Well, the point of TV Tropes is the tropes, there is no other "point". I'd only worry if a lot of examples aren't actually legitimate. For overlong example lists, we make dedicated subpages.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Veteran Editor IV
I agree that this exhaustive listing is a problem, especially if it becomes outdated. I had to remove mentions of post-XP Windows systems from Trivia.I Wanna Be The Guy.
Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)
♀ | Small ripples lead to big waves
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I meant, the point that specific example is trying to make.
Well, OK, exhaustively listing consoles and the like when you aren't providing a lot of details on each is useless. But I have to emphasize that there is a difference between exhaustively cataloguing trope examples and the above example.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
♀ | Small ripples lead to big waves
I definitely should've worded my post better. I meant, we don't need to know what each Pokémon region is based on to understand that it takes place on a Fictional Earth, because that's better-covered by Fantasy Counterpart Culture.
No longer active.
As the person who added that text in the Animal Crossing trivia point, I'll say that it didn't strike me as much of an issue at the time, but in hindsight it definitely does open the door to becoming outdated if/when another mainline Animal Crossing game comes out on a later console. The rewrite avoids that issue, and I prefer it for that reason.
As for a cleanup thread, I'm a bit on the fence about it, because while comprehensive listing can become a problem if it starts ballooning to a big enough extent, it doesn't seem to be as disruptive as a lot of other issues targeted by cleanup threads (e.g. rampant trope misuse, natter, excess complaining and/or gushing, etc.).
A problem I occasionally notice that isn't talked about much is "exhaustive listing", where people list every single instance of a trope happening in a franchise even though it's not relevant to the point. Take this example from Trivia.Animal Crossing 2001:
I just changed
the bolded part to "Since all of Nintendo's subsequent consoles have internal clocks of their own," in order to prevent people from having to indefinitely edit the example whenever a new Animal Crossing game comes out.
Big franchises attract a lot of this. FranchiseOriginalSin.Pokemon contains a huge paragraph describing every single Pikaclone, including a labelnote about the anime, even though most of it isn't relevant to the overall point. Similarly, I edited the Pokémon example
on Fictional Earth a few months ago because it needlessly described every Gen 5+ region.
Should there be a cleanup thread for this?