On improper TRS cleanup

I agree with War Jary 77 that overzealous deletions are better than expecting a completely unfamiliar editor to guess which trope is better. If you see it in the history and can modify it to fit something then you are the better person to do it. The edit history isn't going anywhere unless the page is cut, and at that point you have a bigger problem than one example.

Edited by Synchronicity on Jan 5th 2023 at 7:44:31 AM

I also agree that if you're not 100% certain about which trope to use, it's best to just outright delete it. A work missing a trope is not a big deal; no page actually lists every single trope in the work, so one more missing trope is not really a big deal. Meanwhile, an example listed under the wrong trope, or that simply isn't a trope at all, will only lead to confusion and make future cleanup harder.

The majority of TRS threads these days are Pending Final Action, which should make it easier to participate in threads in earlier stages of discussion since there aren't that many of them. Part of the idea behind Current Trope Repair Shop Threads is to serve as a catalog of threads at each stage of discussion and provide a brief overview of what each thread is about, making it easier to find a thread you might want to read and/or participate in more thoroughly. But if you want a discussion about whether or not People Sit on Chairs is being interpreted too broadly in a way that's wiping out viable tropes, that's a topic for another thread.

(I will say that a number of tropes that theoretically should be tropeworthy have been bolted because in practice they were just used as "thing exists/happens" and it wasn't clear how we could police them in a way that would make sure they would continue to be tropes.)

I don't think there should be a blanket icon for all redirects as some of them are viable alternate titles, but having an index for "no longer valid trope names" that includes TRS-created redirects and disambigs that would trigger an icon when they're linked on work pages could be a good idea. If it weren't for the fact it wouldn't remove the entry from the Related page, I would suggest commenting out entries that link to renamed/deleted tropes similar to what we do with Zero Context Examples.

If a page is clearly a trope but the problem is policing misuse, isn't that the kind of problem an example sectionectomy is for?

I don't see how, TBH, though I agree with Morgan that that's an issue for a separate thread. (Which BTW I've personally wanted to make for months - I just haven't mustered up the effort.)

Somebody cleaned up Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs, and said they were removing "snark". While most of what they removed was indeed snark, they also removed two examples of What Happened to the Mouse? that I think were valid, albeit phrased wrongly.

That's not really what this thread is about, though I don't know where you'd go to post about that, other than Ask The Tropers.

What Morgan Wick said. Ask The Tropers is your friend here.

Slight bump to say that I'm re-endorsing the idea of a second wick check on closure, to prove wick cleanup was done well.

I am not completely sure about that idea but I understand the reasoning behind it. I think it'd be a good idea to ask for opinions on the TRS gen discussion thread

Ditto.

and I might do that then when my headache goes away.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 16th 2023 at 11:05:08 AM

I did bring this up here

Some tropes like Surprisingly Realistic Outcome are hard to judge by just looking at the write-up and not knowing the work and how the scene actually played out. I would suggest err on the side of deletion with a note about what's unclear about the entry. Chances are, someone is having the page on Follow and is able to re-add the entry with validating context.

Oh man, I should check this forum more often. I'm guilty on multiple occasions of having been an overzealous mover, but I'm better about it now. As much as I get antsy about how long the queue gets, I would much rather TRS cleanup folks go slower and consider each wick rather than rocketing through them. That's just me though; I often fix other glaring page errors (ZCE, indentation, tropeslashing) I encounter when dewicking. As a result, overzealous deletion is a (potentially unwarranted) pet peeve of mine.

When cleaning up misuse (especially of the more misused tropes) unnecessary removals are going to happen to some extent. We go out actively looking for misuse so we're more prone to see problems that might not actually be there, or the example can potentially be salvaged but it ends up being cut entirely due to the editor's unfamiliarity with the work (or their laziness/a desire to get the cleanup over with because it's been months/years.)

We've all done this at some time or another, but badly cut examples are far less of a problem than badly kept examples as the latter can encourage continued misuse of the trope, making the cleanup take even longer. In TRS, I'd support a second wick check as a way to say "we fixed it, now let's keep it that way."

Well the existence of this thread is comforting to me.

I don't usually have a lot of confidence in assisting with cleanup efforts, I'm worried about causing problems just like this!

Last time I contributed to a cleanup, I ended up giving up after not doing a lot because every other wick I checked was something without an easy answer of where to move it considering the huge list of things the page was being disambiguated to. Some of them were clear and I was happy to deal with those, but I got so worried that I'd mess the others up that I barely helped.

I know the cleanup efforts need more help, but I didn't want my enthusiasm to help just make things worse. It's a relief to know that it's not so simple for everyone else either, and maybe that'll help me contribute better in the future.

Edited by Jokubas on Feb 1st 2023 at 2:28:46 AM

I was re-reading this and I saw a comment that I think is worth some discussion, from Ms Oranje Disco Dancer:

This is an interesting viewpoint—at what point is something "chairs"? I actually feel like this might be worth a separate discussion—I know that concerns have been brought up about our definition of "chairs" before, so it might be worth deciding exactly what is chairs.

“Someone cheats” (the actual usage of Your Cheating Heart) is a character action, though. certainly not a trope no matter how you slice it.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 1st 2023 at 11:05:36 AM

Discussing the nature of People Sit on Chairs is a topic for another thread.

That's what I meant—is it worth another thread?

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of cases, the wicks get cleaned, but on-page examples, especially subpages, tend to languish and never be cleaned. I noticed that when editing Past Experience Nightmare to get rid of an Uncanny Valley wick, and realized that the example I was reading was actually misuse leftover from Bad Dreams. So even if we don't think a wick check would be useful (I can see how it could be complicated in a lot of cases), making sure that the trope page itself has been properly cleaned up should be a requirement.

I thought that was something we wanted to make sure people remember to do before threads are closed but admittedly a lot of people forget.

TBF, the Bad Dreams cleanup was a while ago and also I was the person who A) made the thread and B) was doing most of the cleanup work, however realizing that we'd just left misuse around made me wonder if this thing happens with recent TRS efforts too. I know I've brought up Hell Is That Noise in the past for having a lot of uncleared misuse, and the trope subpages for that one are also a mess; but again this one is a bit older.

I know some tropes get sent back to TRS without needing to be requeued because they don't get cleaned up properly, but is the on-page examples not getting cleaned sufficient for that?