Interview for a School Project -- TV Tropes as a Discourse Community

Hello, this is Black Mage Anolis. I have an English project that focuses on discourse communities (a simple(r than normal) definition of discourse community can be found here), and after realizing contacting the mods directly about an interview might not be the best of ideas, I'd thought I'd create a conversation for the purposes of the interview. I'm not sure how many people should join in, and I was hoping to get probably just one of the moderators, but two~three people is fine with me.

As for why it's here, well, since we're discussing the wiki itself and how it applies its purpose and standards and what not, I thought putting it under Wiki Talk would make the most sense (and get to the mods the fastest).

Once we're done (and I'll say so), you can go ahead and lock it up.

Okay, first question, more general: How would you say TV Tropes differs from other wikis and their communties? Do you think TV Tropes has a true community, or is it more a mix of many different communities?

Guys, seriously, I don't have all the time in the darn world here. I know sometimes, people say "I'm not trying to rush you," but y'know what, that's exactly what I am trying to do.

I need this at least before the end of tomorrow. The paper itself is due on Tuesday, and the deadline for grades is Wednesday.

Here, just in case this thing somehow spikes in activity over night, I'll put all the questions I had in mind here:

• What duties do you have as a moderator, and how does being a mod differ from being a "normal" troper?
• What sort of skills or traits, if any, have you needed in order to be a moderator?
• Would you believe having a specific skill set would help or hinder your duties as a troper and a moderator?
• How would you say TV Tropes has evolved as a community (if you think it is one, that is)?
• What sort of language or lexis do you use frequently when discussing what goes on with this site?
• How would you say others outside of the community react to TV Tropes and tropers in general? What sorts of opinions do you know others have on the community? (Also, amendment: do you know f**knotvtropes exists?)
• What kinds of people do you usually see on the site, in terms of demographics or general interests?
• How do you view your status as a moderator? Do you treat it like a job, or are you mostly lax with it?

I'm somewhat amused that you'd expect any of us to respond comprehensively in less than an hour after you posted this. In fact, three posts in less than an hour, one of which all but demands our response, is something we consider pretty rude. We aren't on call for your school deadlines.

That said, I'll go ahead and give my answers.

1. Our duties as moderators are wide-ranging but boil down to several main functions. All of us participate as normal tropers in addition to these tasks.
   • Keeping the peace — making sure everyone is playing nicely with each other.
   • Enforcing the rules and adjudicating violations. This includes issuing warnings, suspensions, and bans, plus talking out issues with those who have been suspended.
   • Performing all of the tasks that are permitted only to the moderation staff: clearing the cutlist, fixing vandalism/deleting spam, monitoring new accounts, locking/unlocking/editing locked pages, approving custom title requests, etc.
   • Answering any questions or addressing any issues that require "staff" attention.
2. To be a moderator, you must first and most importantly be able to keep a level head when dealing with problems. If mods run around screaming and yelling, it demoralizes everyone. We must also be able to stand back from a situation and judge it as impartially as possible. Further, we must always keep the wiki's policies and our vision for how the site should function in mind.
3. Our staff comes from all over the world and all different backgrounds. The one thing we have in common is a love of TV Tropes and a desire to see it prosper. Other than that, we evaluate potential moderators with several criteria in mind:
   • Do they have an exceptional grasp of wiki policies and procedures?
   • Do they actively assist with wiki and forum maintenance, such as by organizing projects, cleaning up problem articles, reporting issues to the staff, etc.?
   • Are they well-regarded by other tropers and known for being level-headed and fair?
4. TV Tropes has evolved dramatically over the years from when it was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fansite. As our reach and appeal have expanded into all kinds of media, we've found ourselves transforming from a super-informal hangout to a wiki with rigorous procedures and policies. This is necessary due to the sheer size of the place and the impossibility of monitoring it all. Above all else, we've worked very hard to maintain a culture of cooperation and civility. Some of the biggest transitions have occurred when we radically changed policies regarding certain types of content. Among the most notable are:
   • The removal of Fetish Fuel and Troper Tales, which were collecting some incredibly awful material.
   • The strict enforcement of namespaces to organize wiki content.
   • The removal of articles about pornographic and child-exploitation works in response to The Google Incident.
     In all of the above cases, we've had to say goodbye (voluntarily or involuntarily) to tropers who could not adapt.
5. Troping has a language all its own; TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary covers some of it. Our lexicon includes some very specialized definitions of words that have broader uses in society, starting with "trope" and including things like "subversion" and "deconstruction" — one look at the Meta-Concepts index will show you a lot of them. We talk about Lampshade Hanging and Breaking the Fourth Wall and get really painstaking about the definition of Badass.
   The moderation staff has developed some internal memes (among them pet names for various wiki communities and recurring ban evaders), but we share the language of troping with the community at large.
6. TV Tropes attracts criticism as does any large media site. We're aware of a number of external communities that have formed around various aspects of that criticism. We generally prefer to ignore them, unless they inspire people to troll or vandalize the site, in which case we deal with the situations as they occur. In particular, each of the major transitions that I discussed above, plus minor ones, sends some folks off with hurt feelings, and as people will do, they get together elsewhere and whine.
   
   Occasionally, this criticism is valuable, when it calls our attention to recurring problems that we don't notice on a day-to-day basis because we're too busy. Among them was the frankly disturbing focus on sexuality and fetishes that caused us to cast off material like Fetish Fuel and prompted the removal of some other adult content.
   
   In general, our goal is to be seen as a useful resource for writers to learn about tropes — what works, what doesn't work, what the "recipe" for an engaging story is. We also attract fans of media to talk about the things they love in a non-confrontational environment. We've had many articles written about us, and you can see a sampling of them in Notable References to TV Tropes.
7. There is a recurring meme that tropers consist overwhelmingly of young nerds, a disproportionate number of which are anime fans. This may or may not be accurate; we have never made a serious attempt to survey our users. Troper Demographics references a Google Analytics report from 2010 about us, which is undoubtedly incredibly out of date. Certainly, we are very heavily slanted towards popular media: current TV, current movies, anime, video games, and such. Chances are that if there's a fellow fan of something out there, you can figure it out by who's editing its article.
8. Moderation is somewhere between a hobby, a job, and an obsession. It varies for all of us. I probably spend 4-5 hours per day on the site all told, but it's not in single chunks; I keep a bunch of browser tabs open and check them as I have time. There's a lot of multitasking involved. I sometimes get a sense of dread to go through my various watchlists if I haven't visited them recently, due to the volume of stuff that'll be there. The mod community on Skype helps keep us all sane as we both collaborate on issues and chit-chat casually.

edited 13th Dec '15 6:56:44 PM by Fighteer

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

Sorry about that. I was kind of stressed after the last two times I tried to start this interview. I guess that's that. You can go ahead and lock it.

Nah, it's fine. Some other mods may want to chip in.

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

Hm. Sounds good. I'll learn to be a little more patient with stuff like this, but I will say I do appreciate you answering my questions. Thank you.

Fighteer pretty much covered all the bases as far as the mods go, but I'll add in a little more on a few things from posts #3 and 4:

1. While all the mods have the same tools and can handle the same responsibilities, we tend to gravitate to areas of the wiki that fit our particular interests and skill sets. Some tend to focus on monitoring the site for vandals and ban evaders, while others concentrate on wiki repair and maintenance areas like the Trope Repair Shop and Image Pickin' forums. We do discuss issues behind the scenes, and everyone pitches in as they can, and together we keep things running as smoothly as we can.

2. Being able to communicate clearly and effectively is a must, especially in areas such as the "edit banned" thread, where we have to be able to explain to people exactly why they received a suspension and what they need to do to get their privileges restored.

3. Having a specific skillset can very well help you toward performing a certain task of moderation, or even just as a troper. More visually or artistically-inclined people might be drawn to Image Pickin', for instance, whereas those with a more computer-based skillset might gravitate toward wiki repair and account monitoring.

5. In addition to the wiki's lexicon and our own pet terms, we're bound to use quotes from various media for certain things. On a minor note, I like to refer to our overall community as the "tropulace" (trope + populace)

8. I tend to hit the site for at least a few minutes whenever I've got some free time during the day, and at times spend several hours on it if I'm not tied up with other activities.

edited 14th Dec '15 4:06:37 AM by Willbyr

TV Trope is definitely a mix of many different communities. While there's definitely people like me who frequent the forums and do editing, there are some people that just edit, some people that only go to the forums, some that only partake in specific subforums (i.e. Forum Games) or forum threads, etc.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

Would you say people would more readily identify as a Troper or just as a fan within an outside fandom?

Probably the former if they at least read the main pages with a degree of frequency.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

What level of formality do you usually have when discussing matters on this site? Does it fluctuate or adapt to the situation?

We strive for the least possible formality that's consistent with keeping the site running smoothly. "Fun will be had" is one of our core principles.

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

Now, are there any key differences between the way TV Tropes handles things and other wikis and their communities handle things, aside from the stated purpose, that is?

I don't actively participate in any wikis other than this one, so I can't offer a first-hand perspective on that question. I will say that, from second-hand reports, we are widely considered to have among the fairest moderation policies of any sites out there.

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

Even in comparison to Wikipedia? That'd be very interesting, considering that compared to Wikipedia, moderators here have a de facto blanc cheque and - it seems to me - yet receive far less complaints and arguments.

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

But is Wikipedia a discourse community? There is some interaction between editors on the talk pages, but it is mostly about determining facts or adherence to policy. Pretty binary and not about opinion. The borders of what we discuss are much fuzzier and the potential for opinions to collide is much greater.

edited 14th Dec '15 3:14:43 PM by eyebones

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken

Actually, the fact that Wikipedia does have this more focused discussion might make it more qualified of being a discourse community.

One of the things that separates a standard "speech community" from a discourse community is that there is an actual goal in mind that the group can focus on, but is broad enough to remain relevant as time passes, e.g. cross country runners focusing on improving their times and earning points for their team or a safety committee trying to create universal safety standards for a particular industry. Just butting heads about whether something is the right thing to do or not does not make a community a discourse community.

I've tried to stay away from lumping all wikis under a single community as a lot of the time, the way each wiki goes about things, from which information it chooses to broadcast and for what purpose to how they discuss their content and policies, is very different from wiki to wiki.

A very simple example is Wikipedia vs. Conservapedia. While both seek to have the most accurate information so they can inform the Internet at large, Conservapedia seeks to get accurate information based on the viewpoints of its creator and editors and pretty much shuns any traditional sources of information on everything in favor of a hard-right, super-Christian viewpoint.

edited 14th Dec '15 4:02:19 PM by BlackMageAnolis

You just used "accurate information" and "Conservapedia" in the same sentence, non-exclusively. That's an error.

edited 14th Dec '15 5:27:25 PM by Fighteer

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

I said "accurate information based on the viewpoints of..." I know full well Conservapedia is not an accurate or reliable source, and I sincerely hope no one takes the information it presents seriously or uses it as anything other than Snark Bait.

And I just took a visit there...

I literally felt like I was going to puke.

edited 14th Dec '15 7:34:02 PM by BlackMageAnolis

I think Fighteer was presenting that tongue in cheek.

I have participated in at least one other wiki for a video game but only in a very minor way and left it after observing how overly harsh the mod staff appeared to be at the time. No I do not wish to name any site that is offsite stuff and in the past.

Contrary to the view up thread tropes is pretty fair in general in my experience. The mods almost never do anything arbitrarily and action almost always comes when it is determined something has become problematic or is about to hit the tipping point. All but the most problematic of posters and editors are given more then one shot, warnings, and chances in general to not wind up on the wrong end of a ban. There is also the fact that mods frequently consult with each other as a collective group for taking any sort of sanction or action. The mods and admins alike frequently engage the user populace in general on points of concern.

edited 19th Dec '15 2:18:11 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

Well, thank you guys so much. With these answers, I got a 100 on the paper, and I honestly can't say how much your responses have helped me.

With that, I think you can lock the thread, unless someone else wants to say something about this.

I'm very happy for you! I'll go ahead and lock this, as suggested.

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