Suggesting new namespaces

Oh, and we have cultural divisions. I see creating the Animated Film as a step towards reducing the number of intersections.

EDIT: Ideally, the media categories and namespaces should be identical, but we're not there yet.

Edited by crazysamaritan on Sep 24th 2020 at 8:06:19 AM

Yeah, Animated Film is one I can actually get behind because it's confused a lot of people.

What about a Closing Credits subpage for works, to list all the people involved in the creation of that work? You can only get so far in the work description before it would get annoying or feel out of place (the introductory text is to explain what is the work about). The character page can help to name all the actors of a film, but only the actors, and not in a straight list format. The Trivia namespace works with "trivia tropes" (or whatever we call them); it does not lend itself to work credit lists.

I'm torn. As an obsessive fan, I would love to record every little detail about the works that I like, including the best boy and gaffer of a film. On the other hand, the mission of this wiki is to collect trope information. We have articles on tropes, of course, and we create articles on works if they have enough examples of tropes. We create pages for people who create works because they use tropes, but the best boy and gaffer or literary agent tend to add very little to the creative execution of the work. They can't really be said to impact the end result too much. Thus, there's no need to list them in the description.

I'm about 75% against the idea of "we should list everyone involved in the production of a work" because we aren't imdb or isfdb, and don't need to copy everything they do, either. The goal is tropes and if they aren't going to have a significant impact on the tropes, then I don't see why we need the information (but the obsessive fanboy in me is still screaming for it).

When I want to know the cast of a show, I go to IMDB. That's what it's for, and we don't need to try to copy it any more than IMDB needs to start listing tropes.

Just a thought... would a "VTuber" namespace be a good addition? The entries for individual Virtual YouTubers and groups tend to get split between Web Video and Web Animation, but the content these performers create doesn't really fit in either space as currently defined (closer to Web Animation, but not quite; Web Video appears to be more for real-life content...) There are other VTuber performers and groups that could be added fairly easily, but trying to figure out where to put them is confusing.

VTubers are using the medium of streaming video and thus go on Web Video, broadly speaking. Suggesting they need a separate namespace is like suggesting that Nu Metal needs a separate namespace. Can we please not give every new thing its own distinct identity? "Woo, this person is using motion tracking to animate themselves! Break out the Nobel Prizes." It's a gimmick, nothing more.

Besides, what exactly is their content? We trope creative media, not someone vlogging as a cartoon cat.

Edited by Fighteer on May 30th 2021 at 10:42:00 AM

I assume you mean livestreaming, otherwise pretty much every Web Animation would fall under Web Video.

Web Video and Namespace specifically mention that Web Video is for live-action works. I suppose it could also be used as a dumping ground for other stuff (like how it's usually used for Abridged Series and such), but first you'd need to define live character rigging as not being animation.

As for the contents of Virtual YouTuber pages, I haven't really checked them out but I assume they would use tropes regarding the characters' fictional appearance, backstories, and names. They could also trope the VTubers' original works (since they often perform original songs) or trope live events, though the latter would come close to troping a person like LetsPlay/ does.

Honestly the separation between Web Video and Web Animation makes little sense to me. The medium is exactly the same and it leads to these blurring issues when something features a combination of live action and animation. If it seems more reasonable to put VTubers in Web Animation, so be it.

You're mixing format and medium again. Same format (streaming show), alternate mediums (live vs animated). I still agree with the argument of the mixing of mediums making the distinction less useful.

Edited by crazysamaritan on May 30th 2021 at 12:35:41 PM

I was informed that my Webcomic was in the wrong namespace, and I should come here for help moving it. How do I change Realmwalker To being Realmwalker?

Er, you're in the right namespace... Main/ is only for tropes.

Related thread

I feel like there should be a namespace for music videos. We currently have music videos under the Music namespace, which is fine, but while they are obviously connected to the music, music videos introduce a visual component and story telling elements that I think is worth distinguishing.

Idk if this has already been discussed in this thread (searching using the search bar didn't bring anything up)

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 2nd 2022 at 9:44:51 AM

I'd only support that if there were at least 603 possible pages on music videos on the wiki overall (0.1% of all pages), to show that there may be worth in separating them even if they're technically in another namespace. Given that there's 5969 pages in Music/ and most of them seem to be for musicians or albums, or rarely the songs which don't have an official music video, it seems unlikely.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 3rd 2022 at 10:25:01 AM

I simply think it's not a worthy separation, the only difference between Music/ and Music Video/ would be... the existence of the video footage, which is almost always just a supplementary material to the actual songs.

I don't really agree with that criteria or consider it valid, tbh. How many pages for Toys are there for there to be an entire namespace dedicated to it, for example? Or pages for LARPs? Rides? They're well below this arbitrary criteria being suggested. Point being, we don't really determine a namespace based on whether or not there are pages on the site, but first and foremost on their uniqueness as a medium and then on their ability to help categorize pages on the site

I also think this is a flawed logic. Few pages for music videos exist in part because it's not really obvious that making a page entirely for a music video is allowed. I've been a member on this site for a decade, on and off for sure, but relatively a fairly active one at that, and had no idea pages just for music videos were allowed/existed until I came across You Belong with Me yesterday. Not saying my experience is universal, but I can't imagine I'm the only one.

That's not true at all. Music videos are certainly related to music and you can't have a video without the song itself, no doubt about that. But I'd argue M Vs are a distinct, yet underanalyzed (on the site) medium that can have tropes that are unique to them (Music Video Tropes has a few). For example, while some music videos are just performance vids like Michael Jackson's Rock With You, others are full on narratives that have little to do with the songs they're about. Fall Out Boy's The Phoenix is lyrically about (YMMV on the interpretation of the lyrics) returning to a battle of some sort and shaking the whole thing up. The video on the other hand features the band getting kidnapped and tortured. This separation between music and video isn't uncommon and can be troped.

Relatedly, many videos aren't just visual representatives of the song they're for but may also connect to produce a larger narrative. The same album that Fall Out Boy song came from is one continuous narrative told across separate videos. Similarly, there's Beyonce's "visual album" for her Lemonade album in 2017. The latter in particular includes segments that are completely cut from the album (transitions, spoken bridges, interludes, etc) that connect the separate videos to create a larger narrative about infidelity and healing. Notably, the visual album released before the actual music album did, making the music album supplementary. That too is something distinct from just the music itself.

Or going back to Michael Jackson, "Thriller" is its own mini film and changed the entire medium away from being just "person singing on camera" into a visual craft in its own right. And much of what's featured in the 13min video has no real counterpart in the song itself, like the female character running and hiding from michael and the stinger ending.

And even if they're more literal depictions of the song lyrics like Taylor Swift's You Belong To Me video, as a visual medium music videos make use of cinematic and visual tropes all the time just like other visual mediums. And yet for the most part those go under troped and under analyzed since most people view the music namespace as a place to go into details about the music itself, and not really the videos as standalone entities

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 3rd 2022 at 6:31:34 AM

To be clear, that criteria is only intended for namespaces which are not covered by something else. Advertising/, LARP/, Ride/, etc. is not covered by anything else, so I don't use this argument for those.

Additionally, there are namespaces which people sometimes want to merge with others (Fanfic/ to Literature/, VisualNovel/ to VideoGame/, Anime/ and WesternAnimation/ to Animation/) because that could be done, but I do think they should be kept separate because A. "their ability to help categorize large namespaces" since they are distinct enough to use their own media categories on trope pages and what not, and B. they do have more than 0.1% pages on the wiki. Conversely, some namespaces did exist (Disney/ for WesternAnimation/, Discworld/ for Literature/, Bollywood/ to Film/) which were technically separate, but since they didn't have many pages and weren't as good of a separation to existing pages, they were merged eventually and I agree with that.

And you say that few pages exist for music videos because they don't know pages for music videos are allowed. I'd argue that they rarely get pages because it's hard to find a decent amount of tropes in a three or four-minute video with words. It's generally easier to make a larger and more confident-looking article by writing about the creator's body of work or an album with several songs. And in an opposite problem, I could split "Funky Cold Medina" from Tone Lōc or "Dragostea Din Tei" from O-Zone, but that would make them far shorter as the main artist page currently takes most tropes from them.

Point is, to me the namespace just doesn't feel as useful, doesn't have enough of a place to justify itself, and can lead to problems by having either its articles be short or making the articles with a bigger scope short. And I know Recap/ pages for single episodes of serialized works exist and are in fact the most populated namespace, but those tend to be longer and easier to find tropes in.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 3rd 2022 at 12:38:32 PM

"it's hard to find a decent amount of tropes in a three or four-minute video with words"

I recommend you check out my response to Amonimus. But to summarize quickly, many videos include narratives and some are even full on visual albums in their own right, meaning they'd use the same narrative tropes we use for other mediums. Even in shorter videos there's plenty to trope since videos use a lot of the same production tropes and Camera Tricks as other visual media which includes things for lighting, sequencing, staging, etc.

But even that aside, the minimum for creating a work page that isn't a stub is 3 tropes. If it's not an outright performance video (though since Performance Video exists, maybe even then since that's 1/3 tropes) I don't think it'd be hard at all. Other Common Music Video Concepts hosts a bunch of ideas that very well could be broken out into separate distinct tropes if anyone so chose to and/or covers enough to basically be a guaranteed 1 trope for most music video pages.

This isn't me saying that every music video is tropeable enough to warrant a page. Not at all. But in the same way that not every Web Video has tropeable content and is thus not covered on the site, not every music video would be. Only those that can meet the standards of the site. In my previous response I pointed to 3 different videos alone that could very easily have their own page, 2 of which probably multiple subpages too since each song from the albums they come from have videos that are connected.

And if Music pages would be drastically shortened if we removed tropes about music videos, I don't really find that to be a point against a new namespace. To me that shows an area where the site can improve, i.e. tropes specifically about music and musicality. That or that people aren't utilizing the slew of Music Tropes that already exist that can fill in the gaps.

ETA: and the former namespaces that were merged were likely merged not just because they had few pages, but because they simply aren't separate and distinct mediums from the merge target. The works under the disney namespace were (likely, I'm assuming) animated films. Who made them doesn't change their medium. Ergo merge. Same with Discworld. That's a literature series, so it should be in literature. Merge. Etc. Etc. We make exceptions to that rule for grouping purposes, but the primary determining factor for a namespace is whether or not the medium itself is distinct and unique. Given what I've already written, you know where I stand on that point.

If, for some wild reason, there were only 3 film pages on the site, I don't think anyone would argue against having a film namespace as it's a very obvious medium with tropes. The wiki operates on individs creating and curating pages on their own. You make the namespace and allow it to be filled via wiki magic. I'm pretty confident the same would happen with M Vs, especially since many are short enough and accessible enough via the internet that the barrier of entry for contribution is pretty low compared to other mediums.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 3rd 2022 at 8:09:02 AM

I don't know. I guess I can see the argument—as a music fan myself I am aware that many music videos have a narrative component. Obviously "Thriller", but I also thought of "Coffee & TV" as another example. I guess I'm on board?

Music Video isn't a medium; it's a format. Specifically, it's a type of Short Film where there is a lot of instruments as part of the soundtrack. The medium is typically live-action, sometimes animated. The current articles are about the song, first and foremost. To separate the video derivative from the song, you'd need enough visual-only examples, since the sounds are almost always part of the original work.

Since the video derivative is made by the same creators, it is allowed to be incorporated into the same article. This is the same reason why The Film of the Book is usually incorporated into the Literature/ namespaced article. The article is often film-focused because that's the version that editors are familiar with.

There are several song articles where this split could be possible, but I don't think there's any where the split is needed because we simply have not identified enough music-specific conventions yet.

"the current articles are about the song, first and foremost"

I don't think that's true. I think the current pages are at the very least equally about the song and the video and some are even more focused on the video aspect than the song itself. Genghis Khan (2016) has a single music trope on it. Holding Out for a Hero as well is almost all about the video. Gangnam Style on the other hand has a more equal balance. These pages are already troping the video parts of the songs they're about alongside the music, so why not just make it official.

I'm not saying we split Music.Gangnam Style into Music.Gangnam Style and MusicVideo.Gangnam Style. I'm saying move the entire page to MusicVideo.Gangnam Style. Not every song an artist makes has a music video, in fact the majority don't. So there'd still be plenty to trope on the artist's main Music page from just a music standpoint.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 3rd 2022 at 9:16:33 AM

I already addressed your point in my second paragraph.

Kind of. As I said in my first post, I understand why music videos are grouped under music. I'm not arguing that it's inaccurate to do so given how other things are done on the site. I'm suggesting that even if we can group them under Music as it is an adaptation (of sorts) of it, we don't have to group them together and am presenting an argument for breaking them out into a separate namespace based on their distinctiveness from the more general music category given their visual component.

The Film of the Book point I fully understand, but if we were really being pedantic about it, there are plenty of film adaptations that have their own pages in the film namespace, should someone choose to separate them out by format. There's no hard-and-fast rule saying they need to be joined. The same could be done here and I'm arguing that it'd be good to do so for encouraging the increased troping of music videos and the generation of tropes specific to the format. And similar to how a film adaptation has producers, directors, and writers that contribute to its creation making it not just a product of the source material's creator, so do music videos.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jul 11th 2022 at 6:58:45 AM

Should we have an App/ namespace? There's Vine and Swapnote.