Zzzzzzzzzz
There's no reason to lock them. Fix the ones that you stop that are wrong, or that are clever at the expense of being clear. Go to the Laconic Wiki index page and start somewhere and page through a few in order — if they're ok, leave them alone. If they're wrong, fix them if you can. If you can't, for whatever reason, make a TRS thread for it.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
My point is that someone can just walk in and screw with it again. Since the Laconic pages are so small, they can be locked without difficulty—unlike the descriptions, which we just have to keep an eye on.
*cough*watchlist
edited 23rd May '11 2:11:27 PM by peccantis
I'm guessing most of the misused laconic pages were created that way and won't revert back if fixed.
edited 23rd May '11 3:40:38 PM by SpellBlade
Lovable Rogue
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Seems like a weak argument. How is a given Laconic entry any different from a Main article in this regard?
I see the Awesomeness.
The watchlist is a good idea. I'll suggest it over in Tech Wishlist.
Fight smart, not fair.
In my experience of laconics Spell Blade is quite right and it tends not to be a problem. We have watchlist technology already, and it's the way to go here: you might not see bad reverts.
Dragon Writer
edited 24th May '11 9:29:19 AM by Stratadrake
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.
Zzzzzzzzzz
I've got easily a dozen Laconics on my watchlist already — I habitually add one when I make a change to it. In the past six months I think I've had one come up again.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
But it seems like every time I look at a laconic for a page it's wrong or worse, completely unrelated to the trope at hand. And how they're wrong generally dictates how a page is being misused. They are the single biggest source of misuse on the wiki from what I can tell.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Zzzzzzzzzz
That's because soon after they were started they started being treated as a "Make a short joke about the trope" rather than "State the trope as succinctly as possible while still being accurate." Then came the battle over how long a laconic could be, with one side holding the position that it must be only one sentence and no more, no matter how little sense it made. There are a few of us who are slowly making our way through the Laconic index getting rid of the bad ones.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Zzzzzzzzzz
Making a Laconic in YKTTW is very new.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Well one solution would be to make sure YKTTWS can't launch without a laconic.
I see the Awesomeness.
I've had several, but all of them were corrections because I didn't link back to the main page properly.
Fight smart, not fair.
World's Toughest Milkman
I've certainly seen a lot of bad laconics, but then I tend to only check the laconics when I'm confused about the trope, and it certainly seems plausible that there could be a correlation between confusing-trope and bad-laconic. So I did a little experiment. I did a random walk, looking for articles with laconics. Definitions of bad may vary (I don't mind a little humor as long as it gets the idea across), but here's what I found:
Good (I'd have a hard time improving it):
- Cultural Cross-Reference
- Shockwave Clap
- Hollywood Density
- Invincible Hero
- Human Chess
- Your Approval Fills Me with Shame
- Dark Reprise
- Possession Sue
Fair (gets the idea across):
- Changed My Jumper
- Too Much Information
- You Gotta Have Blue Hair (surprisingly, since the name is a bit misleading)
- Not Allowed to Grow Up
- The Web Always Existed
- If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...
Arguable (flawed but not necessarily wrong):
- Resuscitate The Dog (implies the original kick was intentional)
- Les Collaborateurs (too broad; Darth Vader could qualify)
- Have You Seen My God? (too vague)
- Ludicrous Gibs (more of a joke than a description, but not inaccurate)
Bad:
- Scientific Progress Goes Oi (backwards, I think)
- Unnecessary Combat Roll (wrong justification, based on the name)
Note that none of these was as bad as the examples I regularly see on TRS, and even so, there were only one of three that I would even consider flawed, and only one in ten that I'd actually consider bad.
edited 6th Jul '11 3:12:58 PM by Xtifr
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.
I'm not sure a random check is going to help what I'm getting at. My issue is that when a trope comes up at the TRS it's laconic tends to be wrong. I think they should be much higher up on our priority of things to treat.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. DickAnd Supporting Protagonist's laconic page?
Zzzzzzzzzz
I just redid the six marked "Arguable" and "Bad". All of them were suffering from conciseness at the expense of accuracy; sinkholes; or funny at the expense of accurate. Or some combination.
Take a look at them now.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
World's Toughest Milkman
Right. I was just trying to get a handle on the scope of the problem. I absolutely support the idea of including the laconic (if any) in TRS, but as a result of my experiment, I now firmly disagree with the original proposal of locking all laconics.
Thanks. I suppose there really wasn't any reason to wait. One less thing on my to-do list, then. :)
People have noted that a lot of the Laconic subpages are written by editors who didn't read the description of the page in question. Even if we fix those, they can just get changed back. So I think the easiest thing to do is lock all the Laconic pages, and make a thread (maybe this one) for figuring out which definitions are correct, one by one. It will take a long time, yes, but I'm open to alternate suggestions.