Unfortunate Implications sources: Quantity vs Quality

By actually using it? That's a pretty good start. Any thread can be active if people just bother to use it. There's no way to force interest obviously, but if your only issue with curation is that nobody is curating, I always have to ask... why don't you?

I do have to repeat my concerns about sockpuppeting, which so far have been unaddressed. How is the curation thread going to know if 2 Tumblr or Reddit posts are genuinely made by different people or not?

I even brought up how easy it is. With no response.

Question: Why are we responsible for qualifying opinions cited by other people to justify examples?

I don't know which is kinda of another issue. What makes one persons opinion better than another which curarion is suggesting for removal of examples.

It's sort of an inevitable part of the citation system in general. People are going to fight against any citations that they dislike, sometimes on principal, sometimes out of bias, and sometimes because the citation is literal garbage.

So your admitting curation would be Impossible because as pointed out here . It would be difficult to really tell what to keep and cut.

I don't think there is any answer that's going to completely remove junk in the examples. Whatever standard we use to allow anything is going to allow junk through at some point. Even the "reputable website citations" allows junk through, which I explained previously.

I guess I'm more on the side of, "Does this seem like an actual opinion held by fans of the show, whether or not it's a stupid, garbage opinion." Because that's what YMMV is supposed to be. Social media allows for that far better than news sites do.

Even with sock puppets, yes. Who says anyone at all is agreeing with a news site?

Edited by Eiryu on Jan 25th 2022 at 4:00:00 AM

Huh? I never said anything that implies it's impossible to curate, all I said is that people do have biases when it comes to this and that's something that makes it difficult. If anything the entire citation concept is flawed, but we already have standards used in curation. We've cut things before for being too overly analytical and biased, for just being a bunch of isolated twitter drama, and more.

People having biases has nothing to do with how possible it is or isn't to curate that thing.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 25th 2022 at 5:05:03 AM

Yeah but as stated what makes the opinions of the people on that thread with their own biases better than the people who created what's being cited? As due to the fact you can and will get anyone to believe anything. Anyone will be in favour of or against something. This is putting an opinion on someone else's opinion (even if it is wrong) its still theirs.

You can say that about literally any YMMV cleanup thread though (excluding CM and MB because those are special snowflakes among the threads). In the end it boils down to consensus, but we do try and be as objective as possible.

I think what it all really boils down to is... what's the point of the citations? To show how common a particular belief is? To support the argument that the issue exists? Or to show that the people making the argument aren't talking out of their ass?

Is it about the opinions expressed? About the quality of the argument? The commonality of the argument? How trustworthy the argument is?

For example, if this is entirely about people's opinions on the contents of the work, then I'd agree that curation is impossible and foolish because we're policing feelings. But if it's meant to show that the opinions are common or "valid", then curation becomes necessary.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 25th 2022 at 5:15:20 AM

Yeah but these are cited examples from people whose names you can see.

Don't you see any issue with that over a random entry from someone you can double check from others.

You... might want to reword that, I'm not sure what the argument there is. Are you saying it's different because trope examples aren't posted anonymously?

No I mean the opinions within the citation have actual named people attached to them for a trope that is about opinions and how someone views something.

Sorry if that came off as unclear. I've had to take pain medication for a toothache so am feeling kinda drowsy now which is why that came off as weirdly jumbled.

I'll just head to bed for now. Since I think things have gotten kinda heated and see what's changed later when I'm feeling better.

Hey, no worries, hope you feel better.

Given that this trope is controversial and we're having trouble deciding what counts as a citation, maybe we should move this to Flame Bait.

.... Y'know... That's a possibility.

I wouldn't be against making it definition only and/or punting actual examples (with whatever citation system we want by then) to their own section on Darth.

I know that's all TRS stuff though.

Yeah, like I said. If we want full curation the page would need to be on-page-examples-only anyway.

One thing that I don't think has been brought up in this thread is people who misrepresent their citations. I've removed at least two Unfortunate Implications entries that used citations that didn't accuse the work of being problematic (one entry accused the work of being sexist, while the review they cited said nothing about gender). I do think there are some people who use citations to backup their opinions, which is the wrong mentality to take. We're not saying we necessarily agree with the citations. We're documenting opinions that are out there.

About the concerns that one blog post is just parroting another: I would say to read them to see if they have any of the same phrasing. If they are making similar points but the text is entirely distinct, we can be confident that they are made by separate people.

This is true. Sockpuppets are notoriously bad at hiding themselves, and people can only make so many arguments before they plagiarize someone else's.

So should we take this to TRS.

Having read through the thread, I would like to add my support to using blog posts as citations, as long as we find more than one to support the same point. I am not concerned with any website's reputation; you can find unhinged diatribes on all but the most tightly moderated platforms, and even on those there are plenty of faulty arguments made. (However I would exclude Twitter because its format does not allow going into depth.) The problem is not so much anyone being too sensitive, but rather that they want something to be sexist or racist or whatever to rationalise their dislike for it, when the real issue lies elsewhere. There were many tumblr blogs decrying that Winry in the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist was sidelined and given less agency, yet in many ways she is more her own character compared to the manga; it is likely these fans were annoyed that she wasn't as shippable with Edward in this.

For which fan essays can be used, I would suggest as guidelines:

-The linked text is self-sufficient for anyone who knows the work, without requiring other links to be read or using unexplained fandom terms.

-It does not many any demonstrably false claims.

-Spelling mistakes are minimal, the structure is easy to follow, and there are no major repetitions of the same points.

-The tone is calm, not angry, vindictive or whiny.

-It identifies what real-world prejudices the work is falling prey to, and what form it takes in the culture the author(s) comes from.

I would also recommend signed essays (even if it's an online moniker), partly so we can see the person's output and know their wider views, and partly because they are less likely to disappear like so many tumblr blogs do.

Ah, twitter does allow threads, and I've seen some fairly in-depth ones that probably would've been blog posts if the author had one (or are duplicated as blog posts). So I don't know that twitter threads should be dismissed out of hand, although a single, isolated tweet might be useless.