On improper TRS cleanup

It's come up a lot in the TRS recently that several tropes have been mishandled by the people cleaning them up, leading to even more issues down the line. Most infamous is the botched cleanup of Reality Ensues / Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, where a lot of examples were moved to the new name wholesale without any vetting, giving the impression that the new trope was suffering from instant decay. Similar has happened with King of the Dinosaurs picking up misuse from Tyrannosaurus Rex and thus making that trope misused... and with plenty of other tropes that I can't remember off the top of my head (and I would love other people to note such cases in replies).

There are also cases of people being sloppy when handling things like word cruft, removing words or tropes without concern for context, and in general, leaving behind messes due to rushed or overeager cleanup that doesn't account for proper usage, context, or placement.

The question is... why does this keep happening, and what can we do to stop it? Some ideas have already been suggested (such as a post-cleanup wick check for TRS'd tropes to see if the usage has truly changed), but it could use a broader discussion on a proper, dedicated thread. So, here we are.

i think one issue is that there isnt enough horns being sounded to get eyes on it; i vaguely recall some users being against crowner calls on ATT, which strikes me as weird because you want users to see a discussion

ive already raised issue with "x is no longer a trope" implying "this trope is dead, do not bother readding it"; instituting a policy to use more neutral wording like some editors who put something along the lines of "this trope is disambiguated, please ensure any of the subtropes now apply" would work better

finally, ive seen proposals for the replacement trope, like say Everythings Better With Dinosaurs supposed to be replaced by Gratuitous Dinosaurs or something of that nature, go nowhere before the editorial crowd put the cuts in

Edited by MsOranjeDiscoDancer on Jan 3rd 2023 at 4:22:58 AM

I mean, to be fair, if a trope becomes a disambig it is dead and should not be re-added. So I don't see a huge problem with that wording. It's accurate, maybe a little blunt and a little less descriptive, but it's definitely true.

As for the last bit, it's not really possible to always ensure replacement tropes launch. If they're handed over to the TLP, they're the TLP's problem from then on, and it's always possible for them to be discarded. We've actively taken steps the past few years to prevent threads from being stalled or ruined by a TLP action (as well as to avoid the TRS overstepping their boundaries and demanding the TLP comply).

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 3rd 2023 at 7:12:43 AM

that imo can be solved with a "do not specifically readd this trope, please ensure the examples rematch any of the disambiguated tropes" kind of wording - which some editors already do. The "[x] is no longer a trope" is fine if it's a total cut but more than once I'll click on [x] and it's now a redirect or disambig that could fit with tweaking

the latter is fine but it feels like there should be more consensus esp with mod actions on TLP cliques getting out of hand

Edited by MsOranjeDiscoDancer on Jan 3rd 2023 at 4:29:31 AM

I know that I've made my fair share of mistakes while doing clean up/dewicking, and frankly? The main reason is exhaustion. For a lot of those tropes, I'm one of the only people doing it and there's hundreds if not thousands of wicks, most of which are on pages that I have no familiarity with. After a while your eyes blur, and it becomes too much effort to do more than to just blindly search and replace with the new trope name if it was renamed and the example looks fine at first glance, or delete the wick if it were disambiguated.

Reading the rest of the page for enough context to determine if the example should be moved to another trope, reworded, ect. takes time and effort that should be afforded, but that I sometimes don't have the energy to do for each page when there are literally thousands of them to fix and only 1-3 people working on doing so.

Edited by Orbiting on Jan 3rd 2023 at 9:15:25 AM

Oh, I'd never say to read the entire page. For one, I also tend to tackle massive cleanup projects on my own, and for two the only thing that should matter is the context of the example itself. The problem is, well, people ignore the context of the examples entirely. There's not reading the whole page, and then there's not reading the paragraph of text you're altering. I understand the issue of eye-blur and exhaustion (again, I'm in the same boat as you) but it's not hard to at least skim the example for context before moving it to a new name (or to just cut the trope entirely in the case of a pothole).

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 3rd 2023 at 9:19:55 AM

That's true, but I admit I'm having a hard time picturing examples of not even reading the surrounding paragraph, though I believe you when you say you've seen it. For Reality Ensues in particular, I think that one was significantly hindered by not even the thread itself being clear on what exactly the new definition was: that's a pretty rare occurrence, I hope. I admit that I completely avoided helping out on that thread because I still don't really understand what counts and what doesn't.

Edited by Orbiting on Jan 3rd 2023 at 9:30:41 AM

Well, it was brought up on my King of the Dinosaurs thread that most of the misuse (of the "this work has a T-Rex" variety) were just examples that were moved over wholesale after the trope was split off of the now-defunct Tyrannosaurus Rex. That's the sort of thing I'm referring to, and there's absolutely no excuse because it's not like King of the Dinosaurs had a particularly complicated definition.

There's been other cases of this lately, too.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 3rd 2023 at 9:30:22 AM

I think that there are at least two possible parts of it:

• People working on TRS feel responsible for the new trope, and don't want it to wither and die due to lack of wicks, and so will just move misuse if they're unsure if counts or not

• People in general just really like "X exists" tropes, and genuinely don't realize that those examples aren't tropeworthy

Ah, I was waiting until I was on my laptop to respond to this. There's a few things I want to talk about here.

First off, I am guilty of this myself. Very guilty, in fact. My problem, though, is I often overzealously delete things, as I'd rather have no entry than a possible bad entry. When I did wick cleaning for Flagship Franchise, this happened a lot—one troper even offered to help get statistics for franchises to see if they fit Cash-Cow Franchise, and I stupidly didn't follow up on it—which I will admit was on me and I should've listened. When I do replace, however, I have also had problems—I got two YMMV notifiers for botched Classic Video Game "Screw You"s cleanup, as I moved entries to Scrappy Mechanic without also moving them to YMMV. That was my fuck-up, and I do apologize—I will strive to do better. I am also guilty of sometimes leaving problems in entries and doing nothing about it—I will strive to do better for that as well.

Second, I know this has happened before with some tropes. I remember there were issues for the on-page examples for The Cheerleader when it got moved to Cruel Cheerleader, and I recall Blaming "The Man" had issues from The Man's TRS that Berrenta brought up. I could probably name more too.

Third, I will reiterate my endorsement for a second wick check idea to ensure that thread cleanup was done well. One downside is that TRS is already backed up, and it would make that worse—but I'd rather have a clean trope that takes time to close its thread than a trope with problems stemming from rushed cleanup.

Fourth, as the troper who TRSed Everythings Better With Dinosaurs...yeah, there were tropable ideas that were ignored there. I should've taken more notice, and that one was on me.

Fifth, Orbiting is right that exhaustion plays a role, especially with huge trope cleanups. Not many tropers do wick cleaning, and mistakes can easily occur when it's just a small team doing it all. Especially when there's already hostility from the rest of the wiki to the trope changes brought about by TRS.

Those are just some of my thoughts though.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 3rd 2023 at 10:18:46 AM

It would help if there was some way of tracking edits related to TRS cleanup efforts - perhaps searching for edits by edit reason, or edits of paragraphs containing links to a particular page, perhaps. That way it would be easy for contributors to a thread to double-check and make sure that changes were done properly. But of course that would probably require dev work that's not available at the moment.

In lieu of that, it would be a good idea to post in the thread when you clean up a significant number of links (since it is possible to search for edits by the troper who made them), and certainly when you come across an example you're not sure what to do with. Pending Final Action threads shouldn't just be taking up space on TRS to encourage people to work on them to free up spots; they should be a hub for discussion on how the cleanup effort is progressing and if it's running into hiccups. The thread is there, it should make itself useful.

It's frustrating to see a page sit there continuing to exist and with misused entries cluttering the wiki, and to see a thread continuing to hog space on TRS while you wait for your preferred thread to rise to the top of the queue, but in my view, it's better for TRS cleanup to be done right than to be done fast. If you're not in a state to accurately assess the state of a link you're staring at, take a break. If it seems like you're facing a Sisyphean task because you're the only one working on the project and the list of links seems daunting and possibly growing faster than you can clean them up, try and recruit more cleaners.

The reason why this keeps happening is because many of these cleanups require literally thousands of edits. I don't think the human brain can carefully perform so many operations.

When I do cleanup, I do it in bursts. That usually allows me to review stuff without getting burned out. It's rare that I look at more than 50+ wicks in sitting.

on that note: the fact that thousands of edits have to be shared between at best editors ranging in the double digits means that while i totally get putting a 'this is not a trope anymore' response means the edits get done faster, it feels like instituting a copy-paste Edit Reason everyone can agree on might cut down on the apparent overzealousness and still keep their pace on having to do a kajillion edits

"This trope ([removed trope wikiworded here]) has been depreciated. Please check the trope page to see if the removed example fits any of the disambiguated tropes. Do NOT add the original trope name back." somethin like that

as before ive already seen variations of that edit reason used by editors and it is 1000000% more informative (in my oh so humble [jk] opinion) than "not a trope anymore"

another issue is that the policy somehow shifted People Sit On Chairs from "extremely obvious character action like actually sitting" to "cheating as a plot point/using specific weapons/adding dinosaurs for the cool factor/etc. isn't a valid trope". it does feel pretty tough to argue against TRS esp when the first i heard of the policy shift was the initial wave of "no longer a trope" edits for Your Cheating Heart and at that point it's been done and decided

(id love to suggest some kind of Wikipedia-style bot to automate dewicking, but I vaguely remember the people who undertook the original namespace migration did so because the wiki software doesnt support such bots?)

Edited by MsOranjeDiscoDancer on Jan 4th 2023 at 9:33:26 AM

I am very opposed to cleanup bots specifically because they'll cause problems like the ones outlined here: Unless the bot is somehow programmed to understand example context, it'll leave a lot of cleanup work behind and probably remove even things that were meant to be kept. Dewicking efforts requires human effort and understanding, even if people tend to rush it.

As for the rest of your post, it's still not actually related to the overall point: Not being able to argue against TRS and disliking the stock edit reasons used isn't really the same as the cleanup editors leaving behind a bigger mess than they were originally trying to clean.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 4th 2023 at 2:11:01 PM

sorry, to clarify: more ways to get eyes on threads before cleanup starts would stop accusations of being overzealous, and a singular-use edit reason can help with concerns of trope decay because itd direct tropers to the new tropes (if applicable) instead of the new tropes languishing because it has to be readded to works, but "trope no longer exists" implies otherwise

the former at least would help with TRS from getting crowded with trope decay arguments after cleanup has started

also not to call people trying to cleanup 'bots' but honestly the way a lot of editors take the tropes out... automation would help lighten the load, esp since the general attitude is that 'whoever knows the work/watches the page can fix it'

Edited by MsOranjeDiscoDancer on Jan 4th 2023 at 11:38:14 AM

I wish there was a way for redirects and disambiguations to show little colored icons like Trivia and YMMV tropes do. Then people familiar with a work page but who weren't following the TRS thread would see that a trope is now a redirect/disambig and will know to change it, and being already familiar with the work would be more likely to have a good idea of how to rephrase it/where to move the example to.

that would help immensely imo; i vaguely remember a proposal for putting an icon next to tropes with active TRS threads as well

There's a way for it, since disambigs are already on a special index, the admins just haven't coded an icon yet (because minor QOL changes aren't something they care about).

To be blunt, and this may be part of the bigger problem, but I would much rather see a trope go through overzealous deletions than overzealous moves and renames, mostly because at least with deletions the decay doesn't move to another trope. I agree that people should take their time with everything and make the effort to preserve content if possible, but on the other hand the TRS is sort of forced to take a "cut if if you aren't sure about it" stance to avoid spreading misuse around. And since we can't expect people to do deep dives into every work page they come across, yeah, sometimes it'll be up to people who like each work to salvage any deleted content. I'd rather have that than for people to be so determined to save content that brand new tropes suffer insta-decay.

And while overzealous deletions can easily be blamed on exhaustion and rushing, it's harder to justify overzealous moves/renames because such a thing tends to take a little longer (often requiring re-alphabetization, rewording of wicks, and checking the context). So when people do it, yeah, I guess it can only really be explained by "people wanting to salvage content" and "people understanding the goal of the cleanup but not the actual point of it". As in, people who aren't often doing TRS work might think a rename job sounds easy, but miss the fact that examples also need to be vetted first.

"To be blunt, and this may be part of the bigger problem, but I would much rather see a trope go through overzealous deletions than overzealous moves and renames, mostly because at least with deletions the decay doesn't move to another trope. I agree that people should take their time with everything and make the effort to preserve content if possible, but on the other hand the TRS is sort of forced to take a "cut if if you aren't sure about it" stance to avoid spreading misuse around. And since we can't expect people to do deep dives into every work page they come across, yeah, sometimes it'll be up to people who like each work to salvage any deleted content. I'd rather have that than for people to be so determined to save content that brand new tropes suffer insta-decay."

frankly i think this is it: the "if we don't cut it, another trope will be misused" strikes me as overzealous and too much to basically remove content. i still dont know what the criteria for, in Your Cheating Heart's case, "cheating is a plot point and is now no longer a trope" was and people whod be inclined to argue against it cant argue it anymore.

(to be clear im not big into cheating or anything i just found the execution in its... execution... pretty lacking and confusing. nombretomado's namespace moves were clear and it was understandable because they werent removing content; here i have objections to because an entire trope's gone, and a trope that's a plot point in a lot of works at that)

"And while overzealous deletions can easily be blamed on exhaustion and rushing, it's harder to justify overzealous moves/renames because such a thing tends to take a little longer (often requiring re-alphabetization, rewording of wicks, and checking the context). So when people do it, yeah, I guess it can only really be explained by "people wanting to salvage content" and "people understanding the goal of the cleanup but not the actual point of it". As in, people who aren't often doing TRS work might think a rename job sounds easy, but miss the fact that examples also need to be vetted first."

it cant be that difficult to wait. even some of the more hardline ATT guys pointed out people keep jumping the gun to move for something without discussion. discussing if a trope needs to be salvaged even by new guidelines shouldn't be done immediately. it's not like it's Troper Tales or This Troper or So Yeah that took like five years to remove or something like that

Edited by MsOranjeDiscoDancer on Jan 4th 2023 at 3:20:58 AM

Again, you're missing my point. This discussion isn't about the TRS itself being overzealous in it's choices. It's about cleanup editors doing a terrible job at doing actual cleanup — quality over quantity stuff. This sort of thing happens regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the actual state of the TRS threads and the decisions made there, and such a thing is not what I'm talking about at all.

Yes, TRS needs more voices. And it could use more discussion. I've been part of this discussion for a while, and we've been doing all we can to get more attention. I'm not opposed to taking discussion more slowly and considering other options. But this thread isn't the place to discuss these issues because the issue the thread is about has nothing to do with whether or not discussion is taking place. It's purely about people not doing the ensuing cleanup work correctly. And if it's a choice between "people deleting too many examples" and "people moving misuse around", I'd rather see things get deleted than moved.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 4th 2023 at 6:23:04 AM

"Again, you're missing my point. This discussion isn't about the TRS itself being overzealous in it's choices. It's about cleanup editors doing a terrible job at doing actual cleanup — quality over quantity stuff. This sort of thing happens regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the actual state of the TRS threads and the decisions made there, and such a thing is not what I'm talking about at all."

ah i see. i still think some kind of standard boilerplate edit reason would help cleanup efforts since any newbies who see the cleanup efforts wouldnt be jumping in blind.

and i still think further discussion would lay out who goes where and what's what. maybe some kind of system for hollers specifically on cleanup threads might alleviate some things, but i cant see anything more involved than just pinging everyone and getting them to look at a post that says "don't do this"

is there anything specific to avoid when it comes to cleanups, too? a bigger list of what not to do and perhaps a reminder for each thread might help

(i didnt know Reality Ensues' cleanup had gotten that bad, it seemed okay to me)

TRS threads are considered resolved when the wicks are gone. Which may inadevertly encourage Scorched Earth tactics.

To prevent this, more stops would have to be done in cleanup. The entire Related tab should be copypasted to a sandbox instead of just "done namespaces", and then each wick name commented with if it's moved, removed or kept. It'd also help checking when new wicks are added when shouldn't be.

We've had the whole related page copied over before, but in such a way where every example was put into the same sandbox, and it didn't really do anything other than act as a more complicated way to say "I cleaned these namespaces".

I do worry that making things more complicated would only make less people want to do the cleanup, if after every single wick they have to record that information.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 5th 2023 at 7:58:20 AM

The only other way I can think of is to not allow people without good TRS record to do cleanups, and it's both unreasonable and impossible.