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

Every problem you just mentioned is made irrelevant by the idea of sorting them based on when in the work the guesses were made. If there is a "First Episode" folder, or a "First Season" folder, that means they are guesses made by someone who has seen up to and including that amount, but nothing else. Thus, somebody who has seen the whole show dropping in and saying "No, you're wrong, because in Season Four Bob turns into a werewolf," that person is being an asshole and defeating the spirit of the whole system.

Although I strongly agree with what Fighteer said earlier: These sections (Wallbangers and WMGs) don't need to exist at all, they're allowed for fun and on sufferance, similar to Real Life examples. By that logic, they should follow whatever rules make them the most fun. And since the fun of WMGs consists of making wild guesses, not in finding out from somebody who has watched the whole show that your guess was flat-out wrong or right, then logically, there should be some rule in place to prevent that.

Sorting/grouping WMGs by time frame is one way of doing that. Flat-out nuking the "Jossed/Confirmed" nonsense is another. The two could get combined.

You can't have any fun on a WMG page unless you're respecting the spirit of the page—which is not "Try to predict stuff and then document whether your guess was right or wrong," it's "Consider what you know so far and then make guesses based on that information."

If your sense of self-worth is so intrinsically tied to whether a guess about a television show was right or wrong that you actually need to go make a note to let people know, maybe it's time to take a break from TV and go for a walk or something.

edited 13th Mar '15 10:35:08 AM by SolipSchism

I honestly wouldn't mind seeing the WMG pages disappear. Idle speculation is what forum threads about media were made for. Just look at all those old Usenet groups.

I don't really care much for them either, but I do think it's better to have them sorted by time rather than confirmation. It's on occasion interesting to read what theories, wild or not, people had at certain points, but that loses its charm the moment it turns into true or false facts about the series. We've already got trope pages and episode summaries for those. Don't need to make speculations be the same as well, as that kind of takes away the point of speculating.

edited 13th Mar '15 11:50:47 AM by AnotherDuck

If people are to be increasingly excluded from participation the more they know about the subject being discussed, I see nothing interesting in the concept at all.

I don't think that's what "excluded" means.

Nor is that the core issue — rather, it's that there's no way to accommodate the desires of every person who uses WMG without designing an entirely new system, and the ROI on that for the wiki is virtually nil.

Weren't we designing a new system for the Headscratchers pages (or, if not that, something, I can't remember which)? Why not use that for it as well?

Because WMG is not a form of discussion, unlike Headscratchers.

I'd always assumed it was, since I always saw discussion on those pages.

Then again, it's been literally years since I've bothered to venture onto those pages.

While I don't mind WMG one way or another, I think we should definitely cut out the 'Jossed' entries.

Possibly remove the 'Confirmed' entries, since they would now be proper tropes in the proper page, but Jossed entries should definitely go to slim them down.

I don't know, guys.

I always loved WMG, especially for the more mindscrew-y works. It's very interesting to read and see what theories other fans have and compare them to yours. Or, on the other hand, if a work is totally simple and uncomplicated, it's fun to see some weird farfetched theories about it (kind of like the Youtube series Game Theory).

And I don't see what's the problem with "Jossed" and "Confirmed". For me, it's very interesting to see what fans theorized while something was yet unknown, and what was later confirmed or debunked by the newer installments. Do theory authors see those as dismissive, or something? I've never posted my own theories there, so I can only give input as a reader.

The only thing that ever irked me is that apparently every single WMG page has to feature several "X is a Time Lord / Lost character / Star Trek character / character from whatever work is popular" theories that look kind of unimaginative. But maybe that's just a meme, and I'm a total newb. Anyway, that never bothered me too much.

Might there be a possibility for a split between theories that the creator actually thinks are possible, and theories that are just jokes or pipe dreams that aren't meant to be serious speculation?

The problem is that we'd have to figure out some sort of criteria for what can be considered "serious" and have a dedicated clean-up thread, which probably is too much effort what what is essentially a Just for Fun tab.

Something that may be worth doing is to move Jossed/Confirmed entries into folders separate from the rest of the WM Gs. That way we keep the entries to show what people thought before a work came out and remove the ugly double bullets under them.

I've always been in favor of moving Jossed and Confirmed WMGs to their own folders on those pages.

edited 4th Oct '15 6:34:50 PM by Willbyr

That sounds like a better option. Much simpler to deal with.

Agree.