Hardly ever used as a trope: Understatement

That's why it was being renamed, no?

We aren't talking about renaming it. Just cleaning it at the moment.

The problem is that the people trying to help seem to not be capable of understanding when the trope is being used correctly. We've had to put back an Understatement example twice already because, I'm pretty sure, the person who removed it simply did a bot-job and didn't bother to check the work.

Which one?

^^^^We're not renaming understatement. Sober up.

edited 8th Sep '11 2:33:46 PM by FastEddie

At all? Not even to a title that keeps Understatement in the title but is more difficult to pothole?

edited 8th Sep '11 2:39:39 PM by Arha

The name of the trope is not the problem. Lame usage is. We should fix the usage.

Yeah, but it's just going to become a problem again in the future.

If that's a risk that Eddie is willing to take, then so be it. Also, the fewer misuses there are, the less inclined people will be to copy that mentality.

I'm afraid I don't understand the policy in question. Here we have a trope that has a huge problem and will continue to have a problem in the future. Admin decree is that we absolutely can't change it. With Kuudere we have a trope that has no such issue and thus can't perpetuate itself, and admin decree is that we absolutely have to change it. I do not mind renaming Kuudere, but I don't like the lack of consistency.

They're hardly the same thing. One has an issue of overuse. One has an issue of underuse. One is in plain English. One is in another tongue. One needs clean up. The other needs to expand it's usage outside of the small community that knows the term.

Two different tropes with two different problems getting two completely different solutions is not at all that odd.

I think it's a matter of Policy Hierarchy (not an actual term). Basically, "whim of the admin" trumps "rules of the admin", and "rules of the admin" trumps "otherwise established and agreed upon behaviors".

Or something like that. At least, that's how *I* try to conduct myself.

Edit: I like what Shima said better. :)

edited 8th Sep '11 4:26:16 PM by LordGriffin

Huh? Kuudere has 1155 wicks. That's less than tsundere or yandere, but the trope itself is less common. And I don't approve of the way we can't even try to make decisions about it.

Fine. No point arguing about it. What are we going to do to keep it from being misused constantly, then?

edited 8th Sep '11 4:29:37 PM by Arha

If people absolutely refuse to use Understatement appropriately there are other options to take (such as perma-redlink it and rename to Understatement For Emphasis), which is what we do in extreme cases (such as "I Am Not Making This Up"). Tropes that inherently cause problems due to an obscure name or having a poor name/description relevance aren't given as much leeway.

Although I am worried that misuse will continue even when the bad wicks are cleaned out. The ultimate solution is to start pushing in the good wicks so editors can see the proper use of the trope versus the in-joke.

edited 8th Sep '11 5:42:49 PM by KJMackley

I just added a note to this page to warn people against Sink Hole usage of this trope. Feel free to tweak it if it's lacking in any way.

Oh boy, wick cleanup! I guess I'll have to take a break from spamming Facebook with Star Fox references.

^^I tweaked it and made it a bit less shouty.

Thanks... doing the cleanup of the misuse simultaneously made me realize just how much we needed the warning and progressively made me more and more intolerant of what really is simple overzealousness on the part of editors.

@Madrugada: Sorry for taking so long to answer. I've seen "Understatement" examples either wrongly deletes or deleted without an understanding of why it applies in NCIS, We Are All Pokemon Trainers, and The Pokedex Extended Fanon Edition and their subpages. In the last cases, which I watchlist, the editor who did it, called "bwburke94", did a very clumsy work even worse than a bot's as he not only deleted the understatement but also removes a following line of an entirely different trope. I've already warned this user.

I'd suggest that if we are going to go on yet another "whim of admin", as I have read somewhere, at least we take the care that the proper people are going to do this. I think the very few notable cases where the trope is being used correctly are going to be lost among a mass of deletes that everyone will take the apathetic attitude of not to check.

edited 9th Sep '11 7:17:08 PM by SilentReverence

I think there's a distinction between Understatement as a trope and Understatement as an internet meme.

The trope is: "A statement which, while technically accurate in a strictly literal sense, fails to convey the magnitude of the situation being described."

The meme is: "Any statement whatsoever that is accurate in a literal sense and conveys the magnitude of the situation being described." Basically, not an Understatement.

I don't think the name needs to be changed. Understatement is a trope. The problem isn't the trope itself, it's the meme. You can cull as many sinkholes as you want in editing, but the actual problem won't go away until the meme itself dies. The only way to solve this issue is by preventing the people themselves from misusing it.

Some possible solutions:

1) Rename. A rename would slow the sinkholes, but would lose the clarity of the original trope name in the process. Fast Eddie already said Understatement wasn't getting a rename, so this one's out.

2) Permanent Red Link Club/Lock. A permanent red link would prevent sinkholes, true. But again, Understatement is a trope. X Just X and This Troper and I Am Not Making This Up were never literary devices, just annoying Verbal Tics. Understatement is a legitimate thing, it's just misused a lot.

3) Cleanup. Really only a temporary fix. Either people will replace their Understatement sinkholes right after someone erases them or new tropers will come in and put in their own. Going off that notion...

4) Add a new edit tip: Check the Understatement page before potholing the word in the wiki. It won't get rid of the 9000 or so sinkholes that already exist, but it might help in preventing new ones from sprouting up. This, in conjunction with 3, might help a lot.

The only true way to stop this Understatement nonsense is to keep people from plugging it in everywhere, or from wanting to plug it in. Unless we get a concentrated effort to purge the misuses, everything we do will be drops in the bucket compared to the massive internet meme mammoth.

edited 16th Sep '11 8:43:45 PM by Prinnish

A clean-up effort is already underway. You can go here if you'd like to join in.

And the hope is that once the misuse is cleaned up, the issue will fade away, as most new tropers (and probably some not-so-new tropers) base edit behavior off of what they see; if they don't see Understatement used in the incorrect manner, they are far less likely to use it incorrectly themselves.

And tropers who reverse the removal of the Understatement sinkholes are getting warned/suspended.

Since cleanup's happening in special efforts, and we're not renaming the page, we can close this thread.