Repairing the Trope Repair Shop

TRS can be confusing at first, I'll admit. Each starred thread does have a pinned comment saying what the plan is, and every non-starred thread is just in a voting or discussion phase. If you aren't ready to jump into TRS cleanup, maybe you can just lurk and watch how threads progress for a while. And you're always welcome to ask questions.

I suppose we do lack a step-by-step tutorial of how repairing works like the TLP Guidelines, which could be added to Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop.

Edited by Amonimus on Nov 9th 2023 at 10:12:29 PM

That's probably because every repair case is different, while every TLP is meant to be made and launched under the same guidelines with the same necessary features. It's just kinda hard to break down "how TRS cleanup works" because they can vary by a lot.

Then branching in the guidelines.

For example, I believe it was asked (as in, venting) early this year what is the proper procedure to argue that two tropes overlap.

The issue there was that there is no "proper procedure", hence why everyone gave a different answer. There's a variety of ways that such a thing can be proven or tested, and nobody's way is inherently more correct than someone else's.

But if you have a combination problem of insularity (and that's certainly a vibe I'm getting from reading this thread) and a barrier to entry (which I, at least, feel exists), having something that goes "this isn't the be-all end-all of things but here's an idea of how things work" might be useful (especially if the insularity is making it harder for people to just go "Uh, excuse me... How does this work exactly?").

Edited by desdendelle on Nov 9th 2023 at 9:56:47 PM

To be fair, we are doing everything we can to combat the insularity issue by plugging threads everywhere and pinning the information on the top of each thread so that latecomers know what's going on. We can try to make a general "here's how the process goes" section, I just genuinely don't know how to format it without making it overly complicated and branching, or without making it sound like the simplified version is the way things always have to happen.

The TRS is the kind of place where it's best to learn by getting involved, instead of studying guidelines, simply because we can't possibly explain everything and there's always going to be some questions that are answered through practice.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 9th 2023 at 3:00:06 PM

Bumping this thread cuz it got lost in the void.

I still think 50 threads is too many BTW.

I'm still not really convinced that it'll do much more than create a bigger issue in the future... But as I do think the conversation should continue, I'm posting to just restate my thought and see what others have to say.

I think a fast-track TRS would be a good alternative for starving tropes or ones with wick counts, say, fewer than 100.

I don't have much experience with the TRS but recalling when I was a newbie, I think there are some kinda unofficial rules that we ought to write down. One thing that comes to mind is that the 'projects: short term' forum is supposed to manage clean-up efforts once a course of action has been decided.

We could also expand the guidelines for wick checks. Categorize them for each of the common 'needs TRS' reasons.

For example, if you suspect a trope overlaps with another, then you do a wick check on both and see whether the wicks show similar patterns. Stuff like that is obviously gonna be oversimplified but most learning happens when you first have a simplified or general idea of what to do. Then comes the experience.

Edit: , , and I understand. Well, I'm out of suggestions then.

Edited by Asterlix on Apr 8th 2024 at 9:15:57 AM

IIRC ~GastonRabbit has already shot down the "designated thread for not starving tropes".

I'd rather avoid using Projects: Short Term "once a course of action has been decided", practice shows that once a trope leaves TRS, even less people bother to do any cleanup. TRS is usually moved to Short Term for cleanups that are straightforward and don't require attention, like cuts or definition expansions, though I'm skeptical about that as well.

I remember someone made a suggestion last year to expand Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop page to elaborate the thread reasons and also what should be looked into for each type of problem, but the idea didn't get drafted.

I think other mods are also against deferring wick-starved tropes to a dedicated thread, but either way, I already helped speed up Not Thriving threads by coming up with (and later popularizing) the idea of making the Three-Day Rule less important for threads for wick-starved tropes.

Nowadays, a Not Thriving thread can have a decision finalized in a matter of hours if there's enough consensus in favor of a course of action in a short enough amount of time, and the reason I thought of that idea to begin with is because wick cleanup can often be done in a matter of seconds (an observation of mine from doing wick cleanup for such threads), as opposed to the three days such threads were often open before I decided to speed that up.

Edit: I should probably mention that I'm not following this thread (I'm not sure if I've even read it). I'm just responding to the ping in the above post.

Another edit: Not sure if anyone mentioned that we previously used dedicated threads for handling TRS-level tasks for Personal Appearance Tropes and Badass Tropes (as I said, I haven't really paid attention to this thread), but we closed those in favor of TRS because using TRS itself proved to be more efficient than using dedicated threads (though the appearance trope thread was later retooled into a regular Long-Term Projects cleanup thread while having TRS do everything else it previously did, even if it didn't really gain much activity after that happened).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 8th 2024 at 2:20:53 PM

Aye. As always, the problem boils down to "people just hate doing the cleanup part". Moving it elsewhere doesn't fix the problem, it just pushes it somewhere else.

I've been wondering if at some point we need to think of technical changes that might make wick cleanup easier, and beg the admins to implement them. That spotting a problematic trope is easier than fixing it is a fact that I don't think can be changed.

For example?

I can consider if a tool page would automatically sort pages by the wick count and show 50 most starving and when they were made.

Automatic crosswicking may also help, but that would require redesigning the whole site.

Edited by Amonimus on Apr 9th 2024 at 12:56:26 PM

I proposed something similar to your first idea in the Tech Wishlist.

Oftentimes, fixing starving tropes starts by crosswicking them. Not all of them are problematic enough to require cutting or renaming, so that'd be a good start, I think.

Maybe we can use that automated wick cleaner idea, but just comment out wicks with a clear edit reason? Something like, "this trope has been cut/renamed/disambiguated/whatever and now means __. This example might fit under x, y, or z trope, you may add it back if it is appropriate." Yes, I realize that puts extra work onto the rest of the troperbase, but I think that might be a good thing.

One thing I've noticed with cleanup is that editors seem to think "oh this example got deleted because of TRS, that means I can't do anything with it any more." When you absolutely are allowed to add it back, under a correct trope.

The issue is that hidden wicks don't go away from the related page. It wouldn't change anything aside from the wicks being invisible, which makes cleanup much harder since someone reading a page wouldn't even realize anything was amiss. We use greenlinks for a reason

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 10th 2024 at 9:15:43 AM

Then it can auto-delete them with a good edit reason. Obviously it won't work with every type of cleanup, but I still think finding a way to automate wick cleaning to at least some extent is necessary. As multiple people have noted, it's the big bottleneck.

My concern with automatic wick deletion is and has always been the fact that it'll just create brand new messes. There's a reason we don't plug every cleanup on bulletins even though it gains traction for them; mass deletion sprees are frowned upon unless the trope and the examples are being completely purged. Anything that requires nuance cannot function with a mass deletion tool, and that's sadly most of the large cleanups.

Granted, I get the appeal. I've been slacking on my own cleanup effort for months since I just never have the motivation anymore. But I genuinely worry that any sort of automation will just create more issues down the road, especially since we've taken to doing disambigs and redirects now over straight cuts.

That's why I was saying that the goal is to force the troperbase to engage. The edit reasons are a big part of the idea, to try to communicate the message "please help us clean this up" instead of giving the impression "we're informing you that the issue has been solved, you're not allowed to complain about it now."

Admittedly, that part could be helped just by every thread coming up with a standardized edit reason before cleanup starts, but that doesn't solve the workload problem.

It may help if we were able to save custom edit reasons, as has been requested before, but until then any specific edit reasons like that would be hard to implement since the browser auto-fill no longer works. Truth be told though I have no idea what else we could do to get help though, since we plug the efforts all over the place these days and the work still won't get done (heck, even just getting new users on the TRS in the first place is like pulling teeth).'

Speaking personally, I struggle more with cleanups where it's mostly just checking for occasional misuse. Retools and expansions are the devil since most wicks keep, which means that it's just a lot of tedious work and you don't even get the motivation of watching big number drop. Large disambig cleanups are annoying, but at least they come with an inherent way to check progress, and they're easier to get help with. Things like the one I'm doing now are just a slog, so there's almost no real incentive to do it beyond freeing a slot.

Are the admins aware that bringing back the browser auto-fill for edit reasons would be helpful? It's a small thing, but it's still something.

Catching up on this thread, one thought I had is that if Trope Talk has become the place where discussion and consensus is reached before TRS, then what that leaves for TRS is just making that consensus official, followed by all the labour no one wants to do. Instead of TRS decisions stagnating in STP, TT decisions are stagnating in TRS, and it's possible that the thread cap just moved things around.

There's definitely a sense that the use of Trope Talk for pre-TRS discussion, plus the creation and use of the Queue, has effectively circumvented the intent of the cap and reduced the motivation to finish threads the cap is supposed to create. On the other hand, that could also be a sign that there's so much more demand for TRS threads than the cap can supply that it's clinging on to whatever other avenues it can. On the other other hand, that may just be a sign that the willingness to finish threads before starting a new TRS thread has waned from when the cap was first imposed...