I like the difs. They are one of the primary functions I use the history for. I don't see how making it less functional would be a good idea.
Removing that diff function wouldn't make people read them more. It would just make them less functional.
edited 9th Feb '12 5:58:23 PM by shimaspawn
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. DickWhat @404 and @406 said. You know how on Wikimedia platforms the "history" page provides only a summary list and has extra links for generating diffs from? Kinda like that, but we don't really need it to be that complex. I'd be happy with functionality along the lines of:
- "Abridged" history: Quick summary of all edits. No diffs. Just timestamps, usernames, and edit reasons (when given). Page loads much faster, lots easier to scan for dates, edit reasons or usernames of interst with no article markup getting in the way.
- "Full" history: Includes the diffs for each edit. Current behavior.
- Maybe a cookie that records which one you want as the default.
We could also benefit from some function that displays the full article source after revision X. Not just the diff from W to X.
edited 9th Feb '12 7:48:54 PM by Stratadrake
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.I've always thought that abridged history was about the most useless thing ever. Why would you want that as normal behaviour? It doesn't tell you anything. There's no actual useful information on those pages.
edited 9th Feb '12 7:51:20 PM by shimaspawn
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. DickThe history as we use it now is perfect for my needs, that is seeing what changes were made to an article very rapidly.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I find one thing is missing from the history, and that is a colored highlight of the changed word(s). Now, if a change is made in a long paragraph, you see the paragraph printed twice and have to figure out what the difference is. That's more of a detail than a whole new category, of course, but I would find it useful.
Shima@408: if you want to quickly see what a particular editor has done to a page, the abridged view can be useful — it's far easier than scanning through a wall of differences to find the editor's name.
Not sure it should be default, but it would be a useful tool in some circumstances.
I am not a mod, and I don't play one on TV.That's what ctrl + F is for. In the abbreviated version you'd have to open numerous other pages in order to see what the poster did instead of quickly just jumping down the list and having it right in front of you. You can also then scroll up and see if anyone else reverted it all ready without having to click each and every poster.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick@410: Yes, that (which is what Wikimedia does with its diffs) is also sorely needed. Currently the only way to tell is to look for something that changes the word wrap on subsequent lines, but that doesn't pick up certain kinds of typos or other changes....
An alternate idea is just to make the history diffs collapsible, like opening/closing a folder or YKTTW draft.
Back on the subject of TRS, I was kinda surprised to see the per-page setting changed. What is it now, 250? How about making it 200? Then, yes, a full TRS is two-and-a-half pages instead of an even two, but it also means that you can't tell when there's vacancy for new topics just by the page count. Discourages the musical-chairs style topic posting.
edited 10th Feb '12 10:14:44 AM by Stratadrake
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.The TRS process, without there necessarily being any intent on anyone's part, is biased in favor of renames (whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion). Two major reasons:
- Overreliance on crowners. There are criteria for changing names. Most of them are at least somewhat objective. A crowner isn't necessary to determine if a trope is a character name or a stock phrase. A crowner is almost never necessary to determine if there's a significant amount of misuse — maybe for determining what's misuse and how much is significant, but those are probably better dealt with in discussion. Pretty much the only question crowners really resolve is whether the name is clear (if a lot of people don't understand it, it's not). The guidelines say the presumption should be keeping the name, meaning "I don't like it" isn't enough; using crowners to make the decision makes it about whether people like the name.
- No clear resolution that isn't "rename." True both discussion by discussion and in the forum as a whole. Changing the name is a clear resolution; keeping is not. If there's been no decision to change, it's possible to argue for keeping the discussion going. If there's been a decision to keep, it can always be brought up anew. For the people who don't think the name must or should be changed (and those of us who think names shouldn't be changed unless they must) there's never a victory.
Both of these factors discourage anti-rename people from even participating in TRS. This exacerbates the first, and creates such a strongly pro-rename environment that it can seem hostile to people who aren't. It should be clear how this then becomes a vicious cycle. It happened to me, so if I seem to be talking about a different TRS than the one other people are seeing, though when I dipped my toe in the other day it didn't seem to have moved too far from what I've described.
I don't know what to do about the second. Time limits help a bit, but they need to be enforced and maybe strengthened. Perhaps, automatically locked and archived after 10 days, with moderators able to override if discussion is actually ongoing. As for the first, Everything You Wanted To Know About Changing Names has a list of reasons to keep a name; a name that meets those or similar standards shouldn't even get a crowner, otherwise even having the list becomes pointless. I'd even say a name that fails Guess That Trope but has a decent wick count and little or any misuse should be summarily left alone rather than submitted to a crowner.
Ok, that's my reaction to the thread title/first few posts. The discussion has obviously advanced.
- I don't think closing TRS off more will help.
- The thing Fast Eddie put, presumably, on his to-do list (which I'm sure is quite long) will help a lot.
- References aren't automatically witty. Off-wiki I've seen that far too often in attempts at comedy (Shallow and Narrow Parody are particularly bad about that, as are most impressionists). References can be witty, handled well — but in a wiki with a lot of editors, that's almost as dangerous a path to walk down as the idea that occasional small bits of natter can enhance the experience*.
Crowners help move things along. Threads that don't have crowners either have endless circular debates or quietly die off when there is nothing new to say, whether or not work needs to be done or the issue has been shot down. Complaining about too many crowners is one issue I do not feel the TRS actually has.
edited 10th Feb '12 11:21:55 AM by Arha
About 2: I think that rather than automatically locking, automatically clocking after X days since the thread was opened (or a previous clock ran out), irrespective of activity, looks better. When the clock runs out and a moderator (or engineer) arrives, s/he could assess whether the thread is worth keeping.
About 1: I think that a little bit more judgment before crowner-hooking could help, specifically, scanning if the reasons are good enough for a rename. I have not much better ideas than that, tough.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanThe problem with using crowners (or not) is that our criterias are loose at best. Half the time they are ignored. Seriously, why even have them at all?
For example, we have this as a criteria for renaming:
Gotterdammerung went to TRS for this (It's the title of an opera, on top of not being English). The "resolution" ended up doing something completely different (and keeping the title)
Muppet also a crowner to keep it's work-based name, despite it breaking one of our criterias.
edited 10th Feb '12 11:33:56 AM by Ghilz
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Suggest tropes that have been renamed and you do not think they displayed one of the objective reasons for rename. I'd like to know.
Whoever suggested that crowner options should have the one who adds a certain option vouch to do it, especially if it involves a lot of work, is absolutely correct. I'd like to see that idea implemented, so people won't go around tossing workload if they have no intention to do it.
edited 10th Feb '12 11:33:07 AM by lu127
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer2 is a hard road to walk. On one hand, you don't want people to be able to try to get an action over and over until they get the "right" one. On the other, if the previous decision did not actually fix the trope and it has problems again, it needs to be able to come back so we can find a solution that works. Just because a decision won, it doesn't follow that it was the right or best decision (that goes for any kind of decision, from do nothing to cut).
Take Nightmare Fuel (sorry to keep bringing this one up, it's fresh in my mind). It wasn't continually brought back to the TRS over and over because there was a conspiracy to keep bringing it back until it was renamed. It kept coming back because it kept getting broken after it was decided to "do nothing, clean the wicks" at least three times.
Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.
I think that it was also suggested to sign crowner votes, so that you can see who voted in a particular fashion. I would agree to this, especially since unlike in Real Life there's no need for secret voting here.
I think the "whether or not you like the name" tendency for crowners tends towards keeping names rather than tossing them out. If there's a name that is funny or makes a clever (or not so clever) reference to something, there will be a sizable minority of defenders (if not a majority) independent of how badly the name is failing otherwise. For example, when Götterdämmerung came to the TRS (the first time, with the original definition, not the more recent time), it had a few problems:
- It was getting misuse to mean the trope that currently holds that name, which corresponds to that event in Germanic mythology.
- It was an English loanword (from German, obviously) that corresponded most closely (trope-wise) to a low-scale version of The End of the World as We Know It.
That was also the first case that lead to me being so strongly against encouraging uninformed contributions: even after the thread had gone on for a page and a half about how that name didn't match this trope (completely independent of its worthiness as a name in general), the rename was still frequently getting votes against, with the occasional person popping in to post something like I mentioned above. As I've come to discover, when people pop in from the on-page link, you're lucky if they read more than the title, the OP, and the most recent post. This is why having objective Pro/Con reasons on the crowner itself is so important.
(Apologies if any of that was a little hard to follow—I'm operating on less than three hours of sleep at the moment, so I'm not entirely coherent.)
edited 10th Feb '12 12:39:17 PM by Ironeye
I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.One thing I find odd is why it's assumed that "fix the wicks" is going to permanently repair a trope. I can't see that ever working, for any page. Take, for example, White Gal With Black Guy. I'm choosing that trope because:
A) It's offensive. Someone (even if not caucasian and female or black and male) is going to see that trope and get offended by it.
B) It's hard to define. This is a trope that exists in multiple forms, for multiple reasons. There's a sweet spot of examples which will "clearly" fit the trope (lampshades, invocations), and there's going to be a number of grayer examples that fit some criteria and not others.
C) Hard to name. It recently went to TRS to see if it should be renamed for being offensive and a dialogue-based title. People argued that the latter factor should have been enough to kill the name.
Anyway, it won't matter what we rename this trope to, how many times we clean wicks, or how many times we alter the description. Within 24 months, there will be a ton of examples all over the wiki which will clearly get the trope wrong. That doesn't mean the name is bad, it doesn't mean the description isn't clear, and it doesn't mean it isn't a trope. Curating it is going to mean sometimes cleaning up 1 bad example/pot hole when it happens and sometimes cleaning 40 all at once.
The "sending people who get known a welcome/introductory PM" idea sounds like a good one to me since I do think it would help cut down on some of the initial problems that people have or at the very least it would give them fewer excuses for them.
I am not sure about there being any kind of "elite" in the TRS, but I do believe that the rules, both written and unwritten, are not very clear and that it is tough for someone to understand how things work there even after being on TV Tropes for years and after following TRS for months. I am not quite sure what a good solution to that problem would be though. I guess adding more Administrivia pages could help somewhat.
I cannot say I support additional measures to try to make people who vote in crowners accountable for their results (i.e., seeing who voted for what or sending PMs and such). I understand that sometimes threads can get stalled. Still, I would rather have some occasionally stalled threads in TRS than to have people be constantly asked to do renames, splits, merges, cleanups, and the like on a large scale just because they voted for something.
In short, I would like for TRS and the wiki in general to have somewhat of a relaxed atmosphere and I believe that nagging people to take action can interfere with that. The latter approach reminds me a lot of sending a bunch of emails asking people to donate money, except in this case the desired commodity is free time.
That being said, if anyone thinks that a crowner I make in a thread is premature or if I am being unreasonable, I would really appreciate it if that person could tell me. I am still quite inexperienced with TRS stuff and I can only learn how to do things better if I know what mistakes I am making.
edited 10th Feb '12 1:41:19 PM by LouieW
"irhgT nm0w tehre might b ea lotof th1nmgs i dont udarstannd, ubt oim ujst goinjg to keepfollowing this pazth i belieove iN !!!!!1 d

We really need an edit history function that doesn't simultaneously attempt to show diffs. Just timestamps, usernames, and (when given) edit reasons.
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.