Update: I've finished going over every Greek and Mesopotamian example in Older Than Dirt, and cross-checking every trope on Older Than Print through Older Than Television.
There are so wicks where somebody linked to Older Than Dirt solely to say "This is really old," but Did Not Do The Research to find out how old, or even did provide a date that is much later than 500 BC! The vague name "Older Than Dirt" encourages people to treat it as a synonym of Oldest Ones in the Book, without noticing the 500 BC cutoff point.
To prevent more of this abuse, I request permission (and information how) to change Older Than Dirt into a redirect to Oldest Ones in the Book, and move its contents to a new index with a different name, like Older Than Rome or Older Than Democracy. A specific name would more clearly show that the index has a historical cutoff, and is not a dumping ground for everything that might be somewhat old. It would discourage degredation/decay.
UPDATE: I'm examining wicks now, and several are dubious examples of their trope (a separate problem) or just inaccurate wicks that post-date 500 BC.
UPDATE 2: Now done with all punctuated titles and all un-punctuated to the end of F. Over 100 misused wicks changed or removed so far.
Where can I go to ask permission to rename this index?
edited 31st Oct '11 8:02:06 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Hi Arcades Sabboth — I planned to make such a thread myself for some time, so I'm pretty much on your side. Going through your list:
1) For simplicity’s sake, I'd favor 1900 as the rule-of-thumb cutoff date of Older Than Radio. I am not sure with Older Than Television, there are a lot of dates that could be chosen with some legitimacy (have a look at Wikipedia's article on the history of television
for that matter - but you probably already did that).
Tendentially, I'd prefer a later date over an earlier date (39 rather than 36, but maybe even a later year) — there is a certain anomaly in that the Older Than Television era is the shortest of them all (some 40 years at most), shorter even than the era since television (some 70 years).
However, there will always be tropes which fall in a grey area, no matter how the cut-off dates are set. It should also be considered to what era the trope really "belongs to" more. For example, a trope that emerged with radio plays would have to go to Older Than Television, even if it was first used in 1898.
2) A good idea. Generally, every entry on these indexes should specify the source work where it's found, and explain why it is this trope.
3) You’re right, I noticed that too. We should have an overview of which parts of The Bible fit in the works list (I recently tidied up that list a bit, but I know almost nothing about the development of the Bible). The best would be if somebody knowledgeable on the matter would go about it. It could be tricky, though: from what I read on wikipedia the last few days, the dating of many books of the Bible is rather controversial. Obviously, there are various matters of faith and strands of religious tradition involved.
4) Yes, I noticed that too. But where Wikipedia doesn't have the answers, I am none the wiser myself ...
5) Yes, that's exactly what I think too. The final goal should be that no trope without a verifiable source is here.
About renaming: To rename a trope, the usual way to go is to open an Trope Repair Shop, to get some discussion (and possibly a vote) on the matter. However, there is currently a major backlog of Trope Repair Shops (the maximum number of repair shops on the wiki is being reduced), so the chances of being able to make a new one are currently rather slim (you may try, though). Go here (the button to create a new TRS is on the bottom right corner).
Personally, I see your point, but it’s hard to come up with a title that is equally catchy. Older Than Dirt is a pre-existing phrase which Older Than Democracy is not.
I also went through letters V-Z of the Older Than Dirt wicks and cleaned out misuse. Where it is misused or unsourced, the link sometimes can be replaced painlessly by "very old" or by Older Than They Think. Still, there are many instances where I just don't know how old the source is, or where I am not sure if it's the trope at all. I sense that tropers generally like to shoehorn tropes into older works.
And besides, you have been doing a great job with improving these pages, Arcades Sabboth!
edited 1st Nov '11 4:02:07 PM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
Thanks Lord Gro!
I did have to look up radio and tv history on Wikipedia, and those seemed to be the dates that made sense to me.
I have changed many wicks to Older Than Feudalism. It seems that frequently Greek and Roman myths are assumed to be Older Than Dirt. But when I don't know the time period or can't find examples, I just delete it too.
The biblical dating issue is unfortunate. But if, as Wikipedia says, there is currently no consensus on dating it, I guess it would make sense to continue using the previous model, which is summarized on Older Than Dirt and The Bible. It's a bit like physicists still using relativity and quantum mechanics, because they can't agree what should replace them.
I don't really think Older Than Democracy is any less catchy than Older Than Radio, but maybe I'm not familiar with some pop-culture references there. Democracy was created, in both our republican form and the Athenian form, around 509 BCE, and indicates that a particular historical period is intended. The trouble with Older Than Dirt is that it's too catchy, and the popular meaning is ahistorical. The catchiness encourages abuse. If it just redirected to The Oldest Ones in the Book, that would represent the meaning tropers are assigning to it.
I also wonder how big Older Than Dirt can get. So many tropes have legitimate-looking examples that aren't indexed there. If it gets super huge would it be a good idea to split it in two?
EDIT: Just deleted a wick that claimed Warhammer 40k is Older Than Dirt. Seriously, some tropers have no clue what this index is for.
Several wicks are on works instead of tropes. A work is Older Than Dirt if it contains any trope that is Older Than Dirt? That's what a lot of tropers think. Nevermind that the index itself only indexes tropes.
edited 1st Nov '11 4:49:26 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Well, you're probably right on the 'catchiness' issue. As a descriptor, Older Than Democracy would be quite good.
I also thought about a possible split of Older Than Dirt, but then the cutoff date would reasonably be at about 1500 BC or older, and I wonder what and how many works or sources there actually are for this period?
Another issue is that fictional beings, like Valkyrie, Archangel, Pegasus are being listed. They are not strictly tropes. Should we collect them on these index pages at all? If yes, how about making an extra section for these?
As to the Greek Mythology problems: I did a little reading on Orpheus on Wikipedia. It seems that Orpheus' Magic Music skills were first described by Simonides of Ceos, who presumably lived from c. 556 to 468 BC. In other words, this is an example where a Trope Maker falls pretty much between two of the defined eras (Older Than Dirt and Older Than Feudalism in this case). Without any exact knowledge on when Simonides made his poems on Orpheus (and probably nobody knows), putting Orpheus' Magic Music in either category is speculative.— I'd tend to put him in Older Than Feudalism, though, as Simonides' seems to have reached the high point of his career after 509 BC and I think it's generally more reasonable to put a trope that is in the "grey area" in the younger category.
edited 1st Nov '11 4:25:22 PM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
I've generally put tropes in grey areas in the younger category, but I haven't with Sun Tzu. Should I move his stuff? If the majority of a writer's life is in the older section, then maybe that is more fitting.
As for possibly splitting Older Than Dirt, if it is necessary I favor 900 BCE. That is after a big cultural breakdown and reorganization in the mediterranean area, and marks the beginning of the iron age in Europe and Africa, and I think in south Asia, and is when iron was first widespread anywhere even in Mesopotamia. It's also close to the beginning of the Greek alphabet, and marks the beginning of Phrygia, Lydia, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Most Mesopotamian and nearly all Egyptian examples would then land in Older Than Steel / Older Than Iron, with the Greek, biblical, avestan, Buddhist, Persian, and Chinese examples after 900 BCE. It would be fairly easy for me to sort the tropes.
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
I think Sun Tzu should go under Older Than Feudalism. Wikipedia seems to imply that even 'traditionalists' assume that his work was written after 512 BC, and many believe that The Art of War is generally younger anyway.
About splitting Older Than Dirt: This issue should also be decided in a Trope Repair Shop — so we got the same problem as above.
I think a reason that Older Than Dirt collects so many entries is that we usually assume that an Ur-Example is also the Trope Maker. But, as the page for Ur-Example says, what appears as a trope in hindsight was actually an Ur-Example when it first appeared, and sometimes a lot of time can pass between the Ur-Example and the Trope Maker.
For example, Achilles in His Tent is a trope which is named after The Iliad, but is it actually a trope Older Than Dirt? For when it appeared in The Iliad, it possibly wasn't a trope at all, but a unique and unprecedented plot twist (an Ur-Example).
Edit: Cleaned out all the Older Than Dirt wicks from T below the entries starting with "The" down to Z.
edited 1st Nov '11 7:11:37 PM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
I think trying to make any kind of determination about what was actually a trope in year X (rather than which works we can retroactively see tropes in) is basically doomed to failure, especially when X is as far back as 509 BCE. We're just missing too much context.
In any case, the Homeric example of Achilles in His Tent is definitely part of the history of the trope, whether it would have been recognized as such at the time or not, so noting that seems worthwhile.
132 is the rudest number.
I can see what you are getting at, Micah. Applying a date to a trope can be anachronistic. I don't know what Trope Maker, Trope Codifier, and Ur-Example are, but I think I get the gist. For example, if Achilles in His Tent shows up in the The Iliad, but never again until 400 AD, then it wasn't a trope back then, just a one-off.
If that is misuse of the concept of troping then I can see trimming the indexes. But some tropes were common in the past. Look at Rape Is OK If Its Divine On Mortal. That is so constant in Greek Mythology it could be their motto. Unless you want to argue that the entire concept of tropes, even hypothetically, is too culture-specific to say that tropes of any kind existed in the past at all, I can't see saying this wasn't a trope in Greek myths.
Tropes on the index range from one example to more than we could list without a wall of text.
In other news: I am going to start a TRS thread for this, so I need to do a wick check, so I'm going to stop clearing the wicks until I finish starting the thread.
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
and : I agree that it's worthwile to collect examples even if they are Ur Examples. It is a reason that the number of entries in Older Than Dirt is so huge, though (not a bad thing in itself).
Otherwise, I researched the Bible dating issues and here is what I found. (Guess you learn something from working for TV Tropes!) First up, the books of the Bible can be divided into three groups: The Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), the Deuterocanon, and the New Testament. In overview:
I. The Tanakh = The Jewish Bible a.k.a. the Hebrew Bible canon. Makes up the greater part of the Christian Old Testament. Consists of three parts:
- 1. The Torah = The Five Books of Moses = Pentateuch.
- Genesis and Deuteronomy (the first and the last one) were probably completed Older Than Dirt.
- The other three (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers) had first drafts in the Older Than Dirt era, but the text in its present form was only fixed in Older Than Feudalism.
- 2. Nevi’im (Prophets)
- Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah – at the end of, but within Older Than Dirt.
- Jeremiah, Ezekiel – unsure, but probably Older Than Dirt, too.
- The Twelve a.k.a. Minor Prophets are actually 12 minor texts:
- Hosea, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah – Older Than Dirt
- Joel – Unknown
- Jonah, Malachi – Older Than Feudalism.
- 3. Ketuvim (Writings)
- Lamentations – Older Than Dirt.
- Psalms, Proverbs – Completed and fixed Older Than Feudalism, but many parts are Older Than Dirt.
- Job – Unknown.- However, there is an Older Than Dirt Akkadian poem called Ludlul bel nemeqi (I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom a.k.a. Poem of the Righteous Sufferer), also known as 'the Babylonian Job', which tells much of the same story.
- Song of Songs – Unknown, but there are Older Than Dirt predecessors.
- Ruth, Ecclesiastes (Kohelet), Esther, Daniel, Ezra (incl. Nehemiah), Chronicles – Older Than Feudalism.
II. Deuterocanon of the Old Testament. Makes up the rest of the Christian Old Testament. Which books make up the deuterocanon varies between Catholics and different Orthodox churches. Jews and Protestants have no deuterocanon. The Catholic Deuterocanon are the following: Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah, Expanded Esther, Expanded Daniel. Generally Older Than Feudalism.
III. New Testament: Older Than Feudalism - obviously.
Summing up: My suggestion is to let everything from the Tanakh pass as Older Than Dirt except Jonah, Malachi, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra/Nehemiah and Chronicles. Everything else is definitely Older Than Feudalism.
edited 2nd Nov '11 4:13:46 PM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
Wow, thanks for doing that!
"Conclusion: My suggestion is to let everything from the Tanakh pass as Older Than Dirt except Jonah, Malachi, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra/Nehemiah and Chronicles. Everything else is Older Than Feudalism."
Mostly I agree, but I would err on the side of caution by moving Song of Songs, Job, and Joel to Older Than Feudalism.
If I follow right, the Christian Old Testaments are Tanakh + Deuterocanon?
edited 2nd Nov '11 4:06:26 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Updated the index pages. I've put Joel, Job and Song of Songs into Older Than Dirt. So long as we are not as nitpicky with the rest, there is no reason to be more sceptical about these three.
Edit: Finished cleaning up letters G to Z of the Older Than Dirt wicks. The whole wick list should now be purged.
edited 7th Nov '11 10:38:29 AM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
OK, thanks! I finished the wick check.
edited 2nd Nov '11 8:36:52 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
As the Older Than Dirt page awaits the outcome of the renaming crowner — how is it about the Older Than Feudalism wicks? Do they need wick-checking too, or have you already started checking them, Sabboth?
Let's just say and leave it at that.
Haven't checked them. I was planning to leave the wicks for after the renaming decisions are made and carried out.
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
But will this really affect the Older Than Feudalism wicks? We aren't going to try to rename Older Than Feudalism, are we?
Let's just say and leave it at that.
No, I meant putting off moving all the Older Than Dirt wicks, and whatever else needs to be done with whatever wicks.
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Well, I finished double-checking all the Older Than Feudalism examples. Tomorrow I plan to wade into the quagmire of Older Than Dirt wicks and clean up, since a rename is looking unlikely.
But I have to ask, why are these indexes wicked so much? Saying "That makes this Older Than (index)" after an example seems to treat them as tropes. Other indexes don't seem to get the same. Isn't this kind of weird? Maybe it even encourages misuse.
edited 15th Dec '11 8:50:45 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Editors tend to think that tropes are better when they are older.
It's become a stock phrase, like X Just X, So Yeah etc. (which were redlinked because they flooded the wiki), resp. stock pothole (like Understatement and others). I assume people do it because they see other editors do it, and think it's normal etiquette.
Let's just say and leave it at that.
If it's a stock phrase then should it be killed with fire? Wicking indexes isn't normal, is it?
If it was only examples to worry about, there'd probably be far less misuse.
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
I wouldn't say that they should be eradicated like those in the Permanent Red Link Club. There probably can be legitimate reasons to link to or pothole an 'Older Than X' page.
However, it's true that many of the wicks that point here are inflationary.
Let's just say and leave it at that.
Well, I've cleaned up wicks A-H and I'm removing all of the "that makes this..." verbal tic potholes. Mostly I'm changing them to
- Older Than [index]: [example]
Also, somebody added another Greek example to the index, without reading the page description. *sigh*
How so many people can be against a rename with this continuing abuse is baffling me. But after I finish the wicks, I'll be sure to watch how much new misuse accumulates.
edited 18th Dec '11 7:52:11 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
Uhhg... OK I finished cleaning and double-checking all the Older Than Dirt wicks today, removing misuse, moving tons to Older Than Feudalism. Now it's down to 186 wicks. That includes a few locked pages that will get corrected eventually, and an archive that won't.
I'll keep a watch to see whether misuse continues to accumulate on the wicks and/or examples.
edited 27th Dec '11 11:52:44 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
The Older Than X (The Oldest Ones in the Book) tropes are messy, especially Older Than Dirt and Older Than Feudalism, and I request help fixing them. I have been working for a week or so trying to make them more accurate, but there are still several issues which IMO need to be addressed:
1. Older Than Steam / Older Than Radio and Older Than Radio / Older Than Television currently have entire decades as their cutoff dates. This is too vague. Right now, anything written or filmed during the 1890s or 1940s could go in two different pages. I suggest changing the television cutoff to 1936 or 1939. The radio cutoff could be 1898, 1899, or 1900.
2. I propose adding something to each page that says "Before adding a trope to this page, please make certain that it was written or illustrated in a work dated to before [_YEAR_]. After adding it, please make sure the trope's page references the correct period."
3. The biblical tropes need to be completely re-organized. Older Than Dirt and The Bible describe ways to date the different books of the Bible. But tropes from the Bible are just distributed randomly between Older Than Dirt and Older Than Feudalism. They need somebody who is familiar with biblical scholarship to sort these tropes by which book they appear in and when theose books are dated, and move them to the correct Older Than pages.
4. Greek Mythology is in a similar situation to the biblical tropes. I am currently investigating the originating text/work and date for each such trope and moving them to the correct Older Than pages. However my sources don't provide details dating the individual texts about: the line of Cadmus, the line of Tantalus, the Trojan War, the Returns, and Orpheus. So I would like help dating tropes that use them as examples.
5. Some tropes, especially in Older Than Dirt, have no example at all. They say "folklore and myth the world over" or just have nothing. I think every trope should have a dated example to justify dating it to a particular time period. I think examples should come from works of writing or visual art, or other historical evidence, not "it's oral history/folklore/myth so it must be old." I've tried to find examples on the tropes' pages, but some don't even have examples Older Than Television. I removed some tropes from these index pages because of this.
edited 28th Oct '11 6:03:31 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.