entries in the bud.

There is one more point to make, and it has to do with why YKTTW is needed just for trope pages to exist, rather than be vetted after the fact like Wikipedia does. This will sound blasphemous at first, but tropes are not objective phenomena. That is, they are not things that are well-defined before we ever got our grimy hands on them (with a few exceptions). We take some things that happen in works that have some things in common, we note that they follow a pattern, and then we get down to the dirty work of defining exactly what that pattern is and laying down the boundaries between it and other, similar patterns. Those boundaries can shift when an entry ends up in TRS or when a new trope is proposed. We give tropes names, we take what may be a fuzzy concept and define it into a trope; they are not (usually) things that existed before us that we slap onto a page. Those are things that have to happen before you even have a page, and YKTTW is where it happens.

That last paragraph is one of the banes of my existence in YKTTW when people start yammering on about how this or that doesn't fit some arbitrary definition. More often than not, they're not actually pointing out that something doesn't fit into a trope; they're pointing out that the trope is poorly defined or poorly written to make its definition clear, but they insist that because one sentence on Trope Y lacks a preposition, Trope X is Not A Trope. Drives me absolutely batty.

edited 8th Jan '15 10:55:01 AM by SolipSchism