Why have all tropes been removed from "Real Life" pages?

What's going on? Why have they all been purged? I really don't see the problem with having tropes for "Useful Notes" pages for historical events, such as the Wars of the Roses, or for people who have been dead for centuries.

I don't think it hurt the quality of the wiki, I think it improved it. If anything hurts the quality of the wiki, it's the insufferable vigilantism that has been going on, and deleting legitimately good content for the sake of political correctness.

The short version: troping real life is off-mission at best and flame baiting at worst. We are about troping fiction, not real-world history.

IMHO, the Real Life history tropes were fun to read. Too bad they're gone.

They're still there. Not sure what the OP is on about.

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

Useful Notes pages are being purged of trope lists. It's an ongoing project, so some still have them.

There are specific exceptions. World War II has a list of tropes which originated from the war, for example. And the pages on mythologies, since those are also stories.

edited 27th Dec '15 12:03:37 PM by DracMonster

Again, to be clear: the mandate is to remove tropes on Useful Notes pages that have to do specifically with the Real Life subjects being described. Tropes that are generally observed in fictional depictions of those subjects may remain.

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

To reiterate, Useful Notes pages can have trope listings of tropes commonly appearing in portrayals of what the page is about.

So for example, if portrayals of World War II is often shown as Stupid Jetpack Hitler, then it can go on UsefulNotes.World War II even though it didn't happen.

Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.

I think it is confusing to allow any RL sections.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

I was once told by our good moderator friend Fighteer that RL examples are tolerated, not necessarily allowed, and are removed when they become an issue.

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

Those two words are synonymous. That is what I think is confusing, it'd be much easier and more straightforward to not tolerate any of them.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

The connotations are pretty different. "Tolerated" is hesitant, begrudging, or strained acceptance, while "allowed" does not have any of those implications.

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

I think "tolerated" is more precise.

World War II doesn't have tropes in the same sense as other pages, considering the list there is about tropes that comes from the war (or codified, popularised, etc.). That's at least within the goal of the site, since it's about the origins of a group of tropes, and understanding that can be helpful in understanding how and why the tropes are used today.

I'd say the same about how real life subjects we have pages for are commonly fictionalised, with or without basis in truth.

However, normal trope lists for real life pages I don't see the same use for.

edited 30th Dec '15 5:45:34 PM by AnotherDuck

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If we didn't consistently run into issues with RL trope sections, such as rampant shoehorning, arguments, overuse of general examples, assignment of moral value judgments, and mistaking coincidence for narrative intent, this might not be such a big deal.

In particular, articles that are about RL people (in Creators or Useful Notes, typically) are expressly forbidden from containing tropes about those people, as opposed to about their work (for Creators) or how they are portrayed in media (for Useful Notes). Extending this to RL objects and RL events is only natural.

Just because it is fun to do a thing does not make that thing on-mission or beneficial.

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

Adding tropes to Useful Notes pages is what makes them worthwhile, interesting, and readable. Without the trope lists we are left with terrible fourth-rate Wikipedia articles that are poorly written and largely useless from a standpoint of learning facts. Even the best ones are always, always worse than the corresponding Wikipedia article. They are a waste of bandwidth.

"Just because it is fun to do a thing does not make that thing on-mission or beneficial."

On-mission or beneficial is in the eye of the beholder, of course. Obviously the hundreds (thousands?) of people who worked on and contributed to the trope lists that have since been gutted thought that those lists were on-mission and beneficial. The dozen people (less?) who decided to wipe out all those trope lists felt otherwise.

The trope lists are interesting, and what's more to the point, certainly are on-mission, as TV Tropes is dedicated, let's remember, to the cataloging of tropes. What is not on mission, as far as Useful Notes pages go, are the actual written content about the subjects of the Useful Notes articles—again, TV Tropes is not a history website.

The best solution would be for the moderators to reverse their decision and put all the trope lists back. The second-best solution would be to delete all the Useful Notes articles as wastes of bandwidth, since, after all, anyone who wants to learn about Abraham Lincoln would be far better served going here than going here.

This presupposes that the moderators are the only ones who decide policy changes. I think the first best move would be to delete Useful Notes from the wiki, but they are present as a concession to the Law Of Wiki Expansion.

edited 4th Jan '16 10:38:21 AM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

As well as a concession to those people that use us as a writing help.

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

"This presupposes that the moderators are the only ones who decide policy changes."

The moderators certainly have final decision on policy changes. And I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the decision to gut Useful Notes pages was made by 15 people or less and that most of them were owners/moderators. That is why we keep getting posts like the one that started this thread and the recent one in Ask The Tropers, from the larger group of people who used to read/edit those articles and are still getting surprised by finding them greatly truncated.

You, jamespolk, would be wrong. It came out of the Real Life Section Maintenance thread which is over 200 pages long and involves dozens of people.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

can also be read as They have every right to be surprised. They have no right to make this wiki static if they are unwilling to participate in the discussions that determine wiki changes.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Pretty much this. If you truck on in deliberate ignorance of policy making processes, then your surprise when those processes do things is blatantly hypocritical.

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

Well, let's all just take some comfort from the fact that participation is starting up, even if it took a little kick in the pants to do so. Luckily, this deletion drive can be brought to halt and reversed, if it needs to be.

This decision seems to be coming out of an interpretation of the purpose of Useful Notes; that it is about so-called real life and that tropes are not about real life, but about storytelling techniques.

Not quite accurate. Useful Notes is intended to be a backstop for writers, a resource saying "Readers will probably find these things interesting about this topic. If your facts don't match these, there should be a very good reason. Oh, and here are some common misconceptions to watch out for."

The issue here is that some of those value perceptions and misconceptions that are commonly associated with the topic are tropes. Because, bluntly, there is no perception of a value that does not flow through the filters of storytelling.

So we have tropes that are definitions of biases. The biases piss of people who don't share them and we get frictions. And we say, rather than deal with the friction, we'll just zap 'em.

Bad move. We shouldn't deny that the biases exist, nor should we deny that opposing viewpoints exist. One side or the other or both will rightly feel suppressed.

What we can do is acknowledge that there are different viewpoints and that for our purposes none of them are right or wrong, none of them "win." They just exist, and we just document them.

Okay, so what do we do about the viewpoints that are so obnoxious and repellent that even reporting their existence could almost be interpreted as hate speech? Well, we can make damned sure that the reader understands the obnoxious viewpoints do not go unopposed.

If we get in-page debates, we move 'em to discussion. If we get people edit-warring their viewpoints and deleting others, we bash them with the ban stick.

We can't just continue to duck away from controversy because the controversy is going to expose friction. The consequence of that trend would be a really, really boring document to read, and a lot of the aims of storytelling would be left out in the cold.

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

"You, jamespolk, would be wrong. It came out of the Real Life Section Maintenance thread which is over 200 pages long and involves dozens of people."

I'm afraid I'd have to see the relevant pages, then. Because we all know that these forums are much more lightly trafficked. And I'm still pretty confident in saying that the number of people who decided to wipe out Useful Notes pages is far, far less than the number of people who edited, read, and enjoyed them.

Bottom line is, Useful Notes used to be two things. 1) A half-assed Wikipedia imitation, which was and is beyond the scope and contrary to the mission of this wiki. 2) A list of tropes associated with the Useful Notes subject in question, which was entirely in keeping with the spirit, tone, and purpose of this wiki.

We chose to keep #1 and jettison #2.

So, how do we find out if what we really want to do is back out that decision?

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

If you discount the people who couldn't give a rat's arse to do anything about the problems that crop up on the wiki until it affects them personally, I think it's a fair amount of people involved in those discussions.

Edit: Apologies to actual rats. Rats are cool.

edited 4th Jan '16 9:25:49 PM by AnotherDuck

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As a note @eyebones, we do still explicitly allow tropes about Useful Notes subjects being referenced in fiction. That's different from saying that those tropes apply to the subjects in RL.

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