Cut out the "Jossed" and "Confirmed" from the WMG pages

They take out the fun of the WM Gs. When I come across a Wild Mass Guess page or the entries in them, I want to see the theories discussed based apon the evidence available to the original guesser at the time of his guess, and maybe anything from later materials that might support or hinder the claims of the guess **without** being outright dismissive or confirming them. Every single time I see someone using the phrase "Jossed", its a massive killjoy as it ruins all the energy from the wmg entries.

Perhaps the worst example of how a WMG page has been handled was Game of Throne's one - https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WMG/GameOfThrones .

It's not just that everyother entry has someone saying whether it's been confirmed or not, all of the entries on the page has been sorted into different tabs depending on if an entry is jossed, confirmed, unconfirmed or other wise. It is impossible to read a single WMG entry on that page without being spoiled, by the very nature of how trueful the speculation of each entry turned out to be.

edited 11th Mar '15 6:17:50 AM by Unown

I am tempted to agree. I've never liked these comments as they seem to be out of scope in WMG and sometimes generate natter trees.

I've never liked WMG in general. Everyone's going to have a different standard of what they like and don't like.

What reason is there to speculate about something when you already know the truth? If someone makes a guess about an upcoming episode, what "energy" does it need to have after the episode came and went? What is there left to say except was the guess right?

I wouldn't mind if the "dead" guesses were just deleted, but folderizing them like in your example page is probably even better. Someone else may still be interested. I'd put the Jossed/Confirmed folders at the bottom, though. Maybe with a spoiler warning if you're concerned about that.

My feeling in the matter is somewhat different: if you want to speculate about a show, we have forum threads. This idea that everyone's noodling about whether Alice will hook up with Bob or whether Charlie is a Time Lord is somehow interesting or relevant enough to be preserved in a static format for all to see is just ridiculous.

Frankly, if I do care about a series enough to play speculation games (for example, I was freaking out about Broadchurch while watching it with my wife, who had already seen it, and did something similar with the fifth and sixth seasons of the new Doctor Who), the very last thing I would do is go on a website where everyone else is doing the same thing, out of fear of spoilers.

I get that some people enjoy it, but the appeal is utterly lost to me.

edited 11th Mar '15 12:26:01 PM by Fighteer

Huh? Forum threads are discussions, not catalogues. They aren't a suitable place for listing theories.

I personally enjoy reading fan theories after the fact to see how close they were. What's always bugged me about WMG is that no real effort is made to separate plausible and downright stupid theories from each other. As such, I'd oppose this idea as further weakening any attempt to impose some degree of plausibility upon the pages.

Exactly my point. Cataloging everyone's guesswork about a show is different from a forum thread only in that we attach some degree of permanence to the ideas, as if they have any inherent value.

Heck, I've been involved in plenty of forum threads where speculation runs rampant after a particular plot event, and the vast majority of the time, when these speculations are resolved, someone will go back, dig up the old posts, and reference them with an I Knew It! or kudos to the user who guessed correctly.

edited 11th Mar '15 12:32:14 PM by Fighteer

They're suitable places for discussing theories. What is the point of listing?

Except there's nothing tying the forum thread (if it even exists for a given work) to a particular work page. So it looks like [WMG] is a way around that. I'd be a lot more okay with getting rid of [WMG] if there was a way to automatically associate a forum thread with a work page, but as there isn't at the moment, I'd say we should just leave it the way it is.

That's a wishlist item for TV Tropes 2.0.

As has been mentioned in the past, part of the problem is that WMG's original purpose as a Just for Fun home of joke theories has become mixed up with people posting actual, serious theories.

Mind, it's been like that for as long as I can remember, and I've been here since around the time of The Great Crash

Agreed. I'm pretty sure that "original purpose" hasn't been the case for as long as I've been with the site.

Edit: Also, the problem with using forum work threads for theories is that there's no real way to separate them from everything else - which is a problem when it comes to the threads that I actively avoid for various reasons.

edited 11th Mar '15 7:00:20 PM by nrjxll

I don't think we should cut out the WM Gs. By that logic we would also have to cut out the Wall Bangers. Someone needs to vent their emotions somewhere on the site.

"Someone needs to vent"... no, really, they don't. That's something of a myth. Anyway, there are literally thousands of fansites out there that let you be raging dicks or speculate about everyone being a Time Lord. There's no inherent reason why TV Tropes has to be a party to it.

We dramatically increased our site's reputation for quality by eliminating the skeevier elements, such as Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel. I'm not saying that WMG is costing us credibility, but neither am I saying it is the kind of thing that draws positive attention.

edited 11th Mar '15 9:33:43 PM by Fighteer

Actually, you don't need to vent out those frustrations on this site whatsoever. Blogs exist, after all. However, WMG's I find fun and interesting.

I'm okay with a WMG subforum if they link the WMG tab straight to the appropriate topic. I've seen this done before to a degree; The Discussion tab for the Troper Pantheon goes to a forum thread instead. Fast Eddie did this to make it easier to Discuss and add. It's similar to how the Complete Monsters stuff has their own thread. Minus the particular coding. Anyway, for now, I don't have any issue with the setup. I do feel that the forum thread change could theoretically remove lots of extra pages and put less data on the server, so that's a good technical reason to do this change eventually.

As for "jossed" and "confirmed", I have absolutely no issue with those at this time. I actually think it's good to note that you guessed right or wrong. I do like the idea of putting finished ideas(that were blatantly right or wrong) in a "finished folder" or two, one for each. Perhaps that could cut down on natter a little(although WMG is similar enough to a Discussion that natter isn't a direct issue. For this same reason I actually do like the idea of them being forum topics too).

Irene, these fora you talk about are about maintaining entries not listing them. Moving WMG to the forum would be something completely different.

That's not even remotely important to my premise, Septimus. Nor what I was saying whatsoever.

I'm talking about using the same coding to link each work page's WMG tab to a Forum Discussion topic instead of a separate subpage. That was the purpose of noting the same thing was done before. Of course it's obvious the coding may be different due to the fact the Discussions are not normal subpages but actual specific things similar to Forum Topics themselves. But I don't honestly know if that even matters in the coding. I don't code things here, so I can't really say if doing the same thing would work. I have seen a Trope Repair Shop tab show up that links to a forum discussion(which is exactly what I'm talking about here), so it's probably doable.

It also sounded like Fighteer meant the exact same idea, just that it wasn't ready yet in the coding(or wasn't worked on). Hence being on the Wiki Techlist as an idea(an idea I agree with, for the record). Did I misunderstand what he meant?

I personally don't mind the WM Gs as a concept but the format is rather wonky. If it was formatted kinda like the discussion pages then things might work better, you post your WMG it stays around and others can make comments on it as it generates thoughts on that specific tangent. Forum threads wouldn't work like that, although I would love forum thread integration like the image/repair shop features.

The crossovers or the absolutely insane ones which have absolutely no chance in hell of amounting to anything aside from pimping another work really need to go imo.

edited 12th Mar '15 1:25:19 AM by Memers

^^I took that WMG subforum idea as meaning such.

Okay, backing up to the beginning:

Re: Jossed/Confirmed: I honestly don't understand why anyone would be reading a WMG page of a work they don't want to be spoiled on. For everyone else, sorting out entries that're no longer speculative is useful

Re: Having WMG at all: They're fun to have around, and, if not on-mission, at least not terribly far off it. I'd oppose getting rid of it

Re: Format: Wikipages are best for cataloging. It's very easy for things to get lost in threads, and discussion pages don't allow sorting

Then I think we're on the same page here. So to speak.

Anyway, for now, I do somewhat like the idea of separate folders for Jossed and Confirmed theories. It somewhat separates it.

If I were to suggest a better model to sort things than jossed/confirmed folders of Game of Thrones, then howabout doing what they do on Falling Skies' WMG's and organise the guesses into folders by how far you need to watch the series to comprehend the WMG's.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WMG/FallingSkies

This way those that haven't caught up with the series can join in.

Or another model we can do is Avatar The Last Airbender 's WMG page and catergorise the WM Gs by World Building/ Plot developments/ Characterisations.... but I digress, Avatar's model has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WMG/AvatarTheLastAirbender

Odds are that people who haven't seen it all would join in only to have their guesses immediately marked Jossed/Confirmed by those who have. Spoilers ahoy.

And if we forbid Jossed/Confirmed to prevent the above, those who haven't seen it all won't be so much joining in than posting clueless monologues to which nobody is allowed to honestly respond.

Sorting the "live" guesses like that could be useful, but there should still be separate folder(s) for the resolved ones.