Brought up in the Trope Repair Shop
, we need to take out the in-jokey Understatement references. People are using it to make any given example "witty" rather than actually using the trope.
It's is extremely excessive, by early calculations there is a 95% misuse rate in that regard. But don't worry, the actual number to fix seems to be less than 9,000 (about 8700).
{Note, as of 12:30 am September 19th, the tally is down to 4228; We've gotten over halfway.}
{Note 2: as of 8:37 pm September 29th, it's down to 2412}
{Note 3: as of 6:16 Am October 3, there are 1868 wicks remaining. If the original assessment of ~90% misuse turns out to be correct, there will be between 800 and 900 good wicks left when we're done.}
{Note 4: As of 2:50 pm, October 6th, there were 1079 wicks remaining.}
{Note 5: as of 8:58 am on October 10, there were 729 wicks remaining. The entire list had been scrubbed. 111 of that 729 are those that a software glitch counts even though the page it's supposedly on no longer exists.}
{Note 6: Fast Eddie has modified the wick counter so that it no longer counts the dead namespaces "JBM" or "Crowning *". This killed off 75 of the phantom wicks remaining, for a final tally of 655 good wicks remaining of 8700+ original wicks}
Cleared Punctuated titles starting with:
- Completed!!
Cleared unpunctuated titles starting with:
- A-Z!
edited 21st Oct '11 8:54:57 AM by Madrugada
Think of the mooks!
I really need to clean up my trope page situation at some point. You're looking for Thirty Two Footsteps, chosen way back in the day because I found my usual login name (32_Footsteps - yes, always with the underscore) messed with the wiki's coding back in the day.
As for why, yeah, I think you're right on both counts.
Enough crying about the inhumanity of being; time to restart as of Ao No Exorcist.
EDIT: I can only assume that it'll only help so much, but I think we also need a note on the page for Understatement that warns against Sink Hole usage.
EDIT 2: Oh, for... There's actually a note on the Understatement page that people use it frequently here for Rule of Funny. We can figure out wording for the warning later, but I'm zapping that one toot sweet.
edited 1st Sep '11 11:38:10 AM by 32_Footsteps
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Think of the mooks!
Okay, done for now - cleared unpunctuated A up through A Space Marine Is You, next is Assassin Fantastic.
EDIT: Currently at 7875. As the wick check back in the original thread stood at 8788, we've cleared through a thousand of them (and, to be fair, covered more than just those, as we've found legit usage as well). Good progress thus far.
edited 1st Sep '11 11:59:28 AM by 32_Footsteps
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
—ignore
edited 1st Sep '11 12:13:04 PM by peccantis
"Huh, looks like we've made a lot of progress on the unpunctuated A's, in fact I think we're mostly done, I'll just polish them off..."
"oh god... there's so many..."
Cleared 18 examples or so, through Atomic Robo (stopping before Atop The Fourth Wall to avoid being spoiled), with some exceptions noted below. Also cleaned another 11 on the Homestuck subpages (didn't do Homestuck Jossed since that's supposed to be an archive of sorts). Notes:
- Assassin Fantastic: "Myhr's Adventure in Hell" is flagged as YMMV because it's a bullet point and there's a link to Complete Monster in there, which seems to me to be flagrant misuse, but not being familiar with the work, I don't know what to replace it with, or whether or not it's misuse at all. Also, the term appears in the example list, but in a form that I don't know whether it counts as in-universe.
- Asshole Victim: Oh god. The Detective Conan example... it makes my eyes bleed. So... many... troper... in-jokes... (Another example on the page, though not the meme, is counted above - and brings up an issue when the word is just randomly wikilinked. Should I just de-link it, or rephrase it?)
- Astroraptor shows up but does not seem to exist.
- Asuras Wrath: Has a second meme (Beyond the Impossible) in the Badass entry (and arguably a third, in the form of "X, dear GOD X"). Someone more familiar with the work want to fix that one?
- Atlantica Online: Shows up twice on the list for some reason. On Annoying Arrows, I'd need someone more familiar with what it's getting at: Oh, Crap!, or players getting angry at the player? Again, a second example cleaned and counted above.
- ThatOneBoss.Atlus: Wow, a double understatement, and one that means the opposite of what it's getting at to boot! But one I can't untangle as a result. Does it mean it's less than frustrating?
edited 2nd Sep '11 7:05:19 AM by MorganWick
Just so we're clear, what qualifies as an appropriate pothole to Understatement and what doesn't?
It's appropriate to Pot Hole to Understatement if and only if you're quoting a character making an understatement. If you made one when writing an entry, just rewrite it without the understatement.
Honestly, in I was unfamiliar with an example of for this one that was potholed, I'd probably just start editing with ye olde chainsaw.
edited 2nd Sep '11 8:20:10 AM by Balmung
Zzzzzzzzzz
From the That One Boss.Atlus page:
To say that this is frustrating on a first playthrough is [[UnderStatement a slight exaggeration.]] is a bad pothole, a sinkhole. It doesn't refer to the trope, it's just the editor who added that entry going "Ooooh, aren't I clever, I made an understatement. See? see?"
If that's the one you were talking about, Morgan, I just deleted the whole sentence, because it simply doesn't make any sense in the context of the rest of the entry, which is about how tough the boss is. If "a slight exaggeration" is the understatement, then it's actually a major exaggeration. So that sentence says, "to say this is frustrating on a first playthrough is a major exaggeration", which means "it isn't frustrating at all", which contradicts the entire rest of the entry.
It's also a good entry if it's actually listed as a trope in the trope list.
Morgan, we're running into a lot of artifact listings — pages that it isn't on, but are still showing up as wicks. Sometimes it means it's on a subpage, sometimes it just means that the database has an erroneous listing, sometimes it means that the page was cut (which as I understand it, means that the entry is still in the database, but flagged to not display, the same as "deleting" a file on your computer doesn't mean it's really gone, just that the space it's taking up is available to be overwritten.)
edited 2nd Sep '11 8:27:14 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Of course it's fine if it's actually in the trope list, but that's not a Pot Hole, so I didn't mention it.
I axed to other uses of Understatement that Morgan skipped, and rewrote that Detective Conan thing. The Asuras Wrath thing got the chainsaw to the whole string of potholes.
Sorry for cluttering up the thread with my timidity.
Think of the mooks!
@30 As the person who had hammered away at the unpunctuated A- section for a couple hours yesterday, I feel for you. In fact, come on over and I'll treat you to a drink.
One thing that definitely had my mind melting was that, for tropes that are split into subpages by medium, they're listed by the medium when figuring out the alphabeticals. So me cleaning out the An- section meant that I dealt with any page that had an Anime subsection. Like High Octane Nightmare Fuel, Ho Yay, and Squick. I'm dreading unpunctuated V- in the future due to the entire Video Games subsections.
Related to the Astroraptor thing, I noticed that there are a few that show up on the list but aren't really there. For example, all of the former "It Just Bugs Me" pages are still listed there, usually right next to "Headscratchers." IJBM naturally just redirects to the appropriate Headscratchers. And the former persist on the list even after you nuke the sinkhole from the latter page. Any idea what causes that?
EDIT: @35 - No, you noted in the thread where you felt that you couldn't make the right judgment call and asked others to help make it. That's not timidity, that's being sensible.
edited 2nd Sep '11 8:41:44 AM by 32_Footsteps
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Great, that just reminds me how unpleasant going through all of wicks that start with "A" in the Flat "What" cleanup thread was, so I'd agree that you guys deserve a freaking drink.
EDIT: The entries that show up in the related list, but don't actually exist is a long standing glitch with pages that are cut without being blanked.
edited 2nd Sep '11 8:51:33 AM by Balmung
Zzzzzzzzzz
What I've been doing for any page I open that has any of the tabbed subpages live on it (WMG, Heartwarming, Film, that whole string of possible tabs at the top) is to open each live tab into a new browser tab and simply do all of them in the same bunch. Yes, it means that the three "punctuated H" and 2 "punctuated K" pages listed generated about 40 individual pages to check, but it also means that I picked off a few that were probably listed individually father down the list.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
I only do that for ptitles since the related page gets namespaced unpunctuated titles just fine and they're right next to each other on the list.
edited 2nd Sep '11 9:09:51 AM by Balmung
Think of the mooks!
Oh, you people who aren't stuck using work computers that won't allow me to use a browser more advanced than IE 6.
Yes, that's what I'm forced to use at the moment.
God save my soul, I've hit the Av- section... so I get both Avatar and Avatar The Last Airbender as a double whammy in front of me. I'll be a while.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Zzzzzzzzzz
Oh, god, Footsteps. Leave one of those for someone else. Please don't try to do both of them... I'll take one.
edited 2nd Sep '11 9:38:39 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Think of the mooks!
Too late. I'm going to take a break for a while, having cleared through unpunctuated Aw-. Appropriately enough, next on the list is Ax-Crazy.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Thread activity: pick a related at random. Let's see who gets to zap most misuses from a single page :> My personal best is 6, although I can't tell which page it was.
edited 2nd Sep '11 10:12:58 AM by peccantis
Think of the mooks!
My best is two, plus one possibly correct usage, on A Wizard Did It (I wasn't sure if quoting an understatement on the Star Trek commentary track was good, so I left it). Though I'm not sure whether that's a "game" so much as a "record of the horrors encountered."
Starting again with Ax-Crazy. Insert joke here.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Zzzzzzzzzz
I got four on one page, but I don't recall which page.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Think of the mooks!
Unpunctuated A- is finished! Woot! I survived!
Wait... 7609 links to go.
...
Bring it on, B-, bring it on!
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Zzzzzzzzzz
Down from 8700 though... We're nearly an eighth of the way through.
Wait. *Does math...* We're at 7561, which is a little over 1200 of them, which is about a seventh of the original number.
edited 2nd Sep '11 11:50:05 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Think of the mooks!
Alright, I'm done for now. I've cleared out the unpunctuated Ba- section, so next on the list is Beach Stars. I think that doing that stretch in one run is starting to affect my mental health.
...
...
I'm Batman.
As a side note, the Bat-Computer notes that the number is down to 7495. This has been a clever plot by the Riddler, but we shall put an end to this.
Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.
Zzzzzzzzzz
You're better than Batman, dear. You also must be having a slow day at work.
I had been thinking what others might think when they see such a drive-by editing like this. A stock edit box comment would add just that much more extra time to this project.
Of course I am thinking there is no way that many wicks accumulated by a handful of people, so taking them all out as quick as we can will prevent others from thinking it's an okay practice. All other details such as the rename need to be handled in the trope repair shop.
edited 3rd Sep '11 1:52:02 AM by KJMackley
Thirty Two Footsteps, post 22, Edit 2:
1) Because people are stupid and think potholes are clever.
2) Yes, it is.
3) see #1
4) Because you're a dedicated troper who wants to make the wiki as good as possible? Alternatively, because you're a masochist?
5) Certainly.
edited 1st Sep '11 11:00:46 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.