Trope lists for each episode?: Western Animation.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic

Aside from how overwhelming having that many trope lists can seem, it also raises the question of how episode-specific something has to be to belong there instead of the main page.

Why not just have it all on the main page? There would be far fewer lists, the blurry distinction would be sidestepped, and there'd be more room for comparing and contrasting different episodes' approach to the same trope.

[[EDITED IN: I have since done a complete 180 on this subject, or at least a 179. Instead of shifting from the recaps to main, I think we should shift from main to the recaps, reserving the main page trope list for tropes that are continued themes that apply to most of the series.]]

edited 12th Aug '11 5:17:06 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

I know other shows that have episode recaps (Doctor Who for instance) tend to include tropes used in the episodes at the end of the recap. If it's a question of people being confused about where tropes go, they could easily go both on the main series page (listing the specific episode) and on the recap page for that episode.

We try to keep them all on the main page, but too much text can be a problem, so having just too many tropes listed causes splits, such as this show.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Why not just split them by letter instead of by episode? They're already split into their respective halves of the alphabet anyway, they could be split further.

Wouldn't that be fairly redundant?

edited 9th Aug '11 10:37:19 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

The policy seems to be to include only general tropes and reocurring tropes on the main page, with single-occurrence tropes being put in the recap pages. I don't see the problem with that.

That's exactly what I was going to say. I'm perfectly happy with how it is, with one-time things on their episode page.

Fixed the tag yet again.

So, trope shows up once, episode recap, more than once, main page?

That still seems like it could cause some confusion though. For example, Nice Job Breaking It, Hero shows up repeatedly in the series:

• Twilight trying to use her magic to help clear the snow but accidentally causing a small avalanche in episode 11.
• Pinkie's singing actually causing a fight she meant to prevent in episode 20, and...
• The others not listening to Pinkie delaying her solution to the parasprite infestation is episode 10.

If someone interpreted one of these as examples, but not the others, they would put it on the episode recap page, but if it happens more than once, wouldn't that mean it doesn't belong there?

I don't see why we can't just shift everything to the main page.

edited 11th Aug '11 5:04:59 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

Eeyup, that's how it grew.

If a trope involves multiple episodes OR multiple characters, it stayed on the main page, where all of the different examples are listed under that trope (look at the main page entries for Alliterative Appeal, or Punny Name, as examples).

If a trope was specific to just one character, it went to the appropriate entry in the character guide.

If a trope appeared in only one episode, it went to that episode's recap.

It isn't really that confusing, but the only notes explaining this appear only if you look at the history of the main, character, or episode pages, or at the very top of these pages if you start to edit.

Maybe it needs a clearer explanation that is more obvious instead of partially hidden?

edited 11th Aug '11 5:12:02 AM by ThMole

Well, the rule could be made clearer than it is, but my point is more that the rule doesn't really have a solid basis in the first place. There will always be alternate interpretations of whether a trope applies to one episode or more than one, as I pointed out earlier, and I don't think it's clear enough to separate tropes over.

And "more than one character"? I think some tropes belong on character pages' sections AND the main page, like Jerk with a Heart of Gold, as that clearly applies both to Rainbow Dash and Rarity.

EDITED IN: On a sidenote, I also think either of the following would make a better nightmare fuel section page image than the current one:

http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/8796/nitemarefuel0.png

http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/4505/nitemarefuel.png

edited 11th Aug '11 5:47:46 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

There will only be alternate interpretations of whether it applies to one episode or more to the extent that the trope itself is arguable. Piling everything on the main page doesn't solve that problem, it just means you get people arguing over whether or not a bullet point should exist rather than which page the trope gets listed on.

My preferred rule would be that extensively used tropes get listed in both places, but splitting them up by episode is miles better than having a ridiculously long trope list.

edited 11th Aug '11 9:45:32 AM by Micah

132 is the rudest number.

It's already a ridiculously long list. I don't think throwing in the tropes from the episode recap lists would make it that much longer.

And the fighting over a bullet list's examples wouldn't necessarily be as bad; a bullet list could organize examples by how obviously they are examples, such as...

• One example would be X...
• To a lesser extent, another example would be Y...

At the very least, not knowing which page to put examples on is obviously a bigger difference than not knowing whether to remove one bullet point or not.

edited 11th Aug '11 9:51:40 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

And similarly, you could list it in the recap as

• In a borderline example...

You don't need the other example next to it to do that.

Yes, splitting by episode makes curation slightly harder. The massive gain in readability makes it worthwhile, though.

132 is the rudest number.

What gain in readability are you referring to?

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

The gain from being able to read things in context. Alphabetical order is semantically random — the fact that a trope name starts with the letter A is totally meaningless. If someone wants to read a random selection of tropes from a series, either "tropes that happen in the first few episodes" (if they're trying not to be spoiled too much) or "tropes that happen a lot" will give them a much better sense of what it's about than "tropes that have been arbitrarily given names that come early in the alphabet".

Incidentally, it looks to me like the recap pages have about 30 lines of trope listing each, while the main page has about 800 lines. Since there are 26 episodes, that means folding the recap pages into the main page would double the length of the list — not at all an insignificant effect as you were suggesting.

132 is the rudest number.

The initial reason that the individual episode tropes were split out was because the main page broke. It's currently pushing the upper character limit. We can not physically put them back on the main. The server will have fits. As it stands, we're going to have to split the current trope list again somehow shortly.

The page is currently at over 345,000 characters. At 375,000 is where we split the page before the server takes a nose dive and crashes. Merging them is not an option.

edited 11th Aug '11 10:33:48 AM by shimaspawn

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

(At least on my computer) the folders are broken.

I think the episode and character pages are doing their job. Simplest solution seems to me: make separate pages for Main A-M and N-Z.

edited 11th Aug '11 10:43:22 AM by Thebes

Fair enough, I only looked at a couple of the recap pages and they seemed to have fewer tropes than that each. (Also, the words per trope mention are also higher on the main page than in the recap sections; the main page has some very thorough entries like Absentee Actor or Added Alliterative Appeal, while many in the recap pages are X Just X.)

Perhaps instead of shifting from recaps to main, we should be partly shifting main to recaps, such as reserving the main page's trope list for continued themes throughout the series, and the recaps' pages being for per-episode themes, even if one or two other episodes also contain the trope?

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

Seems like a good idea.

For the sake of the servers, this is probably the best course of action.

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

When it rains it pours!

I see one other person mentioned that the folders look broken, and they look that way to me, too.

We may have reached the limit of how big the main page can get.

If that's what happened — meaning this isn't just a coding error someone put in by mistake while editing — the solution is to split the page.

Examples of what I'm talking about include the Bleach page (which was discussed back when the folders were originally installed), and our own WMG page.

I made a notice of this at the bottom of the main discussion page. If we do end up splitting the page, we could hold off until the split is done, or try to hit two birds with one stone.

What do you guys think?

I say get a new server.

But failing that, I say don't bother splitting it into anything less than four.

To quote what I said on the discussion page..

I think one thing we can do is make sure we're not putting tropes in that aren't really there. I love this show, but surly not every trope on the net applies to it in some way or another.

Either way, we should think of ways of better organizing the pony pages in preparation for Season 2. We all know things are just gonna explode as soon as soon as the first teaser shows up.

You there! Check out my Youtube Channel! The power of Ponies compel you!

Let's just split the page in two now, it's really close to reaching the limit and it's better to do it now than to do it when we run out of room.

edited 11th Aug '11 7:08:10 PM by MONEYMAN

Is splitting this going to screw up the Related page?