Repairing the Trope Repair Shop

Me, I wonder if the habit of moving things that were part of TRS (trope discussions to Trope Talk, many cleanup projects to Short Term conversations) has dispersed attention between too many fora and impedes people going from one interest to another.

Yes, right now the decision-making process has been rather dispersed among the fora here. There isn't any rhyme or reason as to whether a categorical clean-up proposal will be discussed in Wiki Talk, Projects: Short-Term or Projects: Long-Term/Perpetual; it just seems to be wherever the OP starts the thread.

Not really? There are clear distinctions. People don't discuss changes to tropes in any of those forums, for one — trope change discussions are shut down all the time in the project forums, and Wiki Talk is for, well... the wiki itself.

Maybe you meant Trope Talk instead of Wiki Talk, but that's still a whole different ballgame. People don't go there to start cleanups or make changes — we go there just to have the longer discussions without the pressure of needing to come up with a solution.

I think it's entirely valid for TRS's role to have become solely for, well, the actual trope repair jobs. So many threads in the past clocked out and went nowhere because they centered more around debate instead of solid evidence and a pre-formulated plan of action. Then you had shitshows like the Hot Gypsy Woman thread, which kept spinning its wheels and had some of the worst crowner issues I've ever seen all just because the issue was taken immediately to TRS and wasn't discussed anywhere else first. I'd rather have the project forums all play a role in cleaning up the wiki than to have TRS handle everything under the sun and suffer from less efficient progress in the meantime.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 5th 2023 at 9:15:31 AM

Whether the jobs are distinct has nothing to do with my comment, which is premised on the notion that people often don't stick to whichever interest they began with and thus e.g a person interested in fixing one trope may develop one for fixing others.

I was responding to Prfnoff mostly, given that they expressed that it's confusing because you never know where the discussion will go. My point was that the only place such discussions should actually be is Trope Talk.

I'm also confused; are you saying that splitting the tasks means people won't be as able to work on other tasks? Most TRS regulars do tackle multiple cleanup threads as their interest grows. People not branching out is more of a projects thread issue than a TRS one.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 6th 2023 at 4:16:21 AM

There are people like me who began with one aspect of TRS work and over time branched out into others. Fragmenting trope repair between 3 or so fora can hinder this progression, nevermind that it allows people to ignore one half of trope repair in favour of the other.

But lumping them all together... it only makes things messy and more likely to end up with unproductive arguing and an even larger backlog.

Splitting them instead makes them only uncoordinated and siloed, as we are seeing.

What's uncoordinated about it? If anything, it's more coordinated. People go into the TRS with a strategy or two after having a discussion on trope talk with people who will more than likely join the TRS thread after it opens to share some points they had.

I'm really not seeing the issue with this. And people not checking out other avenues of trope repair doesn't seem to be happening in practice — there's a lot of recurring faces all over the left side forums and there doesn't seem to be any issue with people expanding their interest. I see it all the time.

This makes sense to me.

1. General question threads
2. Trope Talk if anyone feels escalating.
3. If people agree there's an issue, Wick Check and the Queue, otherwise Description Improvement thread or Short-Term if even necessary.
4. Trope Repair Shop when there's an investigation of the problem and idea what to do. If it doesn't die, then cleanup is also handled there.

Also I'm not sure what splitting is mentioned, the actual repairing is done only in TRS. Rather, it's already multitasking both the discussion and the cleanup, and the latter is when most people sign off.

Edited by Amonimus on Nov 7th 2023 at 8:04:42 PM

It is not coordinated if the work on the same trope has to run through multiple threads and fora. It looks more orderly, I'll grant you, but there is a difference between a structure pretty for insiders and an intuitive system.

Then what would your solution be, that a) is doable without a huge coding overhaul to the fora (if not the wiki itself) and b) addresses War Jay's point that putting debate over what course of action, if any, should be pursued back into TRS will just clog the available spots further and result in too much pressure to come to a decision?

(I should note that there are still times when debate over a course of action will take place on TRS, and requiring usage checks for most non-Not Thriving threads does a lot to make those discussions go smoother. But Trope Talk can still be useful to determine what the trope is supposed to be, since the OP and even the checker don't always get it right, and what the parameters of a usage check should be.)

Edited by MorganWick on Nov 8th 2023 at 4:06:19 AM

In an ideal world, there would be a "ticket-like" query forum (like TRS merged with Trope Talk, but only max 50 threads would be allowed to be starred) where anyone can raise a problem with an article, and a mod would toggle statuses from "question, research, debate, repairing" depending on how the talk is going, but I don't think admins would see a huge benefit from it.

The current system is a little janky but it keeps threads out of TRS (and the slot limit) until they actually need to be there, while still allowing for discussion and forming a plan for when it gets to TRS. If anything I'd make the Trope Talk -> TRS transition an official policy, with possible exceptions for when there's actually no pre discussion needed.

How does a TRS OP template sandbox sounds for an idea?

I like that idea. I don't see it having massive effects on TRS, but at the very least it would speed up discussion if people need to reference the wick check or something like that.

IDK if we need a template; every trope is different and I don't see minor formatting changes and the like as something to police. It just doesn't seem that useful; a template won't help people figure out how to properly write an OP content-wise.

"just clog"? Increase the input of threads, certainly, but also the amount of people partaking. Some of which could be persuaded to do active work.

Then again, given the size of the TRS queue(s), it's probably worth asking whether moving the discussion phase out of TRS encourages people to file numerous repair requests that can't then be actioned.

People would be "filing repair requests" regardless of the discussion phase stuff or not. Because there's a thread limit. All the discussion phase does is allow us to talk and debate the trope in a less complicated area and come to a plan beforehand, instead of diving in on a thesis and trying to hash out a plan after waiting for months for an open slot, where it may turn out the issue doesn't even exist.

Anyway, I'm still not convinced that our current set up decreases the amount of people branching out to TRS. I haven't seen anything like that happen; there's no proof it's actually taking place.

I have my doubts. Going through the morgue for spring, it seems like there isn't that much churn in terms of who actually gets the work done. I certainly remember more of it in 2012. It's hard to tell for the other timespan I sampled, 2017, given the time.

Y'know what. I'll see if I can get a script to derive "newby contributions to TRS" over the years.

I mean, I barely see newbies at all on the left side forums; it's not really a TRS-specific issue. Many people just aren't interested in cleanup, and we're at a point where no matter how much we advertise, people just aren't showing up. I wouldn't blame the current TRS system for any of it; it feels like times are just changing and cleanup in general is becoming less and less popular with new tropers (who are more likely to go to the CM thread if anything).

Found out that obtaining the requisite values isn't possible without parsing every single thread and every single troper partaking in it individually, so I decided not to bother.

Instead, I did try to look at how many starred threads are closed every month for the past 12 years, and while I can't make Python display a plot with readable labels the plot with barely readable labels says this (July 2011 on the left, November 2023 on the right):

That... kinda suggests to me that we've been making more progress recently than we have in quite some time, which in turn suggests the current system is working? (The big drop-off the last few months is probably related to the Unfortunate Business that happened in September)

Edited by MorganWick on Nov 9th 2023 at 3:27:22 AM

Taking "from early 2019" as "recently", I'd say so. Providing that discounting non-starred threads doesn't create an issue, of course.

The even less readable graph for "thread closures by month" is:

I don't know how much my experience generalises, but — as someone who would like to help with wick cleaning and whatnot — my biggest barrier to entry is that I have no clue what's going on or how things work or where to even look. TRS (unlike TLP) is (for me at least) kinda opaque.