To-do list:

• Move wicks related to evil rather than the sea from Prongs of Poseidon to Devil's Pitchfork, and remove examples unrelated to either evil or the sea.
  Feel free to use Sandbox.Prongs Of Poseidon Wick Cleaning to keep track of which namespaces have been cleaned.

Original post

Counting the on-page examples is relatively straightforward, since they're already sorted by folder on the page itself:

• Poseidon/marine tridents have 61 distinct works linked, not counting one ZCE ("BIONICLE: Kiina and Turaga Nokama have these"). This accounts for 52.14% of examples.
• Satan tridents have 28 distinct works linked, not counting one ZCE ("Touhou Project: Nue Houjuu from the 12th game wields one, however she is a subversion"). This accounts for 23.93% of examples.
• Random tridents have 21 distinct works linked. This accounts for 17.95% of examples.
• Gladiator/disarming tridents have seven distinct works linked. This accounts for 5.98% of examples.

Regarding inbound links, I opted to focus on dedicated examples over miscellaneous links and potholes, as these would be the most relevant to deciding the viability of a page split by showing how many examples each potential "offspring" would have. Consequently, I checked only character and work pages, looking at every fifth example.

Ratios:

• Sea/Poseidon tridents: 51/104 = 49%
• Demonic tridents: 9/104 = 8.7%
• Gladiator tridents: 2/104 = 1.9%
• Tridents/pitchforks with no narrative significance: 22/104 = 21.2%
• ZCEs: 20/104 = 19.2%

My conclusions are:

Firstly, this page is very under-crosswicked. There are 117 works linked on-page, versus 644 inbounds. The majority of the works I checked were not listed on the page.

As for the examples themselves, notice that both lists are largely dominated by sea/Poseidon/mermaid/fish-associated tridents, the inbound list more so. Normally this would be the opposite of a problem, since it shows concept cohesion — but this trope is currently supposed to cover the other uses of tridents as well, which means that the fact that people are not using or linking for those definitions is a problem. The page's title and presentation absolutely contribute to this, I feel — logically, who would look at a trope called Prongs of Poseidon, with a page picture of a big merman in the ocean, and think that this is also supposed to cover, say, Satan's pitchfork? Folding those other tropes into this one is very clearly hurting them.

My proposal is as follows:

• "Pitchforks associated with infernal figures" is the most obviously viable trope to extract here. It has plenty of examples and is very clearly a strong trend in fiction. Carve out its folder and send it to the launch pad.
• "Pitchforks associated with gladiator figures/used for disarming opponents" could also be viable, but I feel it lacks enough material to work with. We could try to extract it too, but I'm not too confident that that would yield results.
• The third type is by its own definition tridents that have nothing to do with any specific theme. That's chairs by definition and should just be cut.
• Having decided what to cut and what the send to TLP for separation, comb through the inbound wicks list, keep examples of the sea-themed type and crosswick them to the main page, move any applicable ones to the new draft/s, and cut everything else.

Thoughts?

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 17th 2022 at 8:12:39 AM

Opening

Agree! Split!

Keep the Poseidon-based tridents under Prongs of Poseidon, move the Satanic/demonic tridents to a new trope (maybe something like Devilish Pitchfork), and remove the "tridents exist" examples because that's not a trope.

We could probably Yard the gladiator examples.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 30th 2022 at 8:19:17 AM

Agreed.

Gaston Rabbit's suggestion

Eighth-ing Gaston's idea. Seems like a quick and straightforward fix!

I also support Gaston's suggestion.

Yeah, divide between sea tridents, devil tridents and gladiator tridents. That could easily work out.

Basically, yes, make the Soft Split into a Hard Split.

We might be able to split off gladiator tridents right away instead of Yarding, because the on-page example count is higher than the amount of wicks in the wick check. I mentioned Yarding because I was focused more on the wicks than on-page examples when I said that.

to GR's suggestion

I feel like we may end up not needing a crowner for this thread, though it's too soon to be completely sure since the thread is only a day old and we have to wait until at least three days have passed.

How do we deal with Hindu and East Asian tridents?

We can yard them? Otherwise we don't need to deal with them unless there are examples in media?

Yeah, we can't split them off unless we already have examples.

Yeah, unless we have some examples to work with I don't think we need to worry about that just now.

I feel that some of the trident examples are misplaced under Blade On A Stick (Three Blades on A Stick?), as seen in films like Masked Avengers

I just had a look through Blade On A Stick now, and there are definitely a few on there. Once we yard and/or sandbox the new tropes, we should definitely have a go through that for examples.