Advertising Tropes and low wick counts -- should we lower the threshold?

It has been noted over several separate discussions that Advertising Tropes tend to have low wick counts. This is due to several factors, with a major one being that they are hard to crosswick—many individual ads lack/cannot easily have pages on the site.

This has created an interesting conundrum, however, as it applies to TRS—per Administrivia.Wick, a trope with 0-23 examples (or 0-11 if a newer trope) is considered starving, making them instant Not Thriving candidates. And since Advertising Tropes are (as mentioned) harder to crosswick and gain examples for, more often than not many perfectly legitimate Advertising Tropes end up getting cut in the process. (A counter-argument is that such tropes tend to also be Zero-Context Example magnets.)

Per a comment from GastonRabbit, and after other previous discussion about this topic, I am starting this thread to ask the question: should we lower the threshold for what's considered a healthy trope if said trope happens to be an Advertising Trope? If so, how many wicks should a healthy Advertising Trope ideally have? If not, how else might we solve this problem?

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 12th 2023 at 11:56:34 AM

I would support a more lenient threshold.

I say that lowering is fine, and the threshold should be determined by the number of Advertising pages we have + however many work pages trope the ads for that work.

We have about 151 pages indexed on Advertising. How about a minimum of 13, which is close to the square root of that number?

That might work, but maybe we could cut it down a bit more and give it the same threshold as newer tropes (0-11), and change references to "0-11 for newer tropes" to "0-11 for newer tropes or Advertising Tropes" on Administrivia.Wick.

As I've said the previous few times the subject came up, I think we should give Advertising Tropes the same treatment as Forgotten Tropes, since the latter tend to have small wick counts as well, just for different reasons (the latter had a limited lifespan, while the former simply don't have many pages to go on despite possibly being more common than the latter), and on TRS we already treat Forgotten Tropes as exempt from the Not Thriving category. Maybe we could also amend Administrivia.Wick to mention that small wick counts aren't a big deal for Forgotten Tropes, since that's already been an unwritten policy, and I feel that having it written down wouldn't hurt.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 12th 2023 at 1:07:43 PM

I like that idea.

Usually wicks accurately reflect usage across the site because every example is supposed to add one. Since that isn't true in these situations, can't we just count the on-page examples instead?

That seems pretty solid. Maybe only require 10, the number needed to launch, but still enough to prove it's not too rare.

I feel like editing activity should be part of the criteria as well. Most ads don't have their own pages, so in place of that, when people see the trope in the wild they'll place it on the page itself, so if the page is being actively edited that shows that people are aware enough of the trope to be adding new examples. This would probably require the trope not to be a Discredited Trope or (as above) Forgotten Trope, though.

Off-site inbounds could also jump up in importance.

&That's a pretty good idea.

I never said anything about Advertising Tropes being Discredited Tropes or Forgotten Tropes. I said that with Forgotten Tropes, it's already at least the de facto policy to allow them to have low wick counts due to their nature instead of treating it as a problem (since it would be a problem with most other tropes), and I was suggesting treating the wick counts for Advertising Tropes similarly.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 14th 2023 at 6:08:10 AM

On-page is also a good idea.

I was referring to my criterion of considering a page's editing activity, the subject of the rest of the paragraph. If a trope isn't getting new examples, it's not going to be actively edited.

Ah, OK. Seems I misunderstood.

Editing activity seems like a useful reference point, too, though at least in the case of Forgotten Tropes I would still expect fewer changes than usual anyway. There aren't many tropers with enough interest in literary history to pay attention to it (and I have a lot of admiration for those who do).

Edited by Noaqiyeum on May 16th 2023 at 11:13:26 AM

The reasoning for being more lenient on advertising than forgotten tropes is different, so the execution can be different as well. Advertising tropes are, presumably, still getting new examples even if we don't have pages for them, while forgotten tropes aren't.

Yeah, the lack of pages is why I think we should be more lenient with advertising tropes, not a lack of editing activity on the trope pages, especially since on-page example sections could still accumulate Red Links for advertisements we don't have pages for.

Anyway, it's too soon to make a crowner since the minimum for Wiki Talk is seven days instead of three, but I figured I could still draft our options (all of them are mutually exclusive):

• Lower the threshold for what counts as starving (per Wick) for Advertising Tropes to the threshold currently used for newer tropes (0-11)
• Make Advertising Tropes exempt from the standard requirements for Wick health, similarly to what's already done with Forgotten Tropes
• Lower the threshold for what counts as starving (per Wick) for Advertising Tropes to the square root of the amount of Advertising pages (0-13)
• Change the threshold for what counts as starving (per Wick) for Advertising Tropes to be based on on-page examples instead of wicks, using the threshold currently used for newer tropes' wick counts (0-11)
• Change the threshold for what counts as starving (per Wick) for Advertising Tropes to be based on on-page examples instead of wicks, using the standard threshold for wick counts (0-23)
• Change the threshold for what counts as starving (per Wick) for Advertising Tropes to be based on on-page examples instead of wicks, using the square root of the amount of Advertising pages (0-13)

Did I miss anything? While editing activity and inbounds were mentioned, I'd need the specifics regarding how we'd measure trope health with them (such as the minimum amount of edits in the page history, minimum amount of inbounds, etc.) before drafting options related to them.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 17th 2023 at 5:34:09 AM

Posting this comment to make public that I voted in favor of "Lower the threshold for what counts as starving (per Wick) for Advertising Tropes to the threshold currently used for newer tropes (0-11)". I didn't upvote or downvote any of the other options.

Given how the massively leading option is setting advertising pages to a lower standard based on a nearly unchanging constant, I'm wondering how we'd determine when we should revert the standard to be like most other tropes?

Is there a reason we'd ever do that?

Would we have to check TRS Morgue to see what was cut for starvation by previous standard?

I wouldn't object to it (investigating morgued threads by choice), if starvation was the sole reason for the cut.

Should we ping Piterpitcher, the guy who modified the Wicks on this?

I wouldn't object to it either.

There probably wouldn't be any problem with doing that, at least.

I guess we could do that...