Trope Repair Shop: Does it need improvement? (also concerns Image Pickin')

Well....It's worked with natter?

I follow mostly work pages (I plan on making a sock-puppet to follow Nightmare Fuel alone and use that to edit it once I have the time) and I micro-check every edit because it interests me. A pothole like that would be easy to spot for most people well versed in tropes and I would personally nail it every time I caught misuse.

Natter is easy to fix because it's like porn - you know it when you see it. Especially if you're a writer.

Because natter is easier to spot. Stuff with "To be fair" "That's not how it happened" etc... can be spotted by anyone. Double checking every edit in detail (especially when you think you know a page's definition, but don't) takes time and effort.

I've made TRS threads for stuff where people, even TRS regulars, never realized they were misusing it all this time (coz people only read the title: See And The Fandom Rejoiced for example).

You can always just type a PM by hand.

You don't even need a PM. Just make the change and put a detailed edit reason, so the person who wrote the bad example in the first place can see exactly why you changed it. Go to my recent edits on my contributor's page and you'll see what I mean.

It isn't just a matter of lazy editors who don't read page descriptions before adding examples, or don't understand the description.

It's also wicks. It's one thing to watchlist and spot bad edits on the page itself. But pothole misuse is much harder to systematically spot (tell me if there's any way for one person to spot them as they happen?) once there's a critical mass of pothole misuse, the misuse itself becomes the memetic standard assumption of the wiki culture. At that point, stamping out the misuse requires, at minimum, double-checking and cleaning every single wick within a short time-frame.

I like witty names, but it just ain't worth cleaning up after 1500 wicks of a badly misused trope if there are so many editors who don't read or don't understand descriptions. And nobody can force them to. (And yes, I think TRS-ers are sometimes guilty of that, too. And also of voting without reading and understanding a whole thread.)

edited 8th Feb '12 9:14:45 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Is anyone trying to say that between all of the amazingly creative and intelligent people we have on here we can't think up names that are clear concise and witty all at once? I don't believe that, I know the people on here are more then capable of that.

Don't think so, but it's there's always going to be the bell curve of good names, explicitly clear names, and weird names no matter how much effort we put into it. To fix all of that would on the scale of "No Title Left Behind." (Though if we ever do a massive rename campaign, this is what we got to call it.)

Know this could have massive implications for the site, but could we have a trope's Laconic entry be a mouse over text wherever said trope is linked?

edited 8th Feb '12 9:38:44 PM by moocow1452

While that is a good idea in theory (and has actually been suggested before, IIRC), it would require a massive cleanup of the laconics (most of them are... bad). Which is also something that I'm pretty sure has been attempted and fizzled out.

We've tried full scale laconic clean ups on multiple occasions. Most of them are worse than bad. They're actively misleading because the people who wrote them were the same tropers that only read the title and not the trope in the first place.

That's sort of like the two problems of my car not working and my car not being my favorite color. The first is worth fixing, the second is only worth fixing if it's convenient. If we're going to rename, it has to be because the old name was bad, not because it lacked a joke. And references don't count as witty, which is what most people seem to think witty means.

There's got to be something between "so long as a title is clear, we are keeping it forever," and "we must change all the things," right?

I do this, too, and everyone should have detailed (polite) edit reasons, but I'm not convinced it works. I think most editors are the drive-by kind, who edit a page and don't come back for a while, if at all. I know I've had more luck stopping problem natterers by PM than by edit reason. For example, before the natterfy button I used to just follow problem natterer or someone with poor gramamr through their edit history and fix everything with a detailed edit reason. I'd then follow up periodically. They rarely corrected their behavior.

With a PM and a clean-up, they usually shape up. Those that don't end up getting reported on Ask The Tropers, but that rarely has to happen if you just ask them nicely and explain why it's bad.

I have to say, I've had a lot more luck with P Ms myself, and it has changed at least one troper's behaviour. I had a problem about a couple weeks back with someone who just was not spelling things correctly. One PM and they went back, cleaned up all their mistakes, and since then they've been spelling things correctly. I monitored them for a week and when they stayed clean I let them go. P Ms work. Having a list of them for common situations would make people more likely to send them.

Would there be any way to tag relevant Special Efforts threads to the pages they're modifying? Right now, without tagging, Special Efforts to change groups of pages aren't transparently visibile wiki-side.

Let me rig up a special kind of bulletin that only shows up for people that are logged in. That will put it in the view of the people who are interested in the sausage-making part of the wiki, and still not bother people who aren't interested in that sort of thing.

edited 9th Feb '12 8:48:52 AM by FastEddie

Another thing that might be nice is if we can get someone or someones to take over the newsletter thing again. Write up big decisions and what's going on with wiki policy maybe with a bit of humour thrown in. Just sort of a brief summary for people who want to know what's going on with sausage making, but don't want follow the whole process in detail.

If someone could give me bullet points, I could help out.

Actually there a new one up two weeks ago, Bobby G even wrote a part for a segment that would normally have been reserved for a quote from Fast Eddie promoting his invasion of Idaho or something. Last week got put on hold because some stuff but this weeks issue should be up on Saturday.

edited 9th Feb '12 9:35:24 AM by Parable

Maybe those need to go on the announcements when they come out then.

It didn't get out to anyone, then. I never saw it.

Regarding Deboss's remark that references don't count as witty - perhaps we should point that out on the Clear Concise Witty page, and/or create a page explaining that References Arent Witty?

We have numerous tropes with names that are genuinely funny, or failing that, at least a passable pun. And then we have numerous tropes named after a 50-year-old film in which the trope appears once. The former is witty, the latter is not.

Some Trope Namers are like pre-existing terms: Never caught on in the first place, so you shouldn't feel pressured to use it (which is the essence of Trope Namer Syndrome).

BTW, regarding that discussion from four pages ago about crowner outcomes and who's willing to do the work, idea: When a mod calls a crowner with winning options, how about the mod being able to see exactly who voted for/against said options? Then they know who to call for volunteers on the entailing cleanup work, because very few others (and certainly nobody who voted against it) will volunteer their time for the task.

"The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few."
(I don't need to attribute that one)

That requires people to actually go look at the edit history. I'm sure most people who don't read the trope description also aren't going to read that, they're just going to see that what they added was removed and put it right back in. Ideally, hitting the edit button should take you to a modified history page that shows you changes you've made and changes made to those changes, along with any reasons, before it lets you actually edit anything. Though I think that would be either a pain in the ass or outright impossible to implement.

edited 9th Feb '12 2:53:52 PM by Blissey1

I don't know where the quote is from either. This is why we killed the examples from that trope.

I have to say, that history thing would make large scale repairs and wick cleanings even more annoying than they already can be.

I do like the idea of a References Arent Witty page. A lot of people seem to mistake random character names for humour.