Sandbox / How To Repair A Trope

...or "Five Habits of Highly Successful Trope Repair Shop Threads"

Generally speaking, a successful trope repair tends to go through five phases of discussion:

1. Is there a problem?
2. What's causing the problem?
3. What would be a good solution?
4. Which solution is the best?
5. Okay, let's go do that, then.

Phase 1: Is there a problem?

First things first: If a trope is broken, it won't be functioning properly. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Before the discussion begins, check to make sure it's actually not functional.

It's important to have a clear and concrete problem to point to before starting a discussion—it provides crucial evidence to guide the rest of the repair process. In other words, you can't diagnose the disease without knowing the patient's symptoms.

In Phase 1, we're looking for problems that are objectively present (or at least not in dispute) and hurting the trope in some way.

Examples

• Description/example discrepancy: Its examples and/or wicks don't match the trope description.
• Underuse: It has failed to attract any usage, and its wick and inbound link counts are low.
• Complaining: Its example section is dominated by Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.

What we don't want are problems that rely on subjective interpretation—for example, an I Thought It Meant isn't a good basis for a thread. Similarly, if you're not sure whether or not there's a problem, don't come to the Trope Repair Shop asking "Hey, do you guys think this is a problem?" It's unproductive to start a thread with a debate about whether or not the thread should exist.

Ideally, the first post in the thread will present all the relevant evidence so that we can get right to Phase 2.

For smaller issues

Some minor repair actions are below the Trope Repair Shop's radar. If it's more of a tune-up than a full repair, chances are it goes somewhere else.

What Goes Where on the Forums gives a rundown on all the different places you can bring issues to (although there should probably be an Administrivia page too; someone should get on that). If that doesn't help, head over to Ask The Tropers and ask. We don't bite.

Phase 2: What's causing the problem?

In Phase 2, the goal is to pin down what's causing the problem. Going back to the medical analogy, we want to know what the disease is before we prescribe a cure.

The things we're looking for in this phase aren't inherently problematic, and can occur on perfectly healthy pages—however, it's easy for them to get out of hand. Some examples:

Examples that probably belong on a separate page

Everything's Worse with Snowclones

Snowclone titles can link a group of tropes together, but a bad snowclone can chain a trope to a group where it doesn't belong.

Bad snowclones are often marked by misuse in the wicks. The typical solution is to rename the trope, although Trope Transplants aren't unheard of.

Ridiculously Similar Trope

It's possible for two tropes to be very close and still have meaningful differences, but sometimes a troper creates a duplicate trope (not realizing another version already exists) or a "The Same, but More Specific" variant without a tropable distinction.

Duplicate tropes can usually be identified by their descriptions alone, but if you're not sure, check to see how many of the examples appear on both pages. The typical solution is to merge the tropes together, redirecting one of them to the other. If a meaningful distinction can be identified, they can usually be left alone, with tweaks to their descriptions clarifying their relationship.

Misleading name

A confusing or ambiguous title can cause one trope to be misinterpreted or mistaken for another.

When a name is misleading, a Wick Check will reveal a pattern of usage that's consistent with a possible misinterpretation of the name. The fix for a misleading name varies based on the nature of the misuse, but the most common ones are:

• Rename the trope: This is the preferred option in cases where the name itself is inherently problematic—a Character-Named Trope, a bad snowclone, an acronym or initialism, etc.
• Repurpose the trope into a supertrope: This is the preferred option when the name is confusing because it sounds broader than its definition. Simply expand the trope accordingly, and voila. Tropes Are Flexible, after all. The old definition can spin off into a new subtrope, or it can simply be absorbed into the new one until someone decides to write up a new TLP for it.
• Perform a full Trope Transplant: This is the preferred option when the trope is being mistaken for a different trope that doesn't have a page yet, but should. The old trope moves to a new page with a new name; the new trope takes its place under the old name.
• Clean up the misuse: This is the preferred option when we don't want to ignore the misuse, but nothing else stands out as needing a change. Misuse begets misuse: purge it from the wiki and (hopefully) it won't come back. Bear in mind that a comprehensive wick-cleaning effort can be a lot of work and becomes more and more difficult the more entrenched the trope is—so don't suggest it lightly.

For more about this stuff, check out Trope Renaming Guidelines.

Poor description

Trope descriptions are difficult to write well. Sometimes an Example as a Thesis dominates the page and obscures the trope's actual definition. Sometimes the description is unnecessarily genre- or medium-specific, making it seem like the trope can't appear anywhere else. Mistakes like these make the wiki harder to read and comprehend.

Tropes with poor descriptions tend to suffer from either misuse or underuse.

• Mixed misuse usually indicates that the description is unclear. When there's a significant amount of misuse, but no consistent pattern to it, it's a sign that editors don't "get" the trope and are trying to infer its meaning from context instead—they stray outside its boundaries, but not all in the same direction.
• When examples are ignoring a specific aspect of the description, consider whether the trope is too narrow. Is that aspect really so essential to the trope? It's possible that whoever originally wrote it mistakenly described a common identifier for the trope as if it were a hard restriction. Tropes Are Flexible.
  
  If the consensus is that, yeah, it totally is essential to the trope, it's likely you have a Missing Supertrope on your hands.
• Underuse is often the result of a rogue Example as a Thesis confusing readers into thinking the trope is narrower than it really is.

---

Anyway, once we all at least have some idea of what the problem might be, we gradually transition into Phase 3.

Phase 3: What might be a good solution?

Our third order of business is figuring out what action, if any, we want to take.

In this phase, we propose and discuss potential actions. Everyone can offer suggestions, debate and critique the other tropers' suggestions, and so on, until discussion slows down.

There are several ways to go from here.

If everyone has said their piece and debate has died down, whether we've come to an agreement or an impasse, we can move on to Phase 4 with a motion and a second.^note We don't actually have a formal system; it's just rude to do this sort of thing unilaterally. Usually it looks more like: "Seems like it's dying down. Crowner time?" "Yeah, probably. I'll start one."

If it's decided that the best action is a minor one that doesn't need consensus to change—e.g. adding redirects or writing up a TLP draft for a new trope—we can skip the voting and go straight to Phase 5 if we want, with, again, a motion and a second.

If somebody jumps in late with a fresh perspective that hasn't been considered yet, we can hop back to an earlier step to talk about it.

If nobody can come up with a satisfying solution and the thread stalls out, a moderator can place a timer on the thread and declare that it has three days to get moving again. If time runs out, the thread gets locked and tossed into the Morgue.^note This doesn't happen automatically; the moderator needs to come back and manually lock the thread.

I need a flowchart.

Phase 4: Which solution is the best?

Here's where we vote, if applicable.

How Crowners Work explains the voting process in great detail.

Phase 5: Okay, let's go do that, then.

Lastly, it's implementation time! Threads stay active until the necessary legwork is completed.