Misused: Dueling Works

Dueling Works is already Trivia.

Cut. There's nothing here worth salvaging that isn't already covered by somwthing else.

Oh...huh. Think I confused it for something else there, like Fandom Rivalry.

The fact that it's classified as Trivia doesn't mean it should be, especially due to the whole thing about deciding who wins the duels. (Of course, if we took that aspect away, then we might also be getting rid of the subjectivity.) Kind of like how Fan Nickname and Fan Community Nickname are classified as Trivia despite fan-created things being Audience Reactions by definition.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 22nd 2021 at 12:53:44 PM

Well, it's been three days, so is there anything salvageable here or not? I think there's enough consensus to cut it now, either way.

I'm in favor of cutting it, but I don't know if we have enough consensus already. If we don't, we'd need a crowner to gauge it.

Edit: Also, there's the fact that not all of the cut votes mention cutting Dueling Products in addition to Dueling Works, but if I didn't mention it already, I'm in favor of cutting the former in addition to what I previously said about the former.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 23rd 2021 at 12:32:07 PM

Certainly favor cutting Dueling Products as well.

In the very first listing of Dueling Products, both "Windows" and "GNU/Linux" are split between three lines each, despite there being no spaces in either name. That's how ugly the table format is. In particular, at least on my screen, the "s" at the end of "Windows" and a comma have their own lines.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 23rd 2021 at 12:56:25 PM

I think it would be a good idea to spread the word of this thread and give more people a chance to participate before deciding we have consensus, if only to avoid complaints that people weren't informed. After all, counting redirects, this trope has over 2,000 wicks.

Yeah, we should bring this up to ATT and the pages' discussion sections (though I can say for sure there will be far more input in the former because whether people bother to check the latter varies from page to page).

Edited by GrafVonTirol on Sep 24th 2021 at 12:37:32 PM

ImperialMajesty already posted a bulletin about it.

Should the trope be converted into some kind of index, ala Too Soon and Your Cheating Heart. Tropes that could fall under it include:

• They Copied It, So It Sucks!
• Suspiciously Similar Substitutes
• Follow the Leader
• Surprisingly-Similar Stories

Edited by magnumtropus on Sep 24th 2021 at 1:34:49 PM

I could see it being somewhat salvaged if there were further stipulations, i.e. the duel needs to be noted somewhere, by news or critic, etc. to avoid people making up duels willy nilly (I feel like we do a similar thing for audience reaction tropes?) and changing the "same time period" to "at most, released within a year of each other" for one time things like albums, songs, films, books, etc. and "had overlapping runs" for series, comics, franchises, etc.

there are two things i can think of off the top of my head that this trope would fit for and they're both about rap albums in which the artists released either the same day or the same week and it was (still is in the kanye v drake duel) a HUGE thing to see which one would sell more due to the personal feuds between the artists.

that said...

even as i type this out, I still think you could easily distort "critic or news" to mean anyone with an opinion, which would lead us back to where we are now.

I'm ok with a cut.

Edited by amathieu13 on Sep 24th 2021 at 5:47:23 AM

I mean, just looking at it is an eyesore, and if no one is going to attempt to fix the formatting (and that's just the beginning of things this trope needs) then just cut it.

Turning it into a disambiguation page between those (plus Surprisingly Similar Characters, which is the character equivalent of Surprisingly-Similar Stories) actually sounds like a good idea.

I think we'd only need to have either Dueling Works or Dueling Products as the disambiguation page if we did that, and whichever name we don't use would redirect to the disambiguation page.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 24th 2021 at 7:39:54 AM

Let Dueling Products be the disambiguation page - works (ie media) are a type of product... from a certain point of view

Edited by magnumtropus on Sep 24th 2021 at 5:27:03 PM

To be really honest, this trope and its subpages is one of the pages that I've frequented a lot in the past. If it's going to be circumcised... well, tough luck, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's going to miss it.

I do agree it's VERY prone to misuse, though.

Looking at the Animated Films page now... a Mêlée à Trois between The Secret Life of Pets, Trolls AND Sausage Party? How are these even similar?

Also, the same page have a TON of bashing directed at A Troll in Central Park. Like repeatedly comparing it against classics like The Lion King (1994) and My Neighbor Totoro ^note  who is SIX years old at that point , and then repeatedly bashing on how inferior Troll is ^note  Direct Quote: Curb-Stomp Battle is an understatement; The Lion King actually had two releases in 1994, and both saw them make it the highest-grossing 2D animated feature of all-time. Warner gave no advertisement to Troll, which was hated by a few critics for being a Triple-G rated film, and it turned into one of the biggest box office bombs in history percentage-wise. To make matters worse, it's the last independent Don Bluth film to credit him, and he disowned it; he had already jumped to Fox by this point. . Granted, the movie isn't very good ^note  saw it when I was 7, didn't like it even back then but, come on...

Edited by RobertTYL on Sep 24th 2021 at 10:26:31 PM

Oh great. Yet another attempt to make this site even more po-faced, humourless and intolerant of anything even slightly quirky. Keep this up and what made this site unique, different and interesting will die and we'll turn into a lesser version of Wikipedia with users slinging around "citation needed" tags and deleting anything that doesn't have a credible source.

Keep the pages. Get someone to add a simple "100% divided by number of columns = percentage width of column in the table" hack to the table code, then trim any overly long chunks of text. Problem solved.

Edited by Exxolon on Sep 24th 2021 at 3:43:04 PM

I definitely understand those concerns about the wiki becoming less enjoyable/interesting. that is why I don't advocate for permanent deletion (at most archival), definitely for now as the format is glitched, but if it can be fixed, I may change my mind to keep with some adjustments.

Edited by Piterpicher on Sep 24th 2021 at 4:32:21 PM

People don't want to cut it because it's "fun", fam. They want to cut it because it's prone to misuse and the tables have been borked for at least a year at this point, and since it's low-priority the admins probably won't fix it for a pretty long time. Until that point we don't want to keep eye-bleedingly poor pages around, and we also need to stomp out the misuse somehow. Cutting it kills two birds with one stone.

Now, I'm not personally sold on the cut train, but I can see why other people are. And it has nothing to do with hating the concept of enjoyment.

At least, Exxolon suggested a solution. I don't know if it's implementable in wiki code or what formatting it uses, so it may not amount to anything without eventual admin intervention, but it could be a gamechanger if it is something we can do (since I'm not clear if they mean table code on user level or admin level). then we'd only have misuse left as a problem.

Edited by Piterpicher on Sep 24th 2021 at 5:26:07 PM

The problem is that that hinges on a pretty decent "if". I have no idea how the table formatting works because I've refused to use it even when it actually worked, but unless we know it's something we can actually do then it's just not a viable solution. We need to test the idea first before considering it.

Solutions that hinge on admin intervention might as well hinge on the drop of a new full-site update or the arrival of 2.0. The admins are just too unreliable, not in that they don't do anything but that they're hard to predict and don't always fix the things you're expecting them to. In other words, if the solution involves having the admins do something, then it's not a solution at all.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 24th 2021 at 11:28:56 AM

X5 Yeah, Mx. Broken Record, we get it. You said the exact same thing (almost to the letter) in another thread. It kinda resembles a Monty Python sketch:

"Every page is sacred Every page is great! If a page is wasted, God gets quite irate!"

Completely and intentionally misrepresenting the opposing argument isn't any more productive when you do it, just sayin'. :P

As for the Dueling Works pages themselves, I don't have any particular affection for them — declaring a "winner" always seemed far more arbitrary than funny or fun — and the only interactions I've had with them has been seeing people fighting over entries or vandalizing (or, more accurately, asking me to vandalize) the page. So I wouldn't bat an eye if they were deleted.

That said, the table format can be converted to a different layout that doesn't involve a table. It wouldn't be difficult so much as a pain in the ass, but then, so are pretty much all fixes that go through TRS.

The main question there is, is that worth doing, and how would one deal with off-page misuse.

I don't have any particular affection for Dueling Works, nor do I think it's even one of the "funner" pages, but I am reluctant to throw the whole thing away. Release dates are affected by similar works in the same period, with studios moving tentpoles up and down the calendar year so they don't mutually destroy each other. So it is notable to position works so near each other, like the aforementioned BVS/Civil War and Kanye/Drake examples. If we focus on release date, then it isn't covered by the earlier mentioned...

• Surprisingly-Similar Stories: Keyword surprising, the whole point of this page is to list works that you wouldn't put on Dueling Works because they look different.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Is about characters within the same work, so not sure why this was even brought up
• Follow the Leader: Could overlap, but not all imitators position themselves so closely to their source.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Ultimately an opinion.

I don't agree with "the table is unreadable, pack it up guys" sentiment either. We have lots of works that compare two things that don't require the table. For example, Retroactive Recognition (before Actor A was known for Work B, you can see him in a bit role in Work C).

Here are some things that we could do if we want to salvage it:

• Ditch the table format, maybe organize by alphabetical order (titles) or release date (earlier work first).
• Get rid of the winner/loser part. While obviously some works sell more than their competitors, it's a breeding ground for opinions and complaining.
• Agreeing with earlier sentiment that we ought to restrict examples to within the same year, or overlapping runs for long runners, as well as similar subject matter.

Now, this is just an opinion and I don't know if we would have enough examples given I haven't pored through the on-page examples, but it's a solution that isn't the chainsaw.

Edited by Synchronicity on Sep 24th 2021 at 11:04:30 AM

I keep saying it because I keep seeing it. There is a definite long term trend and I don't like it.

If things keep going in this direction we'll lose Darth, then Sugar, then Headscratchers, then Awesome, then Funny, then Heartwarming, then Nightmare Fuel, then Tearjerker, then WMG, then YMMV, then Trivia etc. etc. Then we'll start deleting Creator pages as "too subjective". All we'll have left is a list of tropes and a list of works. Then we'll start demanding that any tropes we list are sourced to a reliable source talking about the use of the trope in the work and deleting any that can't be sourced properly.

I can see it. Why can't anyone else?