about the 'No Negativity' rule

This is wrong, dude. People do not agree on why a trope works or how well it was used in a particular work. It devolves into debate. Always.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

How could "how well" possibly not be opinion-based?

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

It doesn't have to turn into a debate any more than the YMMV tab and tropes have to, it doesn't have to be any more subjective than the wiki already is.

Many things in an analysis are objective. There is always a tint to subjectivity to things, but it needn't be their deciding factor to qualify them.

If things spiral out of control into a senseless debate ("yes it is" "no it isn't" "yes it is" "nuh huh" "uh huh"), ban the tropers who did it. Let the people who know how to behave stay.

Those things are more like a spectrum as opposed to Column A and Column B like you're saying. We might not easily agree on the stuff in the middle of the spectrum, but the stuff at the ends is fairly easy to build a consensus on.

If the users are causing trouble with simple stuff like that, even after you're making things easier for them, to the point where you are hesitating to open opportunities like this, then the problem is with the userbase — so the solution is to moderate them, and if they're not cooperating, to ban them, until the rest of the people eventually start getting the hint and get working properly.

(I'm a woman, by the way. It feels weird to be called "he" and "dude". I've got to stop picking gender-neutral usernames, ha ha.)

Thanks, that's one of the things I wanted to say but totally slipped from my mind. You explained it better than I could have, anyway.

edited 15th May '12 10:16:28 AM by Mazz

Where are you getting "how well" from? This isn't just about what tropes happen where. This is about why they're used, and what purpose they serve. Trope analysis doesn't have to just be "things that happened".

To be fair, there aren't that many mods here, and so they have to rely on reports. But nobody reports anything, because they aren't told to, and who would tell them to?

edited 15th May '12 10:18:32 AM by BoundByTheMoon

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

Trope analysis is off-mission.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

Then what is the purpose of going through all the trouble to fill this wiki with lists and discussions and reviews and examples and cross-examples and Related To lists and indexes and such?

Lists of tropes and works by themselves tell us nothing that we didn't know already.

edited 15th May '12 10:18:47 AM by Mazz

Well then, let's rename this place "TV Summaries".

I love how "Main goal" is capitalized like that.

edited 15th May '12 10:23:09 AM by BoundByTheMoon

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

Lists, descriptions, and examples of trope usage are not trope analysis. The other stuff is indeed beside the Main goal.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

And even then it wouldn't make much sense because many work pages only really make sense if you've already seen the work.

"Lists, descriptions, and examples of trope usage are not trope analysis."

That's why they need to be fixed.

"The other stuff is indeed beside the Main goal."

The main goal is to make tons and tons of lists with no context and little explanations that don't really explain anything further than, "this is a thing that happened," and, "this is another thing that happened"? Again, what's the purpose of that?

I'm fairly certain that the main page used to say something to the effect of "the goal of this wiki is to catalog tropes to better understand how they are used in works of fiction". What happened to that?

edited 15th May '12 10:45:56 AM by Mazz

Trope Analysis is Off Mission

And yet people argue that this site has merit as an academic source. If explaining how a trope is used is not the primary intent, in favor of categorization, how does this site operate as a teaching tool instead of a collection of trivia?

Or is it simply the way a person views the site? That someone might think that the site is intended as an academic resource in their own perspective, when in reality there is no true goal beyond quantification and breaking down conventions into an increasingly bloated amount of categorization?

edited 15th May '12 10:43:21 AM by arcsquad12

Do not be so quick to make foolish offers, Daemon. Araghast too once thought I would be an asset to his cause. Look what has become of him.

If by "explaining how tropes are used" you mean "describing how tropes are used", sure. If you mean giving a reason or making any kind of judgment (even by proxy, like reporting others' judgments...) then no.

AFAIK the site is not intended as a teaching tool or academic resource. Readers can use it that way, if they want. They could print it and use it as bird cage lining.

It is a catalog.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

If they choose to interpret it that way, then fine, but they shouldn't use it as a defense then either.

Do not be so quick to make foolish offers, Daemon. Araghast too once thought I would be an asset to his cause. Look what has become of him.

It is very simple. We are not interested in hosting academic debates on the main articles. We provide places for you to do that stuff; it's not our fault if you choose not to use them.

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

I think you should drop the "academic" in that sentence. I doubt we want any debates on the wiki pages.

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

We're not saying it should be all academic debates. We don't need to fall into that extreme either.

We can do mini-analysis type of observations here and there without being formal or academic.

Okay, fine, what Septimus said. We are not interested in hosting debates on the main articles whatsoever. Analytical observations, no matter how pithy, tend to attract natter. As Eddie said, we have eight years of history to prove it.

edited 15th May '12 11:16:41 AM by Fighteer

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

Oh, but it's your responsibility. Admins are responsible for overseeing the sites they administer; that's why they're called that. If your users are generally misbehaving, it's your job to corral them and make them stop sucking at what they do.

So instead, we have "Things That Happened: The (Bloated and Costly) Wiki".

edited 15th May '12 11:19:16 AM by BoundByTheMoon

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

You are deliberately misinterpreting me. We can and do enforce keeping that stuff off the main articles. What we cannot do is force people to use the Analysis page. We can't make our users create content, only control what they are allowed to create and where it goes.

edited 15th May '12 11:18:14 AM by Fighteer

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

What we do is a form of analysis. It is not a traditional form of analysis, nor an conventionally academic form (although, from what I've heard, that may slowly be changing).

If we didn't do analysis on the main pages, every work page would just be a work summary, nothing more, and we'd be fictionwiki.org or some such thing. By identifying and distilling out elements of the work - the tropes - we are analyzing it, all in our own way.

The Analysis subpages are supposed to be for shunting the other forms of analysis, the ones that aren't our trademark, off the main pages. However, the name - and the way the moderation has been phrasing this - aren't entirely making this clear. At this point, we should consider re-naming the namespace, since it seems to be causing misunderstandings on both sides.

(Out of curiosity, what does this have to do with the No Negativity rule?)

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

Zap the natter. Keep the useful stuff. If in eight years your approach failed, try different approaches. Don't just give up and let the wiki stagnate, when it has so much potential. As it is, it's bloated with all sorts of frivolous content that serves no purpose, but there is the potential to turn all that content into something genuinely useful.

It is very, very frustrating to see such a huge and influential website, with such an enthusiastic community, go to waste like this.

Ninja'd Edit: No, that cannot be called analyzing by any stretch of the imagination. That's just listing stuff. It serves no purpose beyond being a list that was written.

It's related to the No Negativity rule because it appears that these problems are all related, and appear to have as a common root the fact that the wiki is stagnating and bloating because its direction isn't going anywhere useful as it is, and it needs a huge overhaul.

Quantity does not equal quality.

Our problem is that the new people find their way to the wiki, look at the type of content we have, and only contribute similar content. It's a vicious cycle and it needs to be broken or else the wiki isn't going forward.

edited 15th May '12 11:25:43 AM by Mazz

Totemic makes a good point: we are in fact doing analysis, just not the kind that involves paragraphs of navel gazing.

@Mazz and Bound: You are the ones inserting this value statement that the wiki is failing in some way. Our hundreds of thousands of users apparently disagree because they keep coming here. If anything, our problem is our excessive popularity leading to a consistent influx of people that have to be absorbed into the culture.

I see no "waste" except in the minds of people who want TV Tropes to be something other than what it is. As I said before, that is your problem, not ours.

As for the "no negativity" thing, apparently not allowing people to spout opinions about how awful a particular work is on the main page for that work is stifling our usefulness as a tool. Clearly we don't agree on that.

edited 15th May '12 11:24:29 AM by Fighteer

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

The message is not "stop sucking at that". It is "stop doing that at all". There are several places for debate and analysis, but the Main namespace is not one of them.

Less explaining how things should be and more listening to how things are, please. If you think a catalog of tropes is boring, or that a bot could do it, or whatever, sorry.

edited 15th May '12 11:27:33 AM by rodneyAnonymous

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

What's wrong with saying how things should be? What's wrong with wanting to improve things, when that goal is just barely gracing our fingertips, just close enough that with a few changes we could reach it?

The problem with having such an enormous userbase is that they can't contribute anything worthwhile, and so they "contribute" bloated lists and gushing, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Isn't this the site that's having funding issues so severe that they've had to crib ideas from Something Awful (paying for badges) to stay afloat?

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

^^ Nothing. I said less, not zero.

And we disagree that would be an improvement.

edited 15th May '12 11:28:42 AM by rodneyAnonymous

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.