Web-group reference pruning

I'm a member in good standing of the ProtectorsOfThePlotContinuum, and have a bit of a question for the lot of you.

There's a lot of us who read TV Tropes, and we've been noticing a lot of references to the PPC piling up, including a bunch that are only tenuously related at best. We're starting to feel a little bit overexposed - we're not a huge web-group, we don't have a massive archive of content, and we really don't think we should be showing up on more tropes than a lot of larger works.

So... Could the bunch of us who are tropers and PP Cers go through and do some pruning? We really don't want people to think this is some kind of censorship attack, we just want to remove links that are misleading, wrong, or just irrelevant.

References that are wrong should be zapped, wherever you find them.

In other words, go for it.

edited 3rd Feb '11 2:50:03 PM by FastEddie

Removing links that are misleading wrong or irrelevant doesn't require permission.Just leave an edit reason explaining that what you deleted was misleading, wrong, or irrelevant. If you want (or need) to go into detail to explain what was wrong, do that on the discussion page for the page you're editing and leave an edit reason pointing there.

If I typed less, I wouldn't get ninja'd.

edited 3rd Feb '11 2:51:11 PM by Madrugada

I probably don't have to say this, but while removing references that are actually incorrect is fine, be cautious with subjectives and audience reaction style tropes. If people have formed opinions about your group, that's something that you can't expunge readily without making it look like you're whitewashing yourself.

Those things should be moved to the YMMV tab, by the way. If you come across one you want help with, send up a flare here. Wiki Magic will kick in.

Also, only remove examples if they are factually incorrect, or shoehorned, but not just because they take too small part of the works.

For exmple if two characters are listed as a Battle Couple though they don't really fight, remove that. But if a legit Battle Couple only appears for a very short time, keep it. We don't judge the importance of tropes.

edited 3rd Feb '11 3:09:19 PM by EternalSeptember

And we most certainly don't think that works should be represented on tropes pages in any way proportionately to their popularity.

This is the kind of thing people get all worked up about with Wikipedia: "Why does <this obscure thing> have a huge page, yet <this other SUPER IMPORTANT thing> only has three sentences?" The solution to this issue, in my mind, is always to improve the coverage of the (supposedly) more important topic, not to reduce the coverage of a more obscure one.

The same applies here. If a work is legitimately a good example of a trope (as in, it displays it as defined, with no wiggle room, no dodging), it should be listed. If it only fits a trope by bending the definition, it should not be listed.

One should be more careful with aversions and subversions. Most of the time, not fitting a trope is not an aversion, it's simply the unremarkable fact that a work doesn't use a trope. Only when a trope is so common as to be de rigeur among works in a particular genre/subgenre is it worth noting aversions.

Subversions are even rarer; a subversion is a deliberate setting up of a situation to make the audience think a common trope is going to apply, and then intentionally making it turn out differently.

Never feel that examples shouldn't be listed on a trope page because the work in question is too obscure.

edited 3rd Feb '11 5:47:02 PM by Morven

tl;dr: There Is No Such Thing As Notability. Don't go around deleting legitimate entries just because you don't think you're not popular enough.

Is Nacked one of your sanctioned pruners? Because I just banned him/her/it for going on a deletion spree. I thought we were discussing this.

edited 8th Feb '11 11:56:30 AM by Fighteer

To add to what Morven and Morgan Wick said: works tend to be found in proportion to their fame or size or popularity in the world but to their popularity among tropers and the extent to which they use tropes (which are often related themselves). Popularity in the world certainly influences the former, and extensiveness the latter, but by themselves those things are largely irrelevant.

The reason I was deleting examples was because they fell into the "shoehorned" part of what Eternal September said above. A good few were also examples we probably could do without being associated with, and the bulk of them have been a certain member of the group, for lack of a better term, "whoring" their own spinoff. A lot of the Tropes examples have been just focussing on two authors to the exclusion of all else, and several of said examples have featured things we don't want people associating with the PPC as a whole.

"we don't want people associating with the PPC as a whole" is not a legitimate reason to remove a trope.

If the trope is a valid example of something that happened in your series, it should stay whether or not you want to be associated with it or even if it's something that's only happened once in a 100,000 page epic.

Maybe give the spinoff its own page? I'm not familiar with the series at all, but I was definitely noticing a pattern to those edits. I'm guessing Nacked doesn't want people thinking the main-series PPC is a part of the Furry Fandom.

That's not a bad idea. Especially if it would clear a majority of the tropes that are at issue.

edited 9th Feb '11 6:03:26 PM by Meeble

Plus due to some of the examples we've been dealing with several newbies who come in having the wrong idea about us. We don't want people thinking we approve of, say, a constantly-masturbating fox or having people raped to death, and aforesaid shoe-horner has been asked to stop such behaviour before I believe.

Just to add to what Nacked said, we de-canonized some of the more egregious examples basically as they were put online - not sure what your stance on retconning away examples is, but some things were written that the community at large definitely did not find appropriate.

Can you list those out specifically? We do want to be accurate, but not remove tropes merely because they make you uncomfortable.

edited 9th Feb '11 8:10:11 PM by Fighteer

Most of the discussion was that our rating as a group really should be PG-13, maybe up to R with appropriate warnings, and definitely not M or X. Some specific examples that came up, though: We're not OK with rape for any reason, regardless of who it's being done to. The in-verse organization itself isn't OK with torture of Sues - and in writing, the aforementioned PG-13 limit keeps a lid on it. Agents shouldn't be Sues themselves, or what's the point? And finally, blatant sexuality, especially of under-aged characters is not OK. (Once again, PG-13 rating.) In general, it's about the feel of the thing - we're here to make fun of badfic, not write bad furry smut.

To be clear, we normally don't write off works or parts of works that the author(s) declare to be non-canon. In fact, we have a page for that sort of thing as well.

This debate is nothing new, either...

That is a very valid point, Totemic, thank you for bringing it up. Canon Discontinuity is close to the situation, but not entirely accurate. When the work responsible for many of the X-rated tropes (that are being removed) was originally put online, the group at large quickly decided that these sorts of things were unacceptable, primarily the aforementioned rape, torture, etc. Exactly when something becomes Established Canon (and thus causing Canon Discontinuity upon revocation) is problematic in web original collaborative fiction, to say the least. However, I don't think there was a time when the work in question was generally accepted as canonical. (Saying that anything put online is automatically canonical is not a good standard, because it allows people to post deliberately bad work to destroy the group's continuity. We don't have a formal Canonization procedure, so I think group consensus is the best possible option.)

Madrugada brought up a few good points in the other thread, some of which I think apply here. Primarily, "The presence of the article is causing the community that created the work problems:" TV Tropes is where we get a lot of our publicity, and many incoming newbies have had massively distorted ideas of how our community actually works, and what we consider acceptable. Now, I understand that the point of that thread was that you don't randomly cut stuff, but removing ourselves entirely from TV Tropes really is not our goal here. We want to make sure that people get an accurate impression of the group as a whole, not one that focuses almost exclusively on never-was-canon work that's outside our guidelines, rating, and frankly, comfort zone.

(Edited for clarity, sorry)

edited 9th Feb '11 10:35:02 PM by TechnoDann

A user named Caddyshack is going around deleting PPC examples. One of his edits was one of Nacked's I restored because it was a perfectly good example of the trope (and was in no way derogatory nor misleading about your... whatever the PPC is).

From Girlish Pigtails (a page I curate):

• Agent Foxglove, Psychopathic Girlchild of the PPC, has twin braids described as "Heidi plaits".

This is a good example of the trope. There is no possible way that Random Browser X is going to look at that example and get the wrong impression of your whatever-it-is, because they won't know who this character is or what context she appears in, only that she is a Psychopathic Manchild with Girlish Pigtails.

If there is a work that you consider non-canon by majority opinion, then wouldn't a better solution be to create a separate work page for it? If it's online, publicly available, and has tropes, it's fair game for troping. If it's not associated with the "main" PPC, then it's a good candidate for its own page, where it can be explained what its relationship to the PPC is.

edited 10th Feb '11 6:46:30 AM by ccoa

Banned Caddyshack. Seriously guys, BRING THE TROPES TO THIS THREAD TO DISCUSS. You can't arbitrarily edit your stuff out of the wiki.

Going through those edits, I noticed many were removing what he/she referred to as "irrelevant" examples, which is definitely not the way things work around here.

If it happens in the canon series, it should be on the pages.

^ Some (I believe) extremely pertinent questions: Are the Agent Foxglove stories still on the PPC site, or have they been removed? Are Foxglove and their partner used as characters by other PPC authors? If I go to the PPC site, how hard will I have to look to find a mention of Foxglove and/or their partner as anything other than a name mentioned in passing?

Alright, I did some digging. This whole thing is about nothing but publicity. And going by the wiki, Foxglove is canon.

While we can give spin-off series their own pages (which is not a bad idea, and someone more familiar with these stories should do this), deleting examples because you feel they make you look bad is a big no-no. The work is what the work is, regardless of how the author(s) feel about it.