Repairing the Trope Repair Shop

To be fair, the TRS queue was born out of necessity. Until it was made, there was a legitimate struggle for slots. Like, people got genuinely mad about it, because the only people who could get slots were the people in the right timezone. For most of us, that was the middle of the night. So some people were able to open slots at complete random, and others had to wait months. The queue was made as an equalizer to make it fair on everyone.

That said, I sincerely don't think it has had a bad impact on anything. I think the real problem is twofold:

• The presence of more complicated efforts, combined with the fact that they're the ones that stick around the longest.
• The impact of what happened a few months ago, which made a lot of active users disappear.

The queue just ensures that nobody has to fight to the death just to make a TRS thread; it's not responsible for anything else. I'm not even sure how it would be.

Not the queue, the cap. The thread cap creates a situation where if you can't make a new thread, you have the choice of putting work into a clean-up thread you don't care about except to get it out of the way (hard), or you can go to another subforum to start the conversation you want to have anyway and wait for a space to become available (easy).

The queue doesn't make the bottleneck worse; it just makes the first step flow more efficiently into the second without actually supporting the function that the bottleneck is supposed to serve. It guarantees that your concern will reach TRS eventually as long as the current TRS threads are eventually cleared, but that doesn't necessarily provide enough motivation to help clear them out yourself.

At least, that's my hypothesis. If that's the case, one thing that would help would be to give people waiting the queue a stronger incentive to contribute; e.g. for some number of wicks you help clean for an open thread, then after that thread closes you can bump the issue of your choice ahead in the queue, something like that. (This might not help the lazy clean-up problem, though.)

I was responding to

"There's definitely a sense that the use of Trope Talk for pre-TRS discussion, plus the creation and use of the Queue"

From Morgan on the last page.

The cap was also born of necessity because it, too, solved a crisis we had at the time. Many threads sat locked for several months, and mods would open them within no clear pattern. So while there was no fighting for space, it also lead to people debating over what "deserved" to be open first, and a lot of frustration as some got opened right away and others were ignored forever.

The cap created our one and only incentive people have to do work. It also stopped the recurring issue of unpredictable openings and community frustration over it. Without it, there's zero reason to do anything aside from the personal desire to help the wiki. Back then, some threads stayed around for literal years. Because why bother with cleanup if you could just wait for something to eventually open?

As for Trope Talk, it just streamlined the process. Instead of debating for ages to determine if a problem even exists, as TRS used to work, now we go in with clear knowledge of an issue. And not everyone uses it; I don't always. It's not splitting the work; it's keeping TRS efficient, at least when it comes to actually deciding on a solution. It's no surprise that the ones that go in circles are the ones that lacked sufficient discussion beforehand.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 12th 2024 at 12:00:55 PM

I'm one of those newbies on TRS cleanup. So far, I've worked in Bleached Underpants, Homoerotic Dream and currently I'm with Canada Eh. I'm not confident enough for helping TRS that are checking misuse instead of renaming/disambiguating... As others have said, you don't get the feeling of progress of the numbers going down.

I'm more motivated because I submitted A Threesome Is Hot, which has issues of being ridicoulously similar to Three-Way Sex, to the Queue. From the looks of it, the thread is gonna take more than 8 months to open...

Sometimes, when I'm working on a page for unrelated reasons, I check for Green Links and clean them, even if they are not my priority. We should convince others to read all of the threads so they can incidentally find the tropes that need to be fixed while working on other stuff.

To be honest, I am not sure what's "streamlining" about going to Trope Talk first. That seems to me more like "complicating", nevermind creating an in-out problem since TRS doesn't have the bandwidth to absorb every issue send to it from TT.

Well, for one thing, far less threads get stuck in the endless debating phase. Do you want to go back to the situation we had with threads like Hot Gypsy Woman or Moral Event Horizon?

I don't see a problem with using Trope Talk as a "pre-TRS" discussion, as long as it halts when the problem is identified and agreed on.

Edited by Amonimus on Apr 12th 2024 at 9:59:54 PM

One idea I've been toying with since this thread got revived is some sort of tool that would list all of a page's references and allow users to verify that it fits the post-TRS definition of the page, meaning that the number of unverified references could be used to track progress. But that would likely be a low priority for Kory, especially since something like that could, theoretically, be done manually on a sandbox page (albeit with a lot more room for error from, eg, people cleaning links without visiting the thread or sandbox first, or miscounting).

Another idea could be automatically flagging links to pages with PFA TRS threads in a similar manner to how links to Trivia and YMMV pages on main work and work example pages get flagged. But that would probably have to work with the above idea in cases where a trope name is preserved for an actual trope, while being largely redundant with green links in cases where it wouldn't. As it would be substantially more complicated to implement than the Trivia and YMMV icons, especially if it relied on something like the above idea, it would probably also be a low priority for Kory.

As discussed here, Kory's priority is on changes that will increase content creation and revenue. War Jay argues in that thread that changes that will have the effect of improving the quality of the wiki are worthy as well even if they may not show up in traffic and revenue metrics, but because of the disconnect between forumgoers/the wiki's official line and the general troper base about the purpose of the wiki and what a trope should be, it's not clear that the powers that be would even share the same definition of "quality", let alone that improving it is a worthy use of Kory's time. As such, any new suggestions for backend changes that would help TRS would probably need to either be relatively simple to implement, or have a clear link to increasing content creation and revenue as well. (I've toyed with floating a proposal for formalizing the queue that would mostly make use of things that already exist or at least could be extrapolated from same, and it still feels low-priority enough in light of the above-linked thread not to bother, if only because the current "informal" queue works well enough that changes to it aren't a high priority even from a "quality of the wiki" perspective.)