Fixing zero context examples

There's a discussion going on about Roleplay.Disney Conquest right now, but while actions on that are pending, I've removed ZCE from that page and the character pages. The editor of Characters.Disney Conquest Dawnseekers removed the "Zero-Context Example entries are not allowed on wiki pages"... notice without touching the majority of commented out examples, but I'm not sure that warrants a tap on the shoulder since it wasn't a mod notice.

I think it does, since it's still an explicit notice and removing it is usually a bad sign.

Tabs, you may want to join us over at the Roleplay Cleanup thread, so we can figure out how to treat these bad RP pages, rather than cause ourselves more headache.

G3ae uncommented some ZCEs on Kyle XY without adding any context. I'd fix them myself, but my Kindle Fire can't handle the page.

Sent them a notifier. I can tackle the page if you'd like.

I'd like it a lot. Thank you!

Done, wasn't too bad~

Characters.Jewelpet 2009 needs help; I'd do it, but I'm devoting my night to cleaning up Fragile Flower wicks...

Edit: Scratch that, other character pages in Franchise.Jewelpet are just as bad. This is goin' in the sandbox.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 18th 2019 at 1:05:18 PM

Well, Characters.Rebuild Of Evangelion and the Characters.Neon Genesis Evangelion subpages (i.e. the Children, NERV staff, etc.) may need to have some look-overs for ZCE examples.

Edited by gjjones on Jul 22nd 2019 at 2:54:19 PM

Fictional Sport also has a ridiculously large amount of ZCEs that fail to explain what the sports even are, or at the very least (if the author never explains what the sport is) what makes them stand out as fictional sports. Another obscenely large portion of the examples also fail to explain the narrative use of the sports.

Edited by Albert3105 on Jul 23rd 2019 at 11:19:52 AM

Hey, so I want to discuss something. The dreaded "Trope Happens" ZCE. They tend to pop up on "self-explanatory" tropes like Troubled Fetal Position, and mean, well, nothing. My concern is, we can comment them out all day, but how can we actually fix these sort of tropes? What context would be added?

What event caused them to curl up in a fetal position?

That fixes Troubled Fetal Position, but generally speaking honestly, a lot of "Trope Happens" zces are very hard to explain properly, to the point where people seem to consider "character does this" enough context. Not every trope this happens on will be so easy to fix.

Such as Fictional Sport - getting its examples to properly follow our ZCE and People Sit on Chairs policy would require expanding the page to like 3x its current size.

Edited by Albert3105 on Jul 23rd 2019 at 11:22:56 AM

Yep.

That said, I think I can go through tonight or tomorrow and hide the blatant ZCEs on that page.

On Troubled Fetal Position or Fictional Sport?

Fictional Sport. Fetal Position is a little much.

The only times "trope happens" should even be considered are on Personal Appearance Tropes and the like since there's often no actual in-universe reason for them, just that a character happened to be designed that way. Who could give context to, e.g. 90% of Fingerless Gloves beyond "(character) wears them?"

Funny you mentioned Fingerless Gloves, that's one of the pages I noticed with an insane amount of context issues. The Personal Appearance thread mentioned that the trope might actually need to be split, since it's trying to trope every possible reason for fingerless gloves and failing at it.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 23rd 2019 at 11:52:54 AM

I picked it for being particularly bad with context (probably due to its nature as a common costume trope.)

There's a reason why there's a moratorium on new appearance tropes and a cleanup thread meticulously examining them for tropeworthiness. If literally all the context you can think of for the majority of examples is "trope happens," it makes sense to start questioning whether it's actually a trope.

Edited by HighCrate on Jul 23rd 2019 at 9:47:25 AM

Yeah, that's kinda why I wanted to bring it up, since commenting them out is fine and all, but sometimes it's the trope itself causing the problems.

As much as I dislike the phrasing of "[trope] happens when [explanation]", entries like those typically are not ZCE, so I leave them alone. "Troubled Fetal Position: Bob does this when it dawns on him how blah blah." That isn't too different from restating the trope, yet the latter looks more specific, much better. "Troubled Fetal Position: Bob curls up into a ball when it dawns on him how blah blah."

Edited by Tabs on Jul 23rd 2019 at 10:55:33 AM

IDK, my criteria involves explaining how the trope is used. If the trope is "Bob curls into a Troubled Fetal Position", then saying "Bob does this when..." is Trope Happens with a "when" added. The problem is that there's no other way to explain the trope, so even if it doesn't fit my personal standards, I can also see why it may not be considered a ZCE.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 24th 2019 at 3:39:56 PM

Yeah, honestly we have a problem with no particularly clear solution here. Commenting it out isn't really fine if nobody can figure out how to fix it. Attempting to add full context to some entries just seems like you're doomed to waffle and recount far too much of the scene, but they can't really be left as just 'trope happens'. I guess there is inspecting and worst-case-scenario, TRS-ing every trope individually but that's, like, the slowest possible solution.

Edited by HalfFaust on Jul 24th 2019 at 3:40:21 AM

I consider the "[character] is this" or "[character] does this" or "this happens when" phrasing one of my personal bugbears. At best, it's vague and awkward and should be rephrased; at worst it's a sign of a ZCE (if sometimes one with a lot of words).

My feeling is that if the best you can do is rephrase it to avoid the awkward "this" phrasing, it's good to at least do that much. Cleanup is always a volunteer effort, of course, so no shame on anyone who would rather not mess with it and tackle easier-to-handle problems first before getting into tricky edge cases.

Questions of tropeworthiness are a little outside the scope of this thread, but there are other areas of the wiki dedicated to addressing those questions, and they are making progress little by little. You do what you can where you can.

Edited by HighCrate on Jul 24th 2019 at 9:55:05 AM