Repairing the Trope Repair Shop

I align with the idea of majorly reducing the slot count and pressing users to go help with older cleanups.

I'm not entirely against shrinking the slot count, though I'd rather try the "thread closing month" idea first... especially if there's some sort of coordinated effort to take out older threads or something. Right now, people just work on whatever they want to work on, and it makes older and more complex threads sink to the bottom.

Bonus Boss was mentioned at one point — that's one that I fear may be complicated for some people, as I myself had trouble understanding the discussion and I wouldn't be great at cleaning it up.

Meanwhile, I've been stalling on Black Sheep because while it's rather simple, it's tedious and there's less satisfaction from it since the number hardly changes and most of it is just confirming that the wicks are properly used. Most of them are. And if I lose momentum, it's harder to figure out where I left off.

Other times, you get the threads that the community flies through because they're a far easier job and people can just delete or replace wicks super quickly. And these ones tend to be the ones that get the most attention currently because they're the most ideal situation.

And now we seem to be in a place where a bulk of the threads need more complicated work done that people aren't interested in, which, combined with the lessened manpower, means we have our work cut out for us.

Well, the thread count limit existed before folks made the queue. The point was that it would encourage people to work on existing threads since otherwise they can't get their TRS plans in, and it was pretty successful at doing so. I think making the queues has negated its purpose, though.

The queue was created because once the limit was cut from 100 to 50, getting your thread in became a Darwinian race to jump in and claim a spot before anyone else, which tended to happen fast enough that it favored people that lived in the right time zone and had free time at the right time to jump in right after the mod closing threads had done a sweep. That's why it's claimed to be "unofficial" and "not mandatory" (even though at this point it effectively is mandatory and is probably more deserving of the Administrivia namespace than Tropes Needing TRS): because it started as a way to resolve disputes between users on the meta thread over how fair it was that some people were more able to claim spots than others. (Link is where the discussion leading to the creation of the queue started, not where the idea itself was proposed. By the way, I feel like it's telling that the meta thread was created eight years ago and the discussions I linked from pages 76 and 79 of a 338-page thread are from only two years ago. It seems like the queue and/or tightening of the cap drastically increased activity there.)

If having the queue reduces the perceived urgency of getting threads closed because just having the thread on record is enough to satisfy your itch... well, that probably doesn't say a lot about the character of many thread-starters and how much they actually care about the trope they want to bring in, but maybe it suggests the cap should be increased to 75 or even all the way back to 100. Even 100 wouldn't be enough to clear out the current queue right away (as it has 100 entries all on its own), and the current cap and queue system does result in some awkwardly long waits between pre-TRS discussion in Trope Talk and actually having a TRS thread.

Of course, that wouldn't help with getting threads cleared out, but it's possible we're just... running up against a hard limit on how fast threads can be cleared out given current tools and wiki culture. There's no guarantee a 10-thread limit is going to result in those threads clearing out faster as opposed to TRS itself atrophying from lack of activity and having big, complex threads hogging all the spots, and even a no-new-threads month isn't that different from what we have now; the difference isn't so much the ability to start new threads so much as the lack of promotion for the need to clear out threads, and given the damage untrained cleaners can do, it's not clear we want that.

When I created Current Trope Repair Shop Threads about a year ago, part of the thinking was to serve as a guide to current activity on TRS to help people figure out where they might be able to pitch in. Unfortunately, it wasn't maintained for very long and ended up being cut a few months later. In any case, the main place where it seems like it's actually needed is for threads in PFA, and in theory, we have Wick Cleaning Projects for that, but I don't know that page works well for that purpose, as it's formatted in a way that could be intimidating to newbies, organized according to the type of move (which may not mean much from the cleaner's perspective, especially for TRS threads), and doesn't always include instructions for how to go about things.

If the slot limit is increased, what will happen is that, sure, the queue will go faster, but because people will prioritize threads with least resistance. It will halt again once there are 100 cleanups with large wick counts.

We could somehow reward people to clear up old threads, but that may encourage sloppy cleanup.

I'd also be against moving threads to Short-Term as it would just sweep misuse under the rug and they will keep the problem that made their TRS necessary.

Image Picking has a culture "if you want to open a thread, help closing others". I believe it's a good mindset that should be promoted here.

I don't think that Sandbox.TRS Queue can be made mandatory w/o a few thoughts on its input (when do things get added) and output (which things from it go to TRS) criteria. Is it essentially "first come to TRS Queue, first served to TRS"? Also all such queue systems are likely to have a pro-insider bias.

Yes, it is "first to queue, unless someone objects, next to make a thread".

People already get told that clearing other threads is the only way to help with the backlog when the pace of TRS gets questioned. Image Pickin' works differently because clearing back there usually just means more voting. When it comes to TRS backlog, most people just don't want to/don't have the time to clean up wicks especially for more complex projects.

Edited by MacronNotes on Oct 23rd 2023 at 12:34:22 PM

Yeah, the queue isn't the problem here. People just don't want to put in the work to close threads, even though it's made clear to everyone that doing so is the only way to get new threads to open.

And I worry a larger cap would just set us back to the chaos of before, where we had a backlog of locked threads that would be opened at complete random. I mean, going to 100 would allow 50 queue threads to be made- but it would be ridiculous to open them all at once.

And, as mentioned prior, it wouldn't fix the actual issue since, even with the cap, there are threads on TRS that have been inactive for months. I don't see a good solution for this issue since TRS is a lengthy, tedious task and most users on this site are hobbyists.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Oct 23rd 2023 at 11:27:35 AM

So as someone who's lately become more active in helping with wiki maintenance and participating more with forum matters, TRS matters included, I also believe that expanding the queue is not the answer. Just from my perspective as someone who is still eager to do my part for it, I am fully content to wait my part for the current projects to be completed before others can get their turn, and increasing the number of active projects at a time doesn't seem like the problem needing addressing for quality repairs.

Rather, the most daunting thing is just the fact that cleanup itself is so long and requires a lot of work, especially for big tropes with thousands of wicks needing maintenance. That I think is just kind of an inevitability because this is a volunteer job with little active incentive other than just generally improving the quality of life of the wiki and making things more convenient for others.

My 2 cents as just a guy on what I'd like to see explored to perhaps rectify things:

• I think it could be of use that the status of a given TRS thread be listed in the title, just so people can have a status on how the conversation is going and the repairs are handled. We have those stickers to mark crowners, I think it might just be easier for folks to gage possible involvement in something if there's also like "Guttural Growler (Cleanup underway, 2k wicks to disambiguate)" or something like that, just giving a glance at the state of certain projects to make it easier to determine what to keep up with, with specific details on the status being available in the thread itself.
• Advertise trope repair efforts more! I've seen more use of the bulletin board in the last few months, I wouldn't mind seeing efforts requiring massive participation pop up where everyone can know about them and do their own part in whatever area they trope in — in fact, wasn't there an effort like that in the past and that's how we managed to collectively disambiguate Nice Hat? Was there a particular reason why we don't do that more? I think it was a good idea to get more folks involved, or at least in the know.
• I guess if you could try something simple as an incentive, a maybe a forum badge or some other small participation acknowledgement wouldn't hurt. You'd have to quantify the amount of work one would have to do in order to earn such a thing, but hey, maybe if someone reports having done like enough wicks cleaned out within the thread, they might get shouted-out on a monthly Trope Report or something.

Edited by number9robotic on Oct 23rd 2023 at 11:12:06 AM

That suggests part of the problem is a tension between the official stance behind what the wiki is "supposed" to be that TRS tries to enforce, and the image the troper base at large has of the place; if the troper base shared the "cabal's" vision of the wiki and of what a trope is supposed to be, cleanup would go a lot faster and have significantly fewer errors. As I said here:

As I hinted at here, part of the problem is the continuing divide between the "forum side" of the wiki and the troper base at large, which has a different idea of what makes a trope and what makes it tropeworthy than the wiki's official position that the TRS regulars try to enforce. This has been a problem for over a decade (as an aside, this thread is hilarious in light of how TRS has and hasn't evolved in the intervening 11+ years), but today it seems like the TRS regulars are increasingly insular, outnumbered, demoralized, and fighting an uphill battle. As suggested by that thread, the alternative to tropers ignoring the intent of TRS decisions in many cases, especially heavily-linked pages, in favor of blindly moving links to the new name, is tropers screaming about TRS as a cabal out to ruin their fun, yet mods are understandably reticent to use bulletins to summon people to TRS threads that haven't reached Pending Final Action, if only because the hoi polloi are likely to shoot down any and every change to a trope that needs it because they like it as is. I wouldn't be surprised if TRS regulars are reticent to try and enforce standards on the TLP out of fear of being similarly branded as buzzkills.

The core issue is that cleaning wicks is a tedious process. Anything that just reorganizes the work in a different way (such as changing the number of threads open at once) doesn't help get through the backlog. I'd be in favor of a thread closing month, as long as something is done to prevent them from piling up again. I also like the idea of cleaning out Pages Needing Wicks since those will almost certainly be less work to repair, and since it mainly consists of older tropes it'll be a semi permanent fix.

This is a longshot but the ideal solution would be a wick cleanup tool that reduces the number of clicks / page loads needed (such as a page where wicks automatically open up in an editor and you can leave canned edit reasons. There can even be a section on the side containing the new definition or disambig targets). Obviously this would be a fair amount of programming work, and would be way easier if 2.0 was a thing. However it's pretty much impossible to make cleaning wicks take less time to do without simplifying the workflow in some way.

I'm saying this as someone that isn't very active in TRS because I don't have the time to clean wicks manually. If it was made simpler I'd at least be able to have more of an impact with my limited time.

This is only a random thought that I had while bathing and haven't thought about too deeply, but why not try attacking the lack of understanding directly?

I was thinking something like a bulletined trs q&a thread where people can ask questions about how and why he's does things. For example, explaining why we get rid of tropes that lack meaning and how we determine that (I still remember the argument over whether Does Not Like Shoes was chairs or not).

This could help tie TRS into the larger community and help uninvolved tropers who want to get involved in trs understand how things work and why we do things a certain way.

Part of the problem here is how easy it is to launch new tropes at TLP. The observation that it’s easy to steamroller past complaints and release them anyway is spot on. And I agree that there have been trope proposals that seem Ridiculously Similar that deserve to be nixed on sight.

It should take much longer than three days to allow for a trope launch. It’s far too easy to throw hats at a trope that’s substandard. New people should have a lengthy waiting period before they’re even allowed to propose tropes. Tropers whose English is suspect should be suspended from trope proposal and made to demonstrate improvement via the Get Help With English thread. It may be difficult to implement and enforce these issues, but if it can be done, that would help.

More scrict TLP (if it's not already) can help the state of new tropes, but whatever that angle concludes won't affect any of current tropes that are pending cleaning.

The simple issue is that if nobody is willing to clean when the wicks are >1000 then TRS loses its point for being. So the approach perhaps would be to make cleaning easier, like listing all wicks in public Google Sheets and tropers checkmark which wicks are fine and which are removed. For example the main reason why I gave up on Uncanny Valley cleaup is that sandbox only listed finished namespaces, but no sense of progress on the rest.

RE: #37

90% of the time, if a thread has the Pending Final Action asterisk it's awaiting cleanup. We effectively already have what you're asking for.

I and many others understand the significance of what that sign means, but I think some more descriptive indicator of an individual project's status would be just a quality-of-life improvement to allow folks to gage the level of work needed for a specific trope. Otherwise at this point, I'm pretty sure people are more easily turned off from working on wick cleanups because they don't go in aware of the scope of what's needed until they specifically go in the thread and then check the respective trope's related list and go "Oh Christ, it's over 9000 wicks? Erm, I'm gonna leave that to someone else" and then no one else takes it up. I think the public specificity may be of much more help than simply an asterisk with alt-text of "needs work".

The mods only use bulletins to advertise trope repair efforts if it's to eradicate chairs-y tropes, not move them to new ones, as history showed that resulted in a lot of bad cleanup that just moved misuse to a new name or other such things. Anything that requires nuance, it's been decided, can't be left to untrained tropers.

I also understand the concern regarding disambiguation jobs for more complex cases, but then what about simpler efforts for the likes of tropes that are renamed (such as Quirky Work), rendered definition-only with no examples (as in Will They or Won't They?), or page transplants (such as Obvious Beta from a main page to YMMV page trope)? Those first two are only marginally more complex than the job of just deleting entries/potholes of defunct tropes, I think for jobs where there is only one real potential instruction (as in, doesn't require analytical judgement for editing jobs), this is something that can be trusted to much more amateur tropers.

That suggests part of the problem is a tension between the official stance behind what the wiki is "supposed" to be that TRS tries to enforce, and the image the troper base at large has of the place; if the troper base shared the "cabal's" vision of the wiki and of what a trope is supposed to be, cleanup would go a lot faster and have significantly fewer errors.

Speaking as someone who only now has jumped aboard doing more forum work after like, a decade of being on this wiki, I was never really aware of the amount of discussion and occasional politicking that goes behind the scenes of how we maintain stuff on the wiki even after we started putting up "This trope is under discussion" banners, because to be honest, that's kind of the only major public thing of note that non-forum tropers can become privy to. I dunno if I like this inherently confrontational approach mixed with an intent to further exclude "untrained tropers" from the know-how of how to rectify both trope repairs as well as the whole TRS process itself.

If we don't want to treat this whole TRS stuff as this gated "cabal" of anti-fun penpushers, we gotta be more educating them about the ways we're going about things, vocal and transparent about the efforts and discussions we're requiring to maintain wiki health, and encouraging for people to become part of the corrective process. If we're not trying to be seen as "buzzkills", it's absolutely the wrong thing to continuously frame them as an enemy that we can't ever approach on the basis that "they're not good enough to write properly", because that itself actively discourages people to participate in doing anything above their usual editing rhythms, and thus, improve. Troping is strictly a volunteer job no matter what anyway, I don't think the mindset of actively excluding people from discussion is the right thing to do.

We can keep hemming and hawing in circles in this thread about worrying about the course of action on what the problem is, but I see it very much here, and trying to reject this in its tracks as irrelevant to the discussion kind of inherently feeds into this wiki cultural divide you're talking about. If we want the TRS to be better improved with more people ready to volunteer for big-ass jobs, we need to get more folks on board with the program, as well as let them know there is a program that they can contribute to way before the anti-fun-police takes away their favorite tropes from a discussion they didn't know was happening and had no educated insight to approach similar discussions with. 50 more threads at a time won't fix that.

Edited by number9robotic on Oct 24th 2023 at 5:41:58 AM

There's no active exclusion; we even put notices on the trope pages themselves now just to attract more people to the TRS threads. We want more people to show up. The issue is that the ones who do either tend to make a mess or show up just to yell at us for getting rid of a trope they like... So it's less that we want to keep "the rabble" out of TRS, and more that any efforts to get more attention either go unnoticed or can easily backfire. The people who don't tend to frequent TRS tend to either not entirely understand the required effort that a cleanup can take, or they hate the TRS and everything we stand for... or they do understand the TRS perfectly and don't have any interest in participating, and that's OK too.

So I'll reiterate: We want more people in TRS. Ideally, anyone who uses the project forums should go there at least once or twice to help out (if the entire CM thread worked on it, cleanups would be done in a week tops) but we can't control what sort of people actually show up and past history has demonstrated that certain types of tropers just aren't suited for TRS, not because they're not good enough but because they aren't taking the time to develop their skills in that area or hear us out.

I understand the risk of that, but simply put, if the act of inviting more people to get involved with improving TRS efforts is the only real effective solution to the keystone problem of "not enough people are involved," that is going to eventually be a risk we will have to take. I don't think this is an insurmountable problem, though — we can definitely talk about means with which to mitigate potential chaos of prospective bad-faith tropers while opening the gateway to folks who are more interested in contributing to the wiki health, but just don't know necessarily how to start.

Just thinking top of my head, perhaps a soft screening process of could be of use for those planning on doing really big edit efforts. Not something that would require massive maintenance in its own regard by either mods or the users themselves, but maybe for if we want tropers participating in mass wick cleanups (taking out 50-100+ wicks at a time for a given project), we'd like to encourage them to check in the respective thread to make note of their intent to cover "such and such" namespaces or what have you? Just a random idea to start off discussion on that front.

I also do believe that making the status of certain repair projects more publicly available could be itself a good incentive to drive some attention towards ongoing efforts, if only because that makes it less likely to be buried in some niche page some folks wouldn't otherwise look to. In general, I'm still strongly in favor of means to educate more of the TRS and how to go about it — it'll obviously be more of a long term effort, but I do think it's in many ways necessary if we want to encourage more critical and thoughtful participation within the wiki.

Edited by number9robotic on Oct 24th 2023 at 7:25:28 AM

Part of the problem is that the definition of a trope we're working with today, and the resulting implications for People Sit on Chairs, The Same, but More Specific, and/or the Trivia and YMMV ghettoes, was imposed more or less by fiat - for good reasons to be sure, but at least from my perspective, with minimal discussion behind them. I'm not sure it's ever been fully internalized by the troper base, and even someone who might agree with the goals behind them in the abstract might find themselves questioning them in specific cases. So I think there's a perception that if we did do more to advertise certain TRS threads and got people who engaged in the discussion, we'd get people who would try to argue basic points about what qualifies as a trope that aren't up for negotiation, or that would return us to the bad old Wild West days of the wiki if they were.

I mean, how exactly do we "open the gates" more than we already have? We already advertise threads on trope pages, ATT, and Trope Report. The occasional bulletin helps, but again we need to use those in specific circumstances even if only because many are too complex to describe and may turn people off or lead to mass confusion. I sincerely don't know what more we can do to attract people to TRS threads. It's easy to assume that there's a whole eager and willing faction of tropers who jusg haven't ventured over to TRS yet... but if they do exist, they're currently ignoring every attempt we make at reaching them.

We have been having the same conversation for a few years now and I don't think there's a resolution. TRS participation has dwindled down over the years due to culture changes, lack of interest among other things. There will always be a small subset of people that are specifically interested in cleaning up wicks and I don't see that group expanding. In any case, you either like doing TRS work as a hobby or don't. I don't there's anyway we can encourage people who aren't interested to do anything. As stated above, we already do everything in our power to TRS decisions. If most people don't wan't to get involved in TRS because they aren't interested, there's not much that can be done about it.

The thing about TRS is that the conversations don't start when the thread opens. They start in trope talk and can go on for a while given how slow the TRS Queue is. A lot of times consensus for what should be done is built there. Perhaps when a trope is added to the TRS Queue, we could put a banner in the trope's header that links to the thread where it was decided that the trope needed fixing?

They don't always start in Trope Talk. Often I'll just do a check on a whim and bring it to TRS. The process isn't the same every time.

We already put a banner in the header when a trope is sent to TRS, and usually, the TRS OP will link to any relevant Trope Talk threads (though admittedly, sometimes it can take a while for someone to do so if they don't). If we want to put a banner up whenever there's a Trope Talk thread concerning a trope that could lead to TRS that's another matter, but that could open a big can of worms.

Edited by MorganWick on Oct 26th 2023 at 1:56:23 AM