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

And, you know, beyond the fact that the trope lists are consistent with the mission of this wiki...it's called "TV Tropes", after all, but even beyond that...

I'm at a loss to figure out what would motivate anybody to take the action that was taken here, to gut the wiki of material that people cared about and were (and are) interested in. We have the There Is No Such Thing As Notability doctrine here, which means that any half-literate yahoo can post a Harry Potter fanfic somewhere on the internet and it can get a work page. Everybody's OK with that. We have an entire namespace dedicated to pinball games, i.e., arcade games that don't tell stories. Seriously, this is a page on the wiki, and everybody's ok with it.

But the tropes associated with Harry Truman were deleted on August 3, 2015, because that's beyond the pale.

I don't get it. Someone will say "tropes on Useful Notes pages will lead to edit wars." So? Fix them. Deal with edit warring and natter like we'd do on any other page.

edited 4th Jan '16 9:36:54 PM by jamespolk

I'm challenging that distinction, Fighteer. I know it has been around for a while, the notion that we are about fiction only. I've never agreed with it. We are about storytelling. Sometimes stories are about real life. Sometimes stories are about real people. Sometimes stories are not even intended to be fiction. Fact is, you can't tell stories without using storytelling techniques.

Let's take the case of Straw Feminist. We have the policy statement in the article that it permits fictional examples only. Fair enough. Any live feminist has not been made out of straw by someone else to serve a narrative purpose. You can say, however, that someone has tried to cast them as a straw figure, say by distorting the feminist's actual position. I think we may rely on the Internet to supply us with people having an opposing viewpoint. As long as we give both viewpoints, we have done our jobs.

What we're seeing here is a blowback because we fallen into the habit of suppressing ALL viewpoints because we don't want to deal with viewpoints we don't agree with.

Also, I have to agree. Harry Truman? Really? How big could THAT edit war get?

edited 4th Jan '16 10:09:51 PM by eyebones

The site is called "TV Tropes". If you want to be pedantic, picking and choosing isn't an option.

I'm one of the people who regularly work with the Real Life sections, although not so much Useful Notes directly. But what I've seen is that, compared to the fictional examples, tropes for Real Life things, especially people, have a significantly higher amount of misuse and shoehorning. A common edit to the Real Life folder if there's a problem is to delete the entire thing, because there are no valid examples.

You never see that amount of misuse elsewhere. Even very problematic tropes with poor descriptions tend to have at least a few valid examples, and if they're cut it's almost always a problem with the trope itself, rather than the examples on it.

And that's basically what it boils down to (not counting YMMV and NRLEP tropes). People who add examples on Real Life subjects, as a whole, don't behave.

"Fix them." Well, we've tried that. Didn't work. This is the next step.

And it is not working. It is just making editing simpler. Let's fix what wasn't working about fixing them. Not making hasty, rule-literal decisions would be a place to start.

edited 4th Jan '16 10:19:08 PM by eyebones

From my end it's working. It's just not working for the people who wouldn't help fixing it before we decided to get rid of it.

Well, it looks like some of them have seen the cost of that apathy and are now willing to get involved.

What is the purpose of Useful Notes on TV Tropes anyway?

Right now, Useful Notes are a variation of wiki articles. (Admittingly, I find Useful Notes to be much easier to read than The Other Wiki, but I don't think that's terribly relevant.)

If it's to dispel misconceptions (that can exist in the form of tropes - let's take Katanas Are Just Better for an example), tropes should be listed only as misconceptions, and the page would explain how the trope does or does not apply in real life. Currently, such explanation is done in the main description of the trope itself, which I feel really should go onto Useful Notes.

Part of them is an extension of the descriptions of tropes that relate to them, similar to but not exactly like Analysis pages. Useful Notes should also be primarily about how the subject relates to media, which would include misconceptions, how it actually is, and tropes directly related to the subject, such as tropes originating from WWII being on that UN page.

@eyebones: Yes, it is a somewhat narrow distinction, but it is important. For example, we allow tropes for documentary works and news media because those craft a narrative around real events and people. We do not allow tropes, however, specifically about the events and people they describe. It's a fine line, but we don't cover a lot of documentary media anyway.

Pulling an example out of my hat, we could note that a political talk show on TV called Donald Trump a Strawman Political, but we would not call Donald Trump a Strawman Political. See the difference?

So, again, a Useful Notes page can discuss the tropes that are applied to the treatment of its subject by media — including nonfiction media. It cannot assert that tropes apply directly to the subject of the article.

We are not striving to be a primary source.

edited 5th Jan '16 5:01:33 AM by Fighteer

We are agreeing in that we shouldn't have a trope directly applied to a human being, but that we can cite some source that is attempting to do so, or is flat-out doing so.

That, however is not what the complaint has been in this and other threads on the topic. The complaint is about wholesale deletions of trope examples, without looking for an attribution. "No tropes about humans in real life" is being applied without discretion. It is being applied simplistically, without really looking at what is being said.

Well, that would be an erroneous application of the policy.

Yup. So, what's needed are some folks willing to go over the deletions and see if they should be restored. I'll drop a note to that effect in Short Term Projects.

Actually it was in Perpetuals. Here's the post.

edited 5th Jan '16 9:14:40 AM by eyebones