Ask The Tropers

Add-delete-add is an Edit War. We're already in one at this point.

The next step is reporting it here, which you already have. I will send a PM to Dratewka linking this ATT so that we can try to figure out what's going on.

I already explained myself:

I see no point of redoing pre-existing entries. There is a room to add new entries, there is space for expanding zero-context examples... and then there is coming to the article and redoing random entries for no particular reason, adding no new content to them, while in this specific case apparently not even watching the movie to notice what's going on in it. And it's dry. Humourless. While also overly long. Because we really need to spend three times as much space to somewhere put the genius vision of re-doing decent entries

What is the purpose of those, aside ego play of "my entry is the visible one"? The ironic part is that I was instantly accused on priv that all I care are my entries... thing is - almost all of re-dos by the other guy are oldies or stuff added by other people.

I have nothing to add beyond what was already said, aside maybe the fact that "mediational wiki-style editing" is bunch of crap that always ends up with situations like this. There is nothing to mediate here. I consider his entries to be vandalism, he considers my clean-ups to be edit-warring and we are never going to reach a consensus here. The decision is going to be made by a mod that barely reads the case and has better things to do and it's going to be flip of coin. If actions are going to be taken at all, since that's just as common to leave the case unresolved.

tl;dr I'm tired and it's 1:30 AM up here.

^your cleanups are edit warring. ^ there's no "he considers" about it. Captain Crawdad started the edit war, but you participated in it.

in addition, i don't see anything wrong with most of Captain Crawdad's additions. your cuts are purposeless and combined with the above screed it reads like you have something against this particular troper. (bashing other people who edit the website, by the way, is a cardinal violation of Rule Zero, so you've also got that going on for you.)

in short, you're both in the wrong, but Captain Crawdad has only edit warred, while you, Dratewka, have combined edit warring with being a dick.

Look, I have no horse in this race, but "mediational wiki-style editing" is how the website operates. Many people edit pages, and sometimes people come in conflict with each other. That's why we have places like ATT and the Discussion pages for things like this.

For the record, I don't see anything wrong with the edits either. I also don't know what you mean when you say the edits are "vandalism". It was a removal of the word "Justified." from a trope, adding an example of Chekhov's Gun, and removing a plothole so that the example can be better understood. I don't know what the vandalism is here.

@C I'm a dick, because I'm pointing out we aren't going to achieve anything? Well, don't want to put a damper on things, but we are already talking about nothing in particular, not even getting a step closer to a non-solution to a non-problem.

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@A ... what? And I mean it. Either I'm too asleep or you just skimmed through the back-and-forth in the article and somehow all that you've noticed was the tiniest of changes.

It's vandalism in sense of taking pretty decent entries and writing them again without their original flair, for the sake of it, with overly-long explaination of everything, the other end of Zero Context Example axis of terrible entries. Not to mention how many entries are either jumping to conclusions (presented as facts) or are flat-out wrong when it comes to content of the film in question. So yeah, vandalism.

The fact that you dislike the phrasing of an entry, or find it inappropriate according to the style guide, doesn't mean it's vandalism.

Also, your definition of overly-long isn't too reasonable. Your entry for Demolitions Expert is close to a Zero Context Example:

Demolitions Expert: Kassem has rather... special experience in this field.

^ not close to, it is a ZCE.

the reasoning i always use is "if someone's primary language is not English and they don't know one of the words in the trope name, can they figure it out from the writeup alone?" and that example doesn't make the cut.

Anyway, I'm with my nose in the keyboard, so I'm going to catch some sleep and you can continue the discussion on your own. Will read conclusion in the morning

^ roger, sleep well. bear in mind that none of this is intended as a personal condemnation of you. you're not acting in line with policy, that's all.

Maybe it would help if I went ahead and listed the things I would argue for changing, and the Tropers can decide what to do:

Change 1:

• Demolitions Expert: Kassem has rather... special experience in this field.

As discussed already, I would rewrite this entry so that the only context isn't a pothole:

• Demolitions Expert: Kassem is introduced perpetrating a bombing in Jerusalem with Middle Eastern Terrorists. He uses his knowledge of explosives later in the film.

Change 2:

• Fatal Family Photo: The watch serves as such. The moment Victor starts talking about home and the atmosphere is getting upbeat, you know something is up...

I would remove the final ellipsis from this entry for grammar reasons, since an ellipsis is supposed to indicate an incomplete thought or missing words, while this sentence is complete.

Change #3:

• Running Gag: Jack is really horny. When he arrives at Porvenir, he stares at the painted ass of a woman in a Coca-Cola ad. He occasionally glances sidelong at a washer woman in town. When driving the last leg of the expedition, he talks about prostitutes with Nilo. When he finally gets his money, he asks the washer woman to dance.

I would add this entry. Dratewka didn't think this fit as a Running Gag because they didn't think that it was supposed to be a gag. I get that it's not super jokey, but it's played for levity in an otherwise very grim film.

Change #4:

• Title Drop: An infamously ineffective one. The truck Victor and Kassem use is called Sorcerer. The name is seen in only two brief takes. Ironically, a name is painted on a truck, but it's Lazaro, for the truck used by Jackie. The working title for the movie - Ballbreaker - was much more fitting and without hinting or misleading about any supernatural after The Exorcist.

I would reword this entry because it seems to contradict itself: The second and third sentences admit that the name "Sorcerer" is briefly visible on one truck, while the fourth sentence implies that Lazaro is the only truck with its name painted on it. Sorcerer's name is indeed briefly visible◊, and Lazaro's name is plainly visible throughout the film. The discussion of the alternate title also seems to be off-topic. So I would reword the entry to this:

• Title Drop: An infamously ineffective one. The truck Victor and Kassem use is called Sorcerer. The name is seen in only two brief takes. The other truck's name, Lazaro, is much easier to see throughout the film.

Honestly, this might not even be an example of the trope, since it's text only. I don't believe anyone actually speaks the word "Sorcerer" in the whole film.

^ - Visual Title Drop is a Thing and a Title Drop Sub-Trope.

all of those changes still look perfectly fine to me, other than replacing Title Drop with Visual Title Drop.

Indeed, I see nothing in those entries that goes against wiki policies, and they are certainly not "overly long" by any reasonable standard.

Now I don't know enough about the work to know whether any of them are factually inaccurate. If they are, that would be legitimate reason to remove them, but I can't make a call on that.

@Michael Only that's not "mine". It's from the guy who started the page in 2015. You can go into history of the article and easily search which entries are mine and which are someone's else, often dating back to the start of the article.

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@Cloe So you are saying a person reading an entry on demolition expert that mentions ME terrorist isn't going to get the message? I'm ESL and I've got it perfectly fine.

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@CC What a fine collection of unmarked spoilers, needless exposition, cutting of information and on top of that, implying of things that aren't in the movie. Will dedicate separate post to those, be back soon

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@ DH That's what the next post is going to be about, since I would probably ignore the rewrites if they weren't in the same time doing reinterpretation of what's in the movie, rather than just being pointless edits for the sake of it.

So:

• Demolitions Expert:
  • There is absolutely nothing indicating Kassem's skills are going to be of any use or that he's a bomber (in sense of being capable to rig explosives) to begin with. That's part of the suspense when they encounter the roadblock.
  • Neither he's introduced preparing to bomb anything. They (his group) already did the bombing and are on the run. We don't even know who made the charge. Hell, we don't even don't know why.
  • Part of the reason why the original entry works is the ambiguity of it - because it's just as ambigious in the film proper. We don't know if he's capable of clearing the road. We don't know if he's just a guy leaving bombs at doorsteps or an actual demo-man. We know he helped to deliver a bomb to a building in Jerusalem and managed to run away from military manhunt - and that's it. So it's less of ZCE and more of what it is in the film.
• Fatal Family Photo: No difference for me, probably just restored it to the previous state on reflex.
• Running Gag: Now THIS is just bunch of bullshit.
  • Running Gag assumes a recurring joke. This film has pretty much zero comedy to it, and Jackie's depression and Survivor Guilt is probably the least funny part of it. How is looking at a poster, because it reminds of home, being disgusted by the old hag washing the floor and in the end being so out of other dance partners, you end up asking that hag a joke? Did we saw some different movies or something? And it's not even something that can be easily interpreted both ways, the film makes it explictly non-comedic and unrelated with each other.
  • The whole "looking for ass" part of the situation is based on the character having to ditch everything he had and know, and end up stuck in a Banana Republic, in a complete backwater. Even such things as presence of any females whatsoever are rarity, that's how crappy Porvenir is.
  • The dance in the end, aside being a joke on Dance Party Ending (backed by Friedkin), is to show that Jackie finally is safe and back to civilisation after his hellish experience with the nitro haul. And then it's instantly subverted by the mafia catching up with him and (probably) killing him. Which, in turn, is a reference to the original film, where Mario dies after apparently succeeding.
  • And all that without mentioning Jackie isn't horny in the slightest.
• Title Drop:
  • And here we are doing the reverse - information is being cut. Why? What for?
  • Agreeing with Malady that renaming the entry (the original one) into Visual Title Drop would be much more fitting.

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Is it clear now?

Demolitions Expert: A simple pothole to Middle Eastern Terrorists is not enough context. That trope by itself doesn't mean he's a bomber, or particularly good at it. What if he's a higher-up, or a low-level grunt who doesn't use bombs? And of course, there's the problem of using sinkholes as context — what if someone doesn't mouse over the link? They won't even get to see he is a terrorist. The text of the example should explain everything without relying on another trope.

Title Drop: Information is being cut because the entry is confusing. OP's wording makes it much clearer about what the entry is trying to say. And the part about the working title seems like an opinion and is really in the realm of trivia.

It is your entry, though. You added it here. Sure, the text in the entry was originally written by somebody else, but when you re-added the same text then it became your entry, since it was you and not that other guy who put it back on the page. Entries that you add are your entries.

First, back to the Running Joke. I was discussing this with a buddy at work (Sorcerer was HYUGE in Poland during the VHS bootleg era of late 80s and early 90s) and he reminded me one more thing. The old, ugly washer is yet another middle finger to the French original, where the local tavern had a beautiful singer. And people were turning heads toward her. But the village from that film was a clean and nice, if poor, place. Porvenir here is a run-down Company Town (shanty, really), to which we are introduced with a shot of a man caughing up blood while going to an outhouse.

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@Synchronicity Then any other way of wording it than CC's will work better. In both cases. Thing is, I find the first one, for demo-man, to be too iconic at this point to work out something better.

And I understand the Ballbreaker notion goes under Working Title then?

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@Michael Can I add what you just wrote to Meta folder of Insane Troll Logic? Asking due to a copyright

Not an okay way to talk. Don't be that way. And yes, entries that you post are by definition your entries.

Demolitions Expert: You cannot expect an example to be so iconic that everyone who reads it knows what you are talking about. That is Fan Myopia. I have never heard of this film and the example does not tell me how he is good with demolitions at all. It is a ZCE, plain and simple, and I find OP's wording much clearer and richer in context. What is wrong with the wording of either entry that you so staunchly refuse to put them on the page?

~Dratewka, your tone in this conversation is overly confrontational and, frankly, rude. You have to talk these things out, and you have to do so in a civil manner.

"Then any other way of wording it than CC's would be better." really? any?

• Demolitions Expert: Kassem make wall go boom. Hurt people. Later, use for good!

it reads more and more like you just have a vendetta against Crawdad, in addition to your general rudeness in this topic.

@Michael Oh, so it's not ok when I'm doing this, but when you insult me and my intelligence, it's fine and dandy?

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@Synchronicity Mostly due to it being factually wrong and doesn't use the spoiler? Even something as basic as this should work better:

• Demolitions Expert: Kassem was apparently this for his Middle Eastern Terrorists friends. This becomes important much later in the film.

I'd still much rather prefer the original, snappy take on this. In fact, I've been thinking about this - could Open Heart Dentistry be used instead or there is some similar trope? That would fit perfectly here, given the set-up, characters and the final "test" of skills, but OHD is specific about being health-care related.

Also, about the Title Drop - Friedkin himself talked about this, so it's not my opinion, it's his realisation post-premiere that the Ballbreaker would be indeed a better title and his friends were right. It's one of those movies where history behind them is just as interesting as the film itself

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@Nombertomado That doesn't work both ways already, so why should I be polite in such situation?

@Chloe I'm only rude toward people rude to me. It figures.

no one here has been rude towards you. we are disagreeing with you and you are taking it personally. Michael has not insulted your intelligence. Crawdad has not directed any remarks toward you in this thread at all. you are wrong, and you don't like hearing it, so you're playing the victim.

Given the givens, as well as some other notes on the account, Dratewka is suspended and cannot participate in this conversation at this time.

This query is getting rather lengthy, so if it can't be wrapped up neatly, please take it to an appropriate forum clean-up thread.

^ consensus is that Crawdad's edits are fine; they can probably be re-added and this query closed.

Crawdad, if this happens again, remember to bring it here or to thw relevant discussion page the first time someone removes your entry. that way you won't get into any edit wars in the future.

Sounds good. Thanks, everyone!

As far as making the edits to the page, should I do that myself or does a mod do that?

You can do it yourself I think, now that consensus has occurred in relation to them.

Yeah the page isn't locked or anything, so there's no need for a mod for that.

If you do do it yourself, be sure to leave an appropriate edit reason (e.g. citing this thread) to make it clear consensus has stabilized and there's no edit warring going on.

Thank you very much for defending me, Chloe Jessica. Much appreciated.

Okay, I've reinstated CC's changes, citing this discussion.

think we're done here then. requesting lock.