Fan-Fiction and Trope Pages

I agree with Eddie. I don't have a problem with Troper Works, but...wow. This might actually be the first ever justified invokation of Tropers' Law. We are not Wikipedia, and it's Wikipedia that has as close to an outright ban without actually declaring it upon making pages for your own work.

Wikipedia makes the - entirely justified, given past history there - assumption that any page created by the author will violate their neutrality policies right left and centre. We do not, as in most cases (Easy Breather being of course an exception) people don't tend to excessively gush about their own works to the same blaze degree. If pages do that, they can be reported through all the usual channels, or just edited yourself then reported if an edit war breaks out.

Wiki magic works on frequently visited pages. One's not on any editor's watchlist can potentially spend a long time rotting before anyone notices. Of course, by the same token, not many people will see the problem pages, but if that's the best that can be said, it's not much.

How many people's watchlists is the modal Troper Works page on, not counting their writers? If it's even as much as five, I'm working from completely wrong assumptions, but my estimate would be zero.

Since Troepr Works isn''t being officially dissolved I expect that in the long run the pages there will migrate out (the fewer that remain in that namesapce, the greater the perceived stigma, and the incentive to move out) leaving only unpublished works, and those by lapsed tropers - not an obvious thing to have a namespace for, but harmless enough.

As for comparisons with Wikipedia, they prohibit conversation in the main page too. Shall we permit that, simply because we are not them? Hardly. That would be absurd. This only thing that should matter when deciding this site's policies is the good of the site. Whether or not it happens to be the same Wikipedia does is completely irrelevant, either way.

On this topic though, we can only wait and see how things turn out, for good or ill. Time may well prove us all wrong.

It's not the least bit tacky.

Whoever makes a page for one of their own works has a personal, maybe even a financial interest in their work becoming well-known. In other words, the page could turn into a thinly-disguised advertisement.

edited 15th Aug '10 5:28:23 PM by BLOODPOUCH

Part of our bias toward fans and fan-sourced stuff is the idea that we don't need paid editors to tell us what to consume for fun or edification. We can figure that part for ourselves, thanks.

One place where that doesn't work as well as it could is around raising awareness of a work to the point where we want to go look at it, to make up our minds. Paid editors work for paid publishers who pay paid advertisers to do that awareness-raising. A whole lot of paying going on.

Outside the publisher-mediated world, how do you promote awareness of a work? Even independent reviewers have to hear of it from somewhere. Nobody is going to promote your work unless you at least kick off the process yourself.

You need an outlet like us, a place with a large readership who have an interest in the kind of work you are doing.

It is a valuable service to provide to the struggling new creator, I think. As long as the entries maintain a basic discipline — Don't sound like advertisements, do communicate by using the trope lists. — I'd say they are very welcome.

While I'm aware my word doesn't carry anywhere near as much weight as that of an admin here, I do agree that as long as a page doesn't get turned into a ruthlessly enforced love-in for the author, an author who's a troper posting a works page of their stuff is fine as long as it's obviously done as a works page, not just "look at my crap!".

edited 15th Aug '10 5:55:47 PM by Nohbody

True, although there seems to be a limit to how much one can get away with Entry Pimping one's own work. Remember Instrument Of God?

The problem with that was that it went beyond "entry-pimping where appropriate" and far into "shoehorning in a mention anywhere the word 'trope' is used."

For the record, IoG was before I started here, I believe.

I for one would love it if Stephen King or Joss Wedon would drop by now and then to do some editing on their articles, as long as they followed our generally accepted guidelines. On the same note, I have no problem with lesser known creators doing the same thing.

Sometimes the one who intentionally included a trope in their work can be the best source of how a trope was used.

"as long as they followed our generally accepted guidelines" being the key point in both cases.

edited 16th Aug '10 9:19:45 AM by Meeble

The above post raises the key point here when it comes to saying if troper-created works should be relegated to Troper Works only.

What if someone like Stephen King became a troper? What about Spielberg? Or what if one of us managed to become equally famous? Surely those works wouldn't need to be in troper tales? It ends up a case where you have to set arbitrary guidelines as to what is or isn't "worthy" of being in its own namespace rather than troper tales. I reckon you'd find it extremely impossible to convince people here that web originals, web comics or fanfiction are lesser media than any other kind...

I thought that the vague distinction was that Troper Works was for when the author him/herself made the page. We could move stuff to Main/ if it becomes famous enough, by whatever measure.

Off the top of my head, works by tropers that are in Main/: Antihero For Hire, Sailor Nothing, and Young Wizards (possibly).

None of those pages were made by the author, and I think that they usually joined later.

Honestly, I'd say that knowing that the author is the one that's writing the page is useful information. They tend to have a different view on the work than a reader. Also it makes my life, as someone that watches the untyped pages, rather easier.

^^ Yes, but what if Stephen King was an active troper and made the page? Would that still go in Troper Works? If not then you have to draw the line and defend where you're drawing it. Is only a certain level of fame acceptable for putting the work in literature, film, web original, etc?

Somebody else would probably make the page.

But we specifically do not have that as a requirement!

On what basis are you determining what should be in the main, normal namespaces (literature, film, fanfiction, etc) and what should be in Troper Works? By which I mean, why does something created by the author have to be in Troper Works? If it violates the guidelines or needs repair, we have plenty of channels for doing so, and they apply to pages that weren't created by the author as well.

Okay, so the author might be a bit more likely to breach the guidelines, but that really doesn't persuade me that the "shove it all in TW" idea is necessary or helpful.

The sort od person that would make and maintain a page on their own work isn't likely to play well with others. A page where the author is a regular contributor but not the main one is unlikely.

The line I'd prefer to draw is precisely whether someone other than the author created the page, which is pretty clear and unambiguous.

The namespace issue is moot, but it would still be good to let the reader know if part, or all, of a works page was written by that work's author, however famous they are, because it changes the way we read the page. E.g, if a random troper says Salem's Lot is an allegorical history of Poland, they won't be taken seriously, but if Stephen King himself says it, on his own works page, that's a completely different matter, because he's the author.

For that matter, anything Stephen King had to say about his books would be read avidly, but only if we knew that particular King-loving troper was the author himself.

Is there any way we can arrange to make it clear we've got an author talking about their own work like that?

I'm not entirely sure that we want to give an author a special place regarding his/her own works. This site is fundamentally about fans discussing tropes, and it seems to work best when it's functionally egalitarian (with the occasional mod whacking to keep things focused).

For one thing, an author is (absent things like Old Shame) inherently biased in favor of his/her own work. We had plenty of opportunity to see this with The Easy Breather, and while not all cases will be that extreme, there's an inevitable risk of bias associated with the author him/herself. If an author is given preference with respect to editing his/her own work, it becomes very difficult to sort this bias from the normal process of troping.

For another thing, TV Tropes is growing in popularity. It's inevitable that we're going to be seen as a growing influence of not just criticism, but bona fide analysis. This works best when people can expect us to be, if not necessarily neutral, at least not agents of someone else's agenda. While the works themselves are owned by their authors, our wiki articles on the works are very deliberatley not. If we allow for authors to have control over their trope pages, then the site could eventually decay from being about fans and instead become about authors pimping their own works — or at least being perceived as such.

That said, there are several known cases already on the wiki where the authors of works contribute to their own pages. Fortunately, in the one I am specifically thinking of, the author is content to correct factual errors only (things like spelling, what characters actually said, and proper quoting of Word of God). Otherwise he's quite happy to let us discuss his work and not butt in to tell us (for example), "No, that guy really wasn't supposed to be The Scrappy."

If we can keep it low-key like that, people won't worry about us becoming a platform for authors rather than a platform for fans.

edited 16th Aug '10 11:58:49 AM by Fighteer

Dudes, the policy is that it doesn't matter who wrote the page. Same standards are applied to everything. That's been the policy since the very first day the wiki was open.

I don't mean that the author should be given preference, only that in many ways it's useful to know when an author is troping about their own work, for essentially the reasons Fighteer gives. As long as the authors settles for technical corrections, that's fine, but if the author's inevitable bias starts to show, things get iffy.

I think that's easier to avoid if people know when authors are troping about their own work - then they can be watched more closely for abuse - but Fighteer is right that this could lead to undue deference to authors, not what we want.

Is there a better way of addressing the underlying concern?

Afterthought: If Stephen King wants to trope about Doctor Who or Sailor Moon, he should be treated exactly the same has everyone else. He'd be just another fan of those works. If he wants to trope about himself, and his own books, there's a fairly obvious reason why he's not just another fan.

edited 16th Aug '10 12:18:29 PM by robert

Afterthought: The idea that fans and authors are different kinds of human being is old hat. Every author is a fan. Every fan is (or could be) an author.

Fighteer, who's suggesting authors be given special rights over their own page? I've not seen that claimed here!

This fan/author distincition strikes me as akin to moderator/user on forums. Madrudgada, Fighteer, even Eddie, are all users of this forum who happen to have moderating powers. However, there's no rule saying they have to scream that they are moderators, or have some sort of bell indicating it. We might react differently to pages knowing the author of the underlying work was contributing. For those who don't know who the moderators are, they might react differently to their posts on learning of that. That doesn't actually mean anything though as long as all the usual guidelines are followed.

edited 16th Aug '10 12:14:02 PM by AddyThePawnSlayer

What's the point of Troper Works, then?

As far as I can tell, there isn't one and I'd happily see it either removed or merged with Unpublished Works, with all published media moved to the relevant namespace.

Right, there isn't one. Unless the person putting up the page thinks the distinction is important for some reason.

Unpublished is another issue. Fan Fic has to be published somewhere.

edited 16th Aug '10 12:18:33 PM by FastEddie