Flat What cleanup thread

I've noticed that Flat "What" has been becoming used as a Verbal Tic and troper response And That's Terrible. In the interest of resolving this, massive cleanup is required.

Anyway, as a demonstration of this misuse, here's the results of a check of 50 random wicks (not counting cases of X Just X, but noting them) while staying in only the Main and media namespaces. All of the wicks in Funny, Awesome, High Octane Nightmare Fuel, Tear Jerker, Fridge, Headscratchers, YMMV, and WMG can probably be safely assumed to be incorrect.

Misuse:

1. After The Academy: Sink Hole
2. Battlestar Galactica - Sink Hole, troper response, in natter
3. Confusion Fu - troper response
4. Beatles Cartoon - two counts of misuse as troper response/Verbal Tic
5. Flipped - Sink Hole
6. Gratuitous Panning - Verbal Tic
7. Heil Honey Im Home - In the trope list as an Audience Reaction, rather than anything a character says.
8. Hellfire - I'm pretty sure that the tone of "say what?" is usually more incredulous than flat, regardless, I think it's a gratuitous Pot Hole.
9. Iron Storm - Verbal Tic
10. Jak And Daxter - Verbal Tic
11. King Arthurs Disasters - Verbal Tic
12. Mardek - Verbal Tic
13. Mnemosyne - Verbal Tic
14. Persona - Verbal Tic
15. Ranger - Verbal Tic
16. Rhyming with Itself - Verbal Tic and natter
17. The Savage Dragon - Audience Reaction, also, natter
18. Seven Deadly Sins - Verbal Tic and natter
19. Shadow Man - Verbal Tic
20. Stealth Hi/Bye - "Whaaa?" Doesn't sound like a flat what to me, and I don't think the example it's attached to belongs on the page.
21. Subbing for Santa - Two cases of Sinkholing it to question marks in the same entry.
22. Tales Of Phantasia - Verbal Tic
23. Totally Radical - Sink Hole
24. True Art Is Offensive - Verbal Tic (in the fifth bullet point of natter no less)
25. Two Worlds - Sink Hole
26. Valkyrie - Sink Hole
27. Water Is Dry - Verbal Tic
28. Wolfenstein 3 D - Verbal Tic
29. The World Cup - Sink Hole
30. WTH, Casting Agency? - Verbal Tic

X Just X:

1. What The Fuck Is Wrong With You
2. Erfworld

Correct:

1. Star Kits Prophecy
2. Antihero F Or Hire
3. Gastro Phobia
4. Digimon Arcadia
5. The Fairly Oddparents
6. The Life After Death Trilogy
7. The Muppet Show
8. Nigahiga
9. Oxhorn Short Shorts
10. Psychic Static - Technically correct, though I don't think the quote it's attached to is necessary for the page.
11. Pokémon: Attack of Mewtwo
12. Over The Gun - I think.
13. Pushing Up Roses
14. Recettear
15. Red Vs Blue
16. South Park
17. Star Driver
18. Titus
19. Yukari Is Free
20. Zero Punctuation

This amounts to an astounding 60% misuse when omitting all cases of X Just X.

This thread was restarted here at the recommendation of Madrugada from TRS.

Please post whatever progress you make in cleaning it up by how far you got in the "Related To..." page. Provided that this is done, I'll at least attempt to keep this post updated with the most recent point reached in the wicks.

Here's a link to the related page https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/relatedsearch.php?term=Main/FlatWhat

All the ptitles, A-D and U-Z are done, though the related page is being weird.

edited 9th Sep '11 7:30:45 AM by Balmung

To add a bit: With this kind of misuse and 1304 wicks, that means that there are probably at least 750 bad uses out there. This needs a concentrated clean-up effort; while cleaning up those you happen across will help, it's becoming entrenched as a verbal tic,and that means that lots of people see it used that way and assume that it's ok to do so.

• I've gone through the Punctuated titles as far as Mmkay?; most of the ptitles I checked didn't actually have it in the page. I'm going to ask about that.

edited 15th Aug '11 8:43:06 PM by Madrugada

Did you remeber to try the subpages? (ie. It was on 1984's headscratchers page since the related to pages only show the main page for ptitles, even if it's on a subpage), but I can't really fix much from my phone since editting with this is kind of a pain.

edited 16th Aug '11 3:59:50 AM by Balmung

I fixed a lot of wicks in the first post.

No. I forgot that it's sometimes hiding in a subpage.

I'll mention that to FE and see if he can tweak the related to widget to list the actual page if it's in a namespace on a ptitled page. You know, in his copious free time.

edited 16th Aug '11 10:01:25 AM by Madrugada

I cleaned all the ptitles up to Earth Bound, though the related page is being weird about it. I would have done more, but my netbook's being a bit slow.

I just finished clearing out the misuse of the redirects which was every last one of those links.

I've finished cleaning the ptitles. All remaining wicks on ptitles are either correct or false positives. There's also pretty substantial misuse involving sinkholing any old use of the word "what" to Flat "What", regardless of context.

Cleaned Y-Z. Is anyone else on this? And if so, feel free to report in.

And now I've cleared A.

Current stats:

Holy crap, that's 898 new inbounds since August 15th.

edited 1st Sep '11 9:14:49 PM by Balmung

Did B up through "Blunt "Yes"".

edited 5th Sep '11 9:44:09 AM by Balmung

Finished up B. Anyone want to help here?

I'll tackle the Ws. EDIT: done.

edited 5th Sep '11 4:34:42 PM by AmyJade

Starting on the Vs. EDIT: Did V & U.

edited 5th Sep '11 7:45:21 PM by AmyJade

And I just did all the Cs.

And I cleared the Ds.

Bump, since I'm not sure this ever finished. The only current ptitle with a wick to this trope is Memes.ptitlevos5dvs8, which seems to be fine.

No, I never did finish, and I didn't get all that much help since only a few people ever hopped on to help. The larger Understatement cleanup probably didn't do this cleanup any favours, and by now, everything that had been cleaned probably needs to be rechecked.

I'll try to get back to it next week.

edited 18th Jan '12 7:11:14 AM by Balmung

I've finished re-cleaning the ptitles and unpunctuated A-B.

Up next is Chopped.

edited 26th Jan '12 7:21:16 PM by Nocturna

Is this still happening?

In the As I found about three troper reaction ones. One was on a Headscratchers page, one was not a sinkhole but referenced as an audience reaction alongside an In-Universe example, and one was at the end of a third level bullet (easy target ).

Should the one on the Headscratchers page be removed? I don't read those pages often, so I'm not sure troper reactions like Flat "What" are kill-on-sight on them.

Misuse should be removed even on a Headscratchers or Moments page. The only exception are archived pages, but those have "archive" in the title and should already be locked.