On TRS mega-projects - should there be a limit?

OK, yeah, I overestimated how many wicks would require more than 50 wicks in a wick check. I think either the high quadruple digits or anywhere in the five-digit range would be a better minimum than the low four-digit range, because 2,500 isn't that overwhelming; high four-digit to five-digit is actually the amount I had in mind because this conversation started because of a trope with a five-digit wick count, and the newest dewicking bulletin is for a trope that had almost 6,000 wicks when it was taken to TRS.

Maybe over 5,000 at the minimum; maybe a few thousand more than that. I was thinking wick counts that would result in a project getting a bulletin (I'm aware that we prefer to save those for meaningless concepts; in this case, I'm referring to the wick counts of bulletins we've used and not whether they're meaningful) and simply overlooked the math behind when more than 50 would be needed (hence why I overestimated).

Edit: Gah, accidentally said high double digits when I meant quadruple digits. It's past 1:30 AM; I wasn't seriously entertaining the idea of having the cap be that ridiculously low and simply used the wrong word.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 8th 2023 at 5:28:00 AM

If we're going to implement a cap, I think we should make an exception for proposals that are "expand to match the misuse."

Problem is we don't know if we're going to do that until we get into the actual discussion. For that matter it's far from unheard of for a supposedly "misused" trope to actually be used accurately, the OP just latched on to the wrong part of the description (and/or the description was misleading in general).

As I mentioned earlier, 2500 is also the threshold for a page to be listed on Overdosed Tropes, which also lists link counts for the tropes listed there, if that would help with enforcing a cap.

I agree with the initial proposal being irrelevant if we implement a cap, since there have been a lot of cases of the OP's proposal not being the one the consensus goes with.

Fair enough. I suppose if the fix really is that simple, it wouldn't really clog up the queue.

It's been almost a week (tomorrow will be the seven-day mark), and we usually wait seven days instead of three before making decisions on Wiki Talk, so I'm considering running crowners regarding whether to limit the amount of TRS mega-projects, as well as how many wicks a page needs to count as a mega-project and how many mega-projects can have active TRS threads at a single time.

I was thinking we'd have three crowners at most (depending on how well the first one goes):

• The first for whether to implement the limit to begin with.
• The second would be for deciding the minimum amount of wicks a project needs to count as a mega-project.
• The final crowner would be for the maximum amount of mega-projects can have active TRS threads at the same time.

Any objections to doing that?

It would be nice to have hard data to inform the second crowner.

Maybe the numbers could be obtained from the wick counts for TRS threads that have been on TRS the longest, particularly ones that are from 2021 and are either still open or got deferred to cleanup threads recently. I'm too tired to go through that stuff myself, though.

Unless someone else has ideas for what the numbers can be. I think I'll hold off on starting any crowners until someone has proposed the minimum wick count that would make something count as a mega-project before deciding whether to implement a cap on mega-projects. A bulleted list might work for listing the amounts.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 10th 2023 at 3:27:56 AM

Bumping because the thread has stalled enough at this point to end up on the second page of the forum, and I'm kind of responsible for that for suggesting we needed data, and the too-long thread has talked about hiking the Overdosed Tropes threshold all the way up to 10k, so I decided to gather some data myself... aaaaand I quickly ran into a problem.

See, threads and usage checks won't necessarily mention how many references a page has until cleanup is already underway, so the most precise way to check how many references a trope started with is hope the Internet Archive has a copy of the Related page close enough to when the thread opened without being after the start of cleanup. So I instead decided to measure the size of pages based on how many pages the usage check was required to check (which still involved going into the Internet Archive at times, since some checks would check more pages without acknowledging that they didn't need to, or would split multiple references on the same page without making clear how that affected the count).

Problem is, there are quite a number of threads that only checked 50 pages, but still dragged on a long time. Three threads have closed in the three-plus months of this calendar year after being open for more than a year after entering Pending Final Action^note defining entering PFA based on the date the last crowner closed before the asterisk was actually added, and It Was His Sled only needed to check 50 pages while Unintentional Period Piece checked 51. Right now four threads are open that have spent a year in PFA, and two of them, Ship Sinking and Doing It for the Art, checked 50 pages. If we go to threads that have been in PFA for over six months we add Super OCD among closed threads and Both Sides Have a Point, Tier Induced Scrappy, and Surprisingly Good Foreign Language among open ones, while Would Hit a Girl is the only open thread that's been in PFA for 180-365 days that checked more than 50 pages, meaning the majority of open threads that have been in PFA for over six months had less than 2500 references. (If six months seems too broad of a definition for "mega-project", note that the median closing time for the last 50 or so threads to close that involved usage checks that didn't just check every page, and required cleaning said pages, was about a month.

Now I do suspect most if not all of these pages had reference counts on the high end of the range requiring checking only 50 pages, like over 2000 or so, but still, there didn't seem to be much appetite for a threshold for mega-projects as low as 2500 earlier (or at least for such a threshold to be too restrictive), so I can't imagine 2000 would go over well. If you want, I could dive into the Internet Archive to get more precise counts for the pages above, or do an analysis of pages that did check more than 50 pages but still closed relatively quickly, but I think my main conclusion is that we really need more people doing cleanup, or at least people who know what they're doing.

...Maybe I should be more active on cleanup of starred TRS threads.

Edited by MorganWick on Apr 5th 2023 at 6:01:45 AM

Wrong thread

Edited by MacronNotes on Apr 5th 2023 at 12:40:00 PM

I think part of the problem is the type of action required to close a thread. Like a thread that needs to clear out nearly every wick/example (whether because it was made Def Only or Sugar, etc.) or a thread that just moves every wick (like a trope was made Trivia or YMMV) seem to be dealt with a lot quicker than threads like Ship Sinking, where every wick needs to be examined to see whether or not it still fits the definition/requirements of the trope. Just looking at the thread, the three posts that bring up questionable examples were never answered, so I see why the thread stalled. It could get moved to LTP, but that also doesn't guarantee people will go and help with the cleanup.

It doesn't really matter how big a project is, if the final action is complicated or requires a lot of thought/examination, that seems to turn people away in favor of something less time/thought consuming, and cleanup can't really be done if people aren't sure of what they're doing. I've brought it up before, but maybe dedicating time to just cleaning up instead of opening a new thread every time one is closed might get people to look at some of the bigger and/or stalled projects.

Well, it's that and the fact that not all of those cleanup efforts have obvious criteria to follow. Uncanny Valley made sense to me, but I know it confused many people who tried to help. Meanwhile, I've been confused about The Cameo which is why I avoided it — and I'm a bit uncertain about Ship Sinking, too. So it's not just that the cleanup requires more thought, but it requires an understanding of the problem and what examples we're actually looking to keep.

...That said, "easy" efforts that close quickly tend to be more problematic in the long run since it's that much more likely that they'll get botched. Discussion about that issue here.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 5th 2023 at 6:44:27 AM

I don't think delaying on opening threads is going to make people help with stalled projects. In the end people are going to do what they know they can do/what they are willing to do. There's some cleanups that are too complicated for me to do/or don't understand the trope well so nothing is going to make want to do those. I mostly pick a cleanup I can do from the bottom of the pile and then stick with it until the thread is closed.