Everything's confusing with "EverythingsBetterWith" tropes NEW CROWNER 06/20/13: Everythings Better With Indexes

I wouldn't support moving them to Just for Fun. People may still link to them, which is bad, and there isn't really anything fun about them, other than how all our pages are fun. They're just lists, in the exact way that all our pages have lists, with the exception that these ones are unconnected with tropes!

I nominate the following for the first round of cuts:

Everything's Better With Bunnies - A discussion is already open, everyone agrees this is not a trope.

Everythings Better With Motorcycles- A single-line description, equivalent to "motorcycles are cool." The page is not about gratuitous motorcycles (Sons Of Anarchy is listed), nor does it seem that Gratuitous Motorcycles is a thing anywhere. Numerous actual tropes (Badass Biker, All Bikers are Hells Angels, Cool Bike, Motorcycle on the Coast Road) already cover motorcycle instances.

Everything's Creepier With Cockroaches - The page claims "This trope is dedicated to all things roachy" without any attempt to find a trope. Examples include roaches in ads for roach spray and a Mythbusters segment on whether roaches can survive radiation.

Everything's Better With Kangaroos - Though there may be tropes associated with kangaroos, this page makes no attempt to discover them. Several examples include kangaroos in settings with many other animals too (The Penguins Of Madagascar, beanie babies, Dr. Seuss).

And for the first round of renames:

• Everythings Better With Bacon - Change to Bacon Addiction, and clean up.
• Everythings Better With Chickens - Change to Stock Funny Chicken, and clean up.
• Everything's Better With Muppets - Change to Muppet Cameo.
• Everything's Messier with Pigs - Change to Messy Pigs, and clean up.
• Everything's Wicked With Weasels - Change to Wicked Weasels.

edited 8th Dec '11 1:34:36 AM by Routerie

I notice Maddie was asking for individual threads back in post 27. On first glance this doesn't seem to be in line with that request.

Sorry about that. Individual threads would be fine.

Well it's probably worth waiting for Maddie to have her say. I'm just Mr Stalling For The Fox at this point.

Sure, there's no rush. It's just that we can't make new threads for the foreseeable future (and that I expect the threads to contain a lot of redundancy).

Well if the question is cutting some, that could work with a similar crowner that got rid of some troper tales pages (before purging all of them). We list those with dubious tropeworthiness (like bacon) and put them on a crowner of which ones to cut.

As long as the crowner isn't lumping multiple pages in the same action I think it's worth a try. That is, each page has its own option, or there's one suggested action and only the pages that are being considered for that action are listed on it. Let's start with a crowner on whether to cut each of the ones that appear to be non-tropes.

Short version: Go ahead.

edited 8th Dec '11 4:33:08 PM by Madrugada

Yeah, each option is one page. So votes for that page are irrelevant to the rest of the pages listed on that crowner.

Okay, here's a draft for the crowner's header. Feel free to copyedit. -

We have about a hundred pages of the snowclone type "Everything's X with Y", e.g. "Everything's Cuter With Rabbits". While several of these are viable tropes, several others are just a list of books/films that happen to have a rabbit in them (regardless of the rabbit's role). This falls under People Sit On Chairs, and is not the kind of page T Vtropes needs. We've considered moving them to Just for Fun, but enumerating rabbits just isn't all that funny. This crowner lists about ten of such pages and suggests that they be cut. Vote up the pages that you agree should be cut, vote down the pages that you object to cutting, and feel free to post here explaining your reasons.

I have one of these in particular I keep meaning to make a proposal with: Everythings Better With Chocolate reads like it ought to be, or could be split into Chocolate Makes Everything Better - Chocolate and its presumed power to cure bad moods...and if it doesn't work, at least you're eating large quantities of chocolate. Often comes with a side order of Trademark Favorite Food.

I firmly object to the idea of considering cutting pages by lump without looking at the potential merits of each, with minor fixing.

Your example is the proposed crowner text is bad anyway. Everything's Better With Bunnies is that actual trope, and we have already examined that and determined that we could simply turn it into an index. Careful consideration and feeback on that trope revealed there was no need to cut it. A similar deliberate approach to other such pages could likely reach a similar determination. Puting tropes through mass trials will only result in overly hastly, ill considered decisions. It is not like there is an emergency situation on this anyway. None of these tropes are flame bait, have created editing wars or anything like that, and a number are emensly popular in terms on inbounds.

A better approach is to consider each page one at a time and do our best to come up with quality tropes that cover the topics addressed on the page.

edited 9th Dec '11 9:22:41 AM by Auxdarastrix

Certainly we should debate each one's merits. But we can vote in a common crowner to stop us fro flooding the board with twenty threads.

With Everything's Better With Bunnies, we agreed to cut it / turn it into an index. Which are pretty much the same thing, since "making it into an index" means deleting all examples, renaming it, changing the page type and presumably rewriting the description.

When pages seem to cover two or three different trope, we should delete the Everythings Better than page and create the separate trope pages. But in some cases, the pages cover no trope at all rather than multiple unique tropes. In these cases, I don't think we should spend time brainstorming tropes for the sake of saving the examples.

Take Everythings Better With Chocolate. As Elle points out, despite the page's total lack of a description, much of the page concerns Chocolate Makes Everything Better, or Chocolate Comfort Food. We'd do well to rename the page accordingly and remove all irrelevant examples. But we don't need to create several chocolate "subtropes" for the sake of preserving the page's current content. For example, we don't need a Loving Chocolate Shot for the Willy Wonka example - that's Food Porn The Same But More Specific. We don't need a Super Chocolate Overdose trope for the Clan Destine of Auditors examples, that's Sensory Overload The Same But More Specific.

Cutting isn't the same thing as turning something into an index. With a cut you just wipe out everything. Turning something into an index preserves the old name as a redirect to the index and ensures that you have several tropes related to the animal/topic in question instead of nothing at all. You can also move the relevant examples already collected by the page to each new or existing trope.

With these pages, I recommend that we not keep the old names as redirects if we want to properly stamp out the snowclones altogether.

In the case of Bunnies, we are YKTT Wing a new page for the index rather than converting the old page.

Some of them have very high inbounds.

If we do something en masse, it should be something with less drastic consequences, like the renames you propose here.

Those are fairly straightforward examples of something that can addressed with quick and easy rename, example clean up and removing it from the Everything's Better With X index.

My concern with the cuts is that addressing things en masse will lead to bandwagon hasty decisions without real thought being put into what tropes can be derived from the page. For example Everything's Wetter with Otters was listed in the original post for this thread as "expunge" and might have been cut if we made a en masse decision, but further consider led to the creation of Playful Otter.

edited 9th Dec '11 12:27:31 PM by Auxdarastrix

You've convinced me. Let's start with a round of mass renames for pages that cover tropes but that aren't Gratuitous X. Once that's done, we'll have cleaned up the Everything's Better With Indexes list a lot and will be able to give better attention to how to handle the remaining pages.

Also, any objections to yanking the picture currently on Everything's Better With Indexes, which makes it difficult to think about anything clearly? If the page needs an image, we can make an Image Pickin thread, but it surely does NOT need an image of an index finger...

"En masse" would be to have a single-option crowner that decides the deletion of many pages. That's precisely not what we're trying to do here.

I agree with removing it, but that should probably be asked in IP. Don't worry, IP tends to resolve such things within a day or two.

Even if you have a seperate option for each page, I think you are more likely to generate hasty decisions as people find it easier to just click "up" on each option rather than stop and have an involved discussion about each one.

Also, if you propose such a drastic change as cutting a page without having a TRS just for that page, readers who are interested in the page or are browsing the page will not get the benefit of the TRS Repair Shop banner at the top of the page to let them know that the issue is under discussion. Also, casual readers of TRS will not get the warning that the page is under discussion by being able to see just from looking at the title of the thread. If we cut pages it should be done completely above board, using normal procedures and with everyone getting fair warning and chance for input on the specific page. That way no one can accuse this thread of acting irregularly.

In relation to this specific things that Routerie proposed cutting:

Everything's Creepier With Cockroaches: Creepy Cockroach is at least as much of trope as Messy Pig or Reptiles Are Abhorrent. Granted it needs a rename and example cleaning.

Everything's Better With Bunnies: has 6,961 inbounds under the old ptitle. Between October 25 and today the inbounds increased from 103 under the new custom title to 231 inbounds under the new custom title. With inbounds like that, making it a redirect to the new Bunny Tropes Index would be a better solution. At any rate, any decision about something that already has an open TRS thread should be made in that TRS thread.

Like I said earlier, if we are going to do anything by an expedited "Vote on them in one big crowner on one thread" method it should be a simple change that doesn't really cut any pages, just changes them to a more appropriate title and cleans up bad examples. Everything's Wicked With Weasels to Wicked Weasel for example.

EDIT PS: This crowner that has just been put up looks good, though we might want to consider making it Cute Girl Hair Decs instead of Hair Decorations, given that the the focus is on hair decorations being used to emphasize girly cuteness.

EDIT PS 2: I changed all the proposed titles to singular.

edited 10th Dec '11 5:50:01 AM by Auxdarastrix

I've been trying to avoid double posting, but one can only do so many edits to a post before it gets absurd.

Pretty in Mink doesn't even belong on this index. It doesn't have a title that follows this naming pattern. It isn't about gratitious uses of minks. It is a specific costume trope about furs being associated with glamour, in contrast to Fur and Loathing.

Same with Fluffy Fashion Feathers. It clearly refers to a legit costuming trope, but has nothing to do with Everything's Better With X.

Seldom-Seen Species doesn't seem to belong on this index. It could probably use some other fixes, but for starters we can cut it from the index.

Anyone object to me removing these from the Everything's Better With X index?

edited 10th Dec '11 6:14:25 AM by Auxdarastrix

That's a good start, thanks for putting it up. I agree with most of your proposals, except that I feel that the Ham and Sandwich pages should be cut instead.

And to , I agree that those pages don't belong on the index.

edited 10th Dec '11 7:26:28 AM by Spark9

Please axe them.

I've removed those.

Next nomination for removal from the index: Frickin' Laser Beams. While the Trope Namer could be considered an example of gratuitous lasers, this is really just a subtrope of Ray Gun, which is in turn a subtrope of Energy Weapon.

edited 10th Dec '11 11:02:43 AM by Auxdarastrix

"Pretty in Mink doesn't even belong on this index. It doesn't have a title that follows this naming pattern. It isn't about gratitious uses of minks. It is a specific costume trope about furs being associated with glamour, in contrast to Fur and Loathing.

Same with Fluffy Fashion Feathers. It clearly refers to a legit costuming trope, but has nothing to do with Everythings Better With X."

The point is that putting them in just for glamour is gratuitous use. Same with Everything's Better with Spinning (but for cool instead of glamour). There is little reason to use these tropes in proper examples (which is why not every single instance of wearing fur appears in Pretty in Mink), but they are included just for the hell of it. That is actually what makes up the point of the Everythings Better tropes.

I put them back, because they belong there. You're reasons against them miss the very point of this index.

EDIT: And I really have to call out "It doesn't have a title that follows this naming pattern." as a reason. Indexes do NOT require a pattern for trope names. They require THEMES. Indexes based on name patterns is search duplication, which is considered a bad thing with indexes.

edited 10th Dec '11 11:29:11 AM by DragonQuestZ