Proposal for Raising the Minimum Example Requirement for Works

Ago, thanks for expanding Dadnapped, appreciate it. At work so I don't have time to read/respond to anything else, just wanted to say thanks mate

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I don't see a reason to connect them, myself: they're separate thresholds, after all. That one was found to be too low and raised doesn't necessarily imply that any other is too low and should be raised, it seems to me.

True, I daresay—but would an extra two tropes be enough to make much difference there? And would the degree of difference be worth the higher requirement placed on launching works pages? I'm dubious of both—although granted that I don't have numbers indicating just what scale of difference it might make.

If I may, I don't think that this is quite so: as I understand it, they're arguing that the threshold be raised, but that extant works that fall below it be grandfathered in.

My Games & Writing

Perhaps, but "in those very rare cases something is worthy of an (own) work page but can't be brought to the minimum, to create a list of work pages with an official exception allowance" looks more like forward-thinking than grandfathering. In other words, it looks like they're proposing that new work pages that fail to collect the requisite five tropes must be added to the list, indicating that they're acceptable as-is but need more attention to reach community standards (some sort of consensus is also implied, but I don't think is relevant to my point).

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

• Added seven tropes to Maze Runner.

My position regarding the higher standard is "from now on" and not ruthlessly retroactively when maybe just half an hour of work can get the new minimum reached just fine. There's a bit of a panic here and there that deletion is unavoidable with a new trope count standard, which is a sentiment I don't get. What's so impossible about, instead of immediately signing a work page up for deletion, to either take a look at it personally or bring it to the attention of the community?

Heck, a community effort can precede the envisioned new rule so no work page has to get hurt.

EDIT: The part about future work pages failing to get the envisioned new minimum of tropes is just me acknowledging I'm not omniscient and don't pretend to know with absolute certainty that there are no works worthy of a page that all the same can't get to five tropes (or, for that matter, three). I haven't ever made an art page,^note I'd like to make one for the Nefertiti bust and have been wondering if some jewelry lines, like Lea Stein's work, are tropable but I reckon art pages are the ones most in danger here.

Edited by Pfff133 on Aug 30th 2020 at 9:52:04 AM

Because, based on what you describe, the current standard is ten, not five. If a work page is salvageable and has less than ten tropes, it gets added to a list that encourages editors to expand the page content.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Basically, I don't mind raising our standards if the minimum stays the same. Pages that fall into that minimum can and should get evaluated to see if we can fix them, but there shouldn't be a penalty for only having 3 tropes, and we need to judge the quality of the page as a whole rather than just the amount of tropes listed.

3 is enough to establish a tropeworthy nature, and that's all we need in order for a work to have a page (if it doesn't violate content policy). 5 or more would be the ideal and I do think works that only manage to scrape the bare minimum might need a closer look, but a work page shouldn't be scrapped or disregarded simply for only being able to reach the minimum- some works just don't have a lot of tropes, or maybe it's the case with Me and Dadnapped, where despite knowing the work pretty well, your trope-analyzing skills just aren't working when trying to trope it.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 30th 2020 at 2:05:03 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I mean, if we want to enforce 3 as a minimal bar and 5 as a recommended bar, then I'd be fine with it (at least, to some extent). After all, even after EGA (16 colors) came out, many games retained backwards compatibility with CGA (4 colors). Hell, that happened in the VGA (256 colors) era for a while. Something of a backwards compatibility rule here would be relatively satisfying.

Of course, we'd have to edit Works Needing Tropes' third folder to make it 5 tropes, but the decision would at least be official (I don't think that page's requirement of 10 was agreed upon by anyone, just a random decision in 2013). And of course, obviously using that thread for new works and asking people for help for works at less than 5 would be fine by me.

I know this is a little odd, but I actually thought people would say the barrier of 5 would be too low and I'd have to ask to make it single-digit at most? This is literally what I thought like 2 weeks before starting this because I've expected reactions that standard would still seem low. Just wanted to say it.

Edited by Piterpicher on Aug 30th 2020 at 8:49:42 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

I'd be happy if we could make sure that the "minimum three (or five) examples" are good examples, with detailed, narrative tropes. If nothing else, it needs to be made clear that production and technical tropes don't count.

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

So 3-5 narrative tropes.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

What about works that have no plot or narrative at all?

Edited by jandn2014 on Aug 30th 2020 at 3:32:42 PM

back lol

I don't think that people ever wanted to devalue other tropes. What about games that have no plot but certainly tropes in terms of gameplay and aesthetics (yes, I know, Video Game Tropes exists, but it'd be devalued if this passes)? Or all those Art/ pages, or simpler films, or painters, or music/musicians? There are pages which make it clear it's straight up make it near impossible to have narrative for the works, like Excuse Plot and No Plot? No Problem!. This is what I see as in some cases impossible - not just getting tropes, but getting tropes of a certain type.

Obviously we want good examples (by good, I mean "fit and have context"), but I'd absolutely hate this idea.

Edited by Piterpicher on Aug 30th 2020 at 9:35:56 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Depends on the type of work. For a video game, gameplay tropes are fine. For the rest, the article needs to be interesting to read. I've already said my piece on why production and style tropes aren't.

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

Well then, let me fulfill your expectations!

[Playful tone] I find this ironic, because it does seem like I'm changing opinions, stressing a low bar in one area and a higher bar in another area, but I do consider "minimum required" and "sufficient for our standards" to have a wide gap. Overall, I don't think the gap is very wide for most of the pages that we have because this is a standard for "needs more work", not "this will be cut".

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[serious]
While I'm fine with three tropes being a minimum (nobody adds more than three tropes with sufficient context within a reasonable timeframe will cause the page to be cut), I'd want our expectations of how long a work's example list is to be closer to what's described on Wick for trope pages (Standing- 12 if newly made), and encourage us to raise the bar for what's "sufficient for removal" from Works Needing Tropes.
[wandering off into speculation] Adjustments based on work length make more sense than age of the work; 12 for music/Flash Fiction, 24 for albums/Novels, and 48 for single-medium and multimedia franchises. Not exactly sure what happens to album pages when most of the tropes are migrated to pages for the individual songs, maybe the same rule for their subpages gets applied to the broader work page? That would mean the page for a videogame franchise could get away with 24 tropes if a couple of the individual games had pages... And we'd label paintings and sculptures as "short works" in this, despite following the emphasis convention of a long-form work...

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I think that many tropers, particularly those that aren't the super users who frequent this part of the forums, are far more comfortable adding tropes to a work page than making their own pages. Consider just how often we get ATT queries about why Work X doesn't have a page yet.

So it is better to have more pages made that meet the bare minimum (as long as there is something salvageable within) than not have those pages made at all. As such, I'm against raising the minimum number of tropes for works.

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

That is absolutely true. I've even had problems with people unwilling to make subpages for an existing page, because it seems harder than it really is. Anything that makes it more difficult to make new pages is something we should be careful about.

Obviously we should put as many examples on a new page as possible; I generally don't launch either a trope or a work unless I'm going to be able to give it ten wicks right off the bat. But the minimum shouldn't be too strict.

Right, we should always strive for more and we should find more ways to boost our quality standards without penalizing pages for not having a lot of on-page tropes. We can encourage better pages and more growth without also cutting things.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 30th 2020 at 10:58:13 AM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

For that Works Needing Tropes thing, it sounds like an interesting idea. After all, we have established that sometimes earning too many tropes indeed depends on the work, and the Wick page does indeed take a different parameter into account when deciding requirements, so doing something similar here could pass. I think plotless video games could also fall under the 12 category, depending on the game of course (trying to compare Diamond Digger [thx for expansion again] to Progressbar 95 is not sensible). Of course, I don't know if exceptions would be needed, but it could help.

And alright, I've accepted that the minimal bar is not going up. I still am a little shocked, but I understand their reasoning why it should be kept and that it stays.

Edited by Piterpicher on Aug 31st 2020 at 6:31:44 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

That said, a project for finding these underdeveloped pages and making them more interesting and substantial sounds like an awesome idea and it'd allow us to raise standards without raising the minimum.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Needs Wiki Magic Love is supposed to be that project.

Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.

I think there's actually a thread for it to but it died. We can revive it.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I've been going through the first folder on Works Needing Tropes, sending PMs and crosswicking. Once I finish, I'll edit the list.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I'm a little late, but let me post another agreement with the idea of a minimum count of three and a recommended count of some higher value. Similarly with the idea of finding a way to make under-exampled works-pages more visible to potential editors.

Regarding narrative tropes, etc., I feel that having different rules for different media might be a potential source of confusion, and over-complicate things a little bit. I'm inclined to prefer that the minimum be three tropes of any sort, narrative or otherwise.

Hmm... If there is to be some variation between the requirements for different works, then I think that indeed work length makes more sense than age. A three-thousand-year-old five-line poem may well include fewer tropes than a one-day-old doorstopper novel, after all.

My Games & Writing

Right, and even then we should look at the work itself. If it's basically a Cliché Storm, it should have way more than 3 tropes, while others play with them in such a way as to make them harder to find.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness