Consistent example style

I'm starting to, occasionally, when I have the time and energy, going through a trope and making sure every work title is:

1. Mentioned rather than pot holed.
2. Linked, whenever feasible
3. In italics when needed

So far I've done Fetish Retardant; I welcome anyone who wants to join me in this project.

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

May wanna move this to Special Efforts?

It's definitely a good practice, in any case. Whenever I'm editing an example, I at least look for stuff like that in the same "neighborhood," or correct examples that show up on my watchlist.

Jet-a-Reeno!

I PM'd a mod.

... who responded with alacrity. Thanks!

edited 29th Jan '11 3:51:48 PM by HersheleOstropoler

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

Can we add this to the edit tips?

Doing this to pages that are at the top of the Inbound Links list is a good idea.

132 is the rudest number.

Also, where possible the series should be the first word of the entry.

Great:

• A Show does this when X, Y, and Z.

Acceptable:

• Done in A Show when X,Y, and Z.

Bad:

• When X, Y, and Z, A Show manages to do this.

Worst:

• X,Y,and Z cause this.

edited 29th Jan '11 5:58:00 PM by Yamikuronue

BTW, I'm a chick.

I personally am too lazy to shoot any higher than acceptable.

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

I've been doing this on any page I wind up splitting. I generally curate them afterwards.

I prefer the format.

[Potholed Work]  ^*

[subverted/averted/playedwith]: text referencing both example and description.

I dislike italicizing and never do it myself, but I don't change it if it's already there. I also tend to just chop off any reference to the author, unless it's a trope the author likes and it's followed by other examples. I also cut most of the stuff before the name.

X Just X, I dump on the discussion page with a not saying as such. Crufty versions of X Just X go there to.

Fight smart, not fair.

I do this to every page I curate and often pages I randomly stumble upon, as well as other maintenance and organization. It especially irritates me that so few people bother to italicize media names.

edited 30th Jan '11 7:44:27 AM by ccoa

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

I try to avoid cutting off the authors if it's a book. A lot of times with short stories the author has so many and so brief, that the Author's page becomes the default work page.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

And even in the case of book-length works, many times the author has a page but the book doesn't.

The goal isn't to make the examples as short as possible, or as uniform as possible.

It's to make them as clear and informative as possible.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Hm, that's probably a good idea for some of them. But only if the author has a page.

Fight smart, not fair.

I think it's a good idea in general because Books have a lot of over lap in titles and it's useful to know who's version of a book that we happen to be talking about.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

The author is part of the identification of a book. Would you list an album or song title, but not the group who made it? A music video, but not the performer?

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

The are very few individual books that are iconic compared to the number of authors that are well-known. For example, if I list Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc as an example, how many people know who the author is? (Mark Twain, if anyone is curious.)

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Albums and song titles get special treatment, they are part of the authors page. Books are generally treated as their own work and are generally linked to their authors on the page. If you think I should just point short stories to the authors page, I'll do it. I'll also just move the author around if you want, but it kind of fudges with my entry style.

Fight smart, not fair.

The author is just as important to a book as an artist is to a song title. You really should have it there.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I'm against enforcing a specific format for all examples in a trope article. As long as the current examples are (as Mad mentioned) clear and informative, I don't see the need to reformat them. Of course, we obviously should rearrange specific examples that fail either of those two conditions.

edit to clarify: I'm referring to "Work title always first, followed by X, followed by Y, etc." formatting. Things such as italicizing work titles, spelling out the work vs. potholing, and other such things I'm fine with.

edited 30th Jan '11 11:07:08 AM by Meeble

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I do think that forcing the work title to be stated and not Pot Holed is good, and that books should have authors, but beyond that I don't think it needs a specific format.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I recently read something, in a different context (legal citation), that I think provides a good rule of thumb:

A system of citation forms has basically two functions: to provide enough information about a reference to give the reader a general idea of its significance and whether it’s worth looking up, and to enable the reader to find the reference if he decides that he does want to look it up.

What that means in practice will vary from medium to medium (and sometimes, perhaps, within that medium.)

One thing I've personally been trying to encourage (albeit inconsistently) is for comic book references to have some form of issue citation, preferably in a hottip. An example like:

• In one Superman story, Jimmy Olsen traveled back in time and became a Nazi field marshal.

As written above, the example is fascinating, but simultaneously annoying, as it provides no clues as to where one might find that story among the thousands of Superman stories written over the years.

By the same token, you don't want to clutter up the text with titles, issue numbers, etc., so a simple hottip is better.  ^*

(The above story actually does exist, btw.)

Jet-a-Reeno!

Yeah, my problem is that I tend to cite comic book examples from memory rather than looking up the issue number.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I disagree, but I'll just start shoving it after the pothole.

Fight smart, not fair.

A quick search of Amazon gives me several thousand novels just named "Crossroads". If I see an example that lists it as coming from the novel "Crossroads" I would like to know which of these several thousand novels with the same name the example is talking about. That is why the author is needed.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Fair enough.

Fight smart, not fair.