Do recap pages mirror/reciprocate, or hard split from mainpages?

Over at Ask The Tropers I've been appealing to the hivemind for a solid day over whether episode recap pages mirror/reciprocate whats on a works or character page, or perform a hard split (i.e: a trope that is judged only "relevant" to a single episode should appear exclusively in a recap, not on a work or character page)

I had thought the former, based on articulated precedent, the fact that trying to determine "relevance" of a character trait to a character smacks of "notability" and simple logistics (not everyone can remember an episode title, so its better to allow a works/character page as prime aggregator, where the casual troper may add a trope and example text and allow Wiki Magic to provide the episode title later) But some are insistant its the latter.

My OP from Ask The Tropers: ____ Should recaps function as a hard split a la YMMV and Character Sheets to Work Pages?

In The Legend of Korra, (two episodes in and not Trope Overdosed as yet) troper eX: removed a character trait trope from the sheet on the presumption "Since it is only relevant in one episode, I think it fits better on the recap page for the first episode." I reverted, as this smacks of the dreaded notability critera, and if that logic were followed, all tropes that appeared only once would likewise be excised from work or character pages. As I understand it episode-specific tropes should instead be mirrored one-to-one on recap pages, rather than hard split, particularly in abscence of being Trope Overdosed. I'm being disputed via PM. Was I in the wrong? ____

I've gotten several responses, as you can see, including a moderator insisting that There Is No Such Thing As Notability only applies to removing works not tropes or examples, when the page itself contraindicates them, and has been locked for months.

"Removing tropes, examples... anything... because of "notability" stifles the wiki."

Its never good when I have to debate a moderator, and I've only been getting concurrance from battosaijoe, and precedent from Deboss' post.

Dude, yes, you have my concurrence insofar as where the trope goes. But that doesn't change the fact that No Such Thing As Notability does not apply here. Why? Because we are not REMOVING any tropes from the wiki. We are discussing MOVING one, and when it comes to MOVING one, relevance DOES matter, because that determines WHERE an example goes. Tropes about a shows setting generally do not go on a character sheet, YMMV goes in YMMV, that sorta thing. In this case, eX was arguing as to whether the trope in question (Balloon Belly) was relevant enough (having appeared only in a brief flashback) to be on the character's sheet. As I said before, I believe that yes, it should go on the character sheet. A trope that a character has or had is just that, a trope a character has or had, and thus, it should go on their character sheet.

You're very hung up on the belief that eX wants it removed. He does NOT want to REMOVE it. He wants to MOVE it, and thus, No Such Thing As Notability does NOT apply.

EDIT: As a side note, one day on Ask The Tropers usually doesn't mean much, especially so on the weekends. Mods and tropers aren't around as much, for some reason (maybe it's the lack of work to be distracted from).

edited 1st Apr '12 11:41:48 PM by battosaijoe

I should probably point out that No Such Thing As Notability applies to works, not to tropes. It means that all works (unless expressly stated otherwise, due to being determined untropable, for one reason or another) are fair game.

Balloon Belly is not a character trope. It fits better on the recap page.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

It's not? That's bizarre, IMO. It's a trope that happens to characters that describes a (usually brief) appearance change. That sounds like a character trope to me.

In fact, do we even have criteria that defines what a character trope IS?

It's a Characterization trope, if one is to check the Indexes. So yeah, it would go under the Character Sheet.

Quest 64 thread

Character pages should list tropes that are relevant to understanding a particular character. Recap pages should list tropes that are confined to an individual episode. Balloon Belly is not relevant to understanding the character, and it's confined to an individual episode, so the recap page seems like the better place for it.

What index? It's a visual effect used to indicate that a character has recently had a lot to eat. It has more in common with High-Pressure Emotion, Circling Birdies, or Personal Raincloud.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Characterization Tropes > Personal Appearance Tropes > High Fat Index > Balloon Belly

It's something specific to the characters. The only time it's worth putting on the regular page is if it happens to a character not on the Character Sheet or pretty much most characters that it's not worth mentioning separately.

A little bit of Index research does wonders.

Since when did we stop putting Personal Appearance Tropes that applies to the character themselves on the Character Sheet?

edited 2nd Apr '12 12:29:38 AM by Hydronix

Quest 64 thread

But... Balloon Belly is an event. Should Off with His Head! be on character pages? Not having a head is certainly part of one's appearance, after all.

she her hers hOI!!! i'm tempe

It's also a Character trait when uses multiple times. If it's used once... it still goes on there since it's specific to that particular character.

We also put events on there if it's a character specific one. Since it's part of their Character Development or what they do.

It's both an event and a character trait.(as long as the actual character is on the Character Sheet)

Take a look at one of the early examples, Choji from Naruto. It's not even an event there. It's his particular fighting style, and specifically part of who his character himself is.

edited 2nd Apr '12 2:22:10 AM by Hydronix

Quest 64 thread

Well, this doesn't solve the debate, but the trope doesn't even fit the situation. Balloon Belly is when a character overeats and has a comically distended belly. Since it's misuse, I'll just go remove it.

edited 2nd Apr '12 8:04:30 AM by ccoa

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

I have sort of been following this. Forgive me if what I'm saying has already been said, but here goes.

All tropes that a work uses are "notable" in the sense that they belong on the work's page. The main exceptions are Omnipresent Tropes that are expected to be there (we don't list The Hero on every work page, for example), and of course the usual rules about not listing averted tropes unless they are so common as to be expected, etc. If a trope was ever used by the work, even if it was in Minor Scene 25 of Season 5, Episode 20, it is valid to include it.

We occasionally split pages that become too large as a result of all this troping. There are several ways to do it:

• Make a Characters page and move character tropes to it.
• Folderize the main article.
• Hard split the main article along alphabetical lines.
• If the work consists of sub-works, like individual novels or films in a series, split by those sub-works.

There has never been any rule saying that Recap pages are there to list tropes that are "too specific" for the main page. That is, in fact, in direct contradiction to our rules. Recaps don't even need to use tropes.

edited 2nd Apr '12 8:01:34 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The description of Balloon Belly is specific about this being when a character has just eaten.

Since the aforementioned scene has no indication of eating, putting this scene as an example of it is misuse.

The trope is not "Character has a big belly" but "Character has a big belly to show he's just eaten a lot"

edited 2nd Apr '12 12:59:55 PM by Ghilz

Fighteer, to clarify, you say.

I genuinely appreciate the help here, but it was my inability to cite Administrivia chapter and verse on this point that had eX presuming I was making up rules to suit my purposes. Which administrative page does this rule derive from, if its not extrapolated from There Is No Such Thing As Notability's line "Removing tropes, examples... anything... because of "notability"...etc."

Also, some time ago on Ask The Tropers I received an estimated character count for when its a good time to split a large workpage: 400000+ . Is this standard or just a ballpark figure?

Standard. Pages start to go wonky once past 500000 and we want to make sure.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Well, it's one of those principles that we've operated on from the getgo and I can't say that it's actually written up anywhere, but it is definitely implied by There Is No Such Thing As Notability.

400K is the point at which we require that action be taken, because at 500K, saving edits to the page can crash the server.

edited 2nd Apr '12 2:08:42 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Alright, now I'm very confused. Several folks upthread stated to the contrary, as does moderator ccoa over at Ask The Tropers. Are you the deciding vote? (I'm oblivious to moderator hierarchy, so that's not meant to be facetious)

There is no hierarchy in moderation (other than Fast Eddie being the Big Boss and Physical God of TV Tropes), but I feel like this question is not moderation-actionable.

My idea is that episode-specific stuff goes on /Recap/ while multi-episode things go on /<Work>/

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Septimus that pretty much directly contradicts Fighteer.

The rule he extrapolates from, (as I did at this conflicts' start) is There Is No Such Thing As Notability...

so where does this leave the question of whether recaps split hard or reciprocate?

edited 2nd Apr '12 2:32:39 PM by Aiguille

I've been cleaning up several My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic recap pages and that is how I've seen it operating there - episode specific goes into the recap, multi-episode to the trope lists.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

But this puts us right back at square one. What makes a trope "episode-specific" and when and how do we determine that a trope has enough narrative weight or is notable enough to count on the works and character pages proper? Lets go back to Korra again. Should we delete Child Prodigy and put it on the recap because the character is only depicted as a child for about a minute, and then Age Cuts? Will we need to go fishing in the recaps routinely to paste a once-isolated trope and example on the mainpage if what we thought was an episode-specific event or motif crops up again? Take the destruction of Thundera in Thundercats 2011 by Macross Missile Massacre. Sure it only happens in one episode, (just put it on the recap page) but its narratively important and changes status quo, so does it earn a place on main? What's our metric of, dare I say it, notability?

edited 2nd Apr '12 2:51:28 PM by Aiguille

I usually count a trope episode-speicifc if it occurs as a one-shot event is not referenced again or had no bearing on the over-all story arc.

I don't see why We should cut child prodigy. i have not yet seen the show but I am assuming that as a child, her ability with water bending was very good, making her a child prodigy. Just because the rest of the story does not focus on her time as a child prodigy does not take away the fact that once was one.

Possibly we will, since the series is not yet over. We don't know yet what flashback or episodic events will later become series-important. This is part of what happens when you are laying down tropes for an ongoing series. Things get changed and the page is very "alive". This is not a problem, just a fact of having and operating a wiki.

By your own reasoning, this was not episodic, as it was narrative important to the entire story. So yes, put it on the main, I would say.

Some examples you really have to go by context for each one. I don't think it's possible to decide for a wiki-wide policy concerning episodic recap trope examples and main page examples. We don't even know which events or incidents have narrative weight until the end of the series—and Korra is not over yet.

Notability. You keep using that word, but that's not entirely what we are arguing about. We are not debating whether or not a trope is notable enough to be listed as an example—we are discussing where those examples go. Notability is not an issue. It's clear that all the tropes listed are notable to the show, and examples that need to be added. Defining what goes on the main and what goes on recap pages is the issue at stake here.

Editing to add: i agree with Fighteer in the general sense. Recaps don't even need tropes.

edited 2nd Apr '12 3:31:36 PM by OriDoodle

Doodles

But where it gets confusing (for me anyway,) is that upthread, fighteer himself says his opinion on what goes main and on recap pages

. Whereas in Ask The Tropers ccoa says such an interpretation is misuse.

Y'see where I get lost?

It's probably my fault for being unclear. The point isn't that notability governs what goes on Recaps. The point is that notability means that no trope is too "minor" not to go on the main page. Only when the page is so large that it needs to be split is it worth worrying about using Recaps to hold the overflow.

edited 2nd Apr '12 6:09:01 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Personally, I think it's because "notability" means different things to different tropers, regardless of how the word is defined in any given situation. Some see notability as a negative thing, others as a positive thing, and still others (myself included) see it as neutral. Some websites need it. Others don't.

If you ask me, notability isn't what's important on TV Tropes, especially since Theres No Such Thing As Notability. Instead, I use "relevance", in the sense of "Is the example relevant to the subject of the list?" You could also call it "context". "Does the example fit the context of the list?" For example, would a trope about a work's overall setting be relevant to the character list of the protagonist? Would it fit the context of the protagonist's trope list? The context is traits about the protagonist. A work's setting isn't really relevant to a character's tropes. It might influence which ones appear, but in the end, the trope itself isn't relevant to the character's trope list and thus shouldn't be listed there.

tl;dr: Notability means different things to different people. My opinion: Notability isn't important cuz it doesn't exist here. Instead, see if examples are relevant to the context of the list it's being added to.

edited 2nd Apr '12 6:28:44 PM by battosaijoe