Sportspeople

The index in question, which seems to be all over the place. A metric ton of redlinks, a lot of wrestler pages (which is a little odd since we already have a wrestling index), quite a few pages filed under Creator/ that probably should be Useful Notes/ (unless we decide to axe them completely), topped off by the page being completely unorganized and messy.

Now, I know that basic cleanup of that index could be a Projects thread, but with so many redlinks inviting people to make those pages, the questions comes up on whether those are pages we should have, and what the cut-offs should be between an athlete falling under Creator, Useful Notes, or just not getting a page. So, I'm throwing this out to try and get some opinions on how to handle this matter. Thoughts?

Me bump, you no thump.

Anyone?

I'd nuke the index, and even many of the pages on it. Personally, even though I like sports myself, I think we've got way too much sports coverage in general on TV Tropes (which is probably another topic entirely, but look at our monstrosity of a page for The World Cup, for instance). I can't figure out which criteria are even being used to determine who gets to be on this index.

In my opinion, sportspeople should only have their own page if they're creators or actors in their own right (e.g. Michael Jordan in Space Jam, Shaq in Kazaam), in which case they'd be treated like Creator pages. And they should be athletes recognizable for their fame by non-fans, not athletes an aficionado may recognize but who are just there to play a bit part realistically. Beyond that, I see no need for pages for athletes who are just really good or famous. The usual rules for a Historical Domain Character typically require such people to be in multiple works with their own stereotypes such that there are a ton of tropes associated with them across fiction, even if not in real life, so I think few (if any) athletes qualify as such.

In the future, I think the 2.0 version might allow us to expand it to allow for athletes as real-life Historical Domain Character in the sense that the film either portrays a real-life sporting event (e.g. Ali, Miracle, Brian's Song) or features a real athlete portrayed by someone else in a fictional situation (e.g. Field of Dreams). Since we'd have "character tags" there, we could include a character tag for the athlete that includes some information about the athlete in Real Life (as kind of a gauge of how accurate that portrayal was). The character "Muhammad Ali", for instance, would be a character attached to the work "Real Life" and then "borrowed" for the film Ali, in which he is portrayed by Will Smith. If you clicked on "Character:Muhammad Ali", you'd see a little information about his real life and career, like we have now. But I see no need at this time for the Muhammad Ali page because it doesn't really connect to anything in a truly useful sense.

Edit: I'm also a Serial Tweaker; sorry

edited 19th Apr '16 10:21:58 PM by GoldenSeals

Really, we shouldn't have sports pages except as Useful Notes on particularly notable athletes (Pele, Babe Ruth, etc).

The fact we have character sheets for things like Nascar, various soccer leagues, etc. is ridiculous as that stuff is utterly irrelevant to the site.

Through TRS I managed to get The Beautiful Game turned into a useful note and cut the player list. I'd like to see the same done to the World Cup as well.

edited 20th Apr '16 12:14:16 PM by Larkmarn

Agreed. Professional wrestling has been given a pass to the extent that it's scripted and the wrestlers are personas played by actors, but "real" sports don't have characters; they have players, and those players are real people.

For the record, I'm the one who made our page on Babe Ruth, and I deliberately decided to put it in the Creator/ namespace because he was also a moderately active radio and film actor on top of his baseball career, and so I wrote the page to focus on that. (Whoever added that trope list about his baseball career needs a good drop-kicking.)

I suspect that the problem is that people can't distinguish between a sport game itself (real life) and journalistic accounts of the game (which can and often do add tropes and narratives to it). We don't want to trope the former, and troping the latter would border too much on the former to be viable without raising all kinds of flame wars and debates, even if we made it clear we were troping the account of a game published by X magazine/website, instead of the game itself.

Didn't know we actually had a Babe Ruth page. Going to do a bit of cleanup to that one.

Unless the sports person in question is somehow involved in a fictional work I am in the nuke it camp. There is really no reason to have the index is all over the place and frankly sloppy.