Improving YKTTW (again)

Here are some things I have found about YKTTW:

• The last thread on fixing YKTTW has utterly failed at fixing its myriad issues. People still are not treating the drafts as actual drafts that anyone can edit (so sponsors still are seen as "owning" their YKTT Ws and most of the replies continue to be examples), and YKTTW still produces mislaunched tropes frequently enough that not long after the TRS cap was lowered, a new Special Efforts thread was started to keep sending mislaunched tropes back to YKTTW without waiting for spots to free up.
• Since the new YKTTW was started, there have been more new entries created than launched. When it started, it had a little under 100 pages; there are now 123. The result is a recent thread on clearing the YKTTW backlog that produced numerous ideas, but none of them seemed to get very far.
• The most popular unimplemented ideas on the crowner on the last thread were hooking crowners to a YKTTW, hollering from a YKTTW (Fast Eddie recommended hollering to one person in the recent thread but I don't see how you would do that), and a personal YKTTW history. All of these had ratios of 18:1 or better, and the tagging system was the only suggestion over 18:1 that was adopted.
• There is a thread on Tech Wishlist with the goal of overhauling page creation. Considering that YKTTW is all about page creation, it seems logical that it will be affected by these changes. In particular, an idea in the last thread that didn't get much attention, mostly because it was conflated with a proposed move of YKTTW to the forums - separating the draft from the first post and making it an actual wiki page - seems like it would be an ideal way to allow people to use the new page creation system to submit directly to YKTTW.
• Two semi-recent changes that have been imposed on YKTTW have been a new "Motion to discard" tag and making it so that only mods can remove tags. The latter may have been intended to solve a problem that was greatly exacerbated by a) having tags cleared not just by clicking the button, but by clicking the text, so that people may remove tags without intending to, and b) possibly the use of normal links to remove tags, which may have opened the door for search-engine bots accidentially removing tags.
• It is possible to put multiple tags on a draft. I'm not sure how this would be useful. This is exacerbated by having only mods be able to remove tags.
• Mod presence on YKTTW seems to be spotty.
• There is little explanation of what tags mean. People may have been clicking tags expecting to get such explanations.
• Tags have limited use in general.
• The YKTTW history is nearly useless, showing the entire text of each version so it's nearly impossible to compare each, and attributing each version to the original sponsor regardless of who actually edited it. This greatly limits the usefulness of YKTTW drafts as drafts. For the record, "YKTTW history with diffs and editors" was the next most popular option on the crowner. (The next most popular options were hooking alt-titles crowners to YKTTW, and forcing comments when removing hats - and it's only at this point, at the last item over 10:1, that you get to the second item to actually be implemented, making permalink YKTT Ws resemble the main list, and only because the permalink became the only way to view the actual YKTTW. "Sort by reply date" was next.)
• Pagination may actually be hurting YKTTW throughput. Personally, until recently I only read the first page of YKTTW and ignored everything else.
• Not only did the "flagged and new" button go away when the new YKTTW started, meaning you can't just look at the new threads and flag the ones you're interested in. there is no longer any way to see just the newest threads at all. There are controls to sort by "oldest" or "latest replies", but it doesn't seem to do anything.
• The flag button isn't very visible; in particular, the button when a YKTTW is flagged is almost indistinguishable from the button when it isn't when you're skimming the page.
• Choosing "show hats only", "show flags only", or sorting by tag does not change the URL, so they can't be bookmarked. (Oh, and the next most popular option on the crowner? "YKTTW watchlist", a purpose the flags are supposed to serve. "Stale YKTTW list" and "alternative forum-view" were the next most popular options.)
• "Show hats only" shows all threads with any hats. It would be helpful if there was some way to view all threads with all five hats, as those tropes are presumably the closest to launching.
• There have been YKTT Ws with a consensus to discard that never did get discarded, even when the sponsor has agreed.
• Throwing out an idea is easy. Providing feedback on them is hard.
• Markup has never worked correctly on YKTTW; the note markup still doesn't work. In particular, although apparently the use of asscaps for medium headers on trope pages has been deprecated, the fact that folders don't work on YKTTW - when the deprecation only applies to new pages - effectively renders this meaningless.
• Some people have claimed that the layout of YKTTW is cramped.
• Some people have expressed that it is not always clear what to do when a page has no obvious problems but isn't attracting interest, or when someone does identify a problem, the sponsor or someone else explains why it isn't, but because the original complainer doesn't come back it's not clear whether the rebuttal is sufficient. Even with the hats, it needs to be clearer when concerns with a trope have been satisfied and someone can launch without worrying about it ending up in TRS later.
• Barely-formed ideas are actively disdained on YKTTW, to the point that at least one person has suggested forcing people to come up with three examples, and possibly a fully-formed description, before starting a new one. This despite the fact that originally, waaaaaay back in the sands of time, the norm for YKTTW ideas was this. This is partly because of the problem mentioned above; people don't know when a half-formed idea is worth putting effort into, so they have to fight with the OP just to figure out what it is and then to figure out whether it's tropeworthy, when the OP comes back around to it at all.
• Discarding is almost as old as YKTTW 2.0, which is good because it shows how early the need for a discard system was recognized. But it also means the discarding system was built with the same twigs and baling wire as the rest of the wiki, and "discarding" has always meant "launching to Discarded YKTTW". This is a low priority, but it has confused at least one person who was presented with a "your trope was launched successfully" message after discarding a trope.
• There is no connection between TRS and YKTTW, even beyond the limited overlap between their respective userbases. A "Per Trope Repair Shop" tag was suggested in the last thread as a way of making clear such YKTT Ws' origins (so people don't do things like accuse them of duplicating the tropes they're being split from), but it's clear that such a tag, and an official tie to the originating thread, would be far more important to keep TRS threads waiting on YKTT Ws from taking up TRS slots.

I suspect that firmly stomping out a lot of YKTTW's issues at this point might require throwing out its existing code, which I believe predates the forums and may well be the first "special" purpose ever to be coded for the wiki (aside from the Toys menu), and starting over. With that in mind, I proposed the following in the recent thread on the YKTTW backlog:

• Adopt the idea of having drafts as pages on the wiki, separate from the first post, but keep YKTTW with a system similar to what it has now, or move it to a discussion-esque system like Ask The Tropers. New posts would not have to come with drafts, and preferably a trope's tropeworthiness would be established before a draft was started (this is a version of an idea raised in this post in the last thread). In addition to simply starting a new thread, you could submit a draft directly to YKTTW using the new page creation form, although you had better be confident that your idea is tropeworthy and your draft is wiki-worthy. The most relevant ideas to this weren't particularly popular on the last crowner, but I'm not entirely sure why, or whether the reasons would still be relevant.

This thread is open for the discussion of this or any other ideas you may have.

edited 9th Dec '12 10:44:59 PM by MorganWick

I know my ideas are terrible, that's why I don't participate on YTTKW or these discussions now. But would you kindly not single me out as the bad guy who demands unreasonable standards? Times have changed on TV Tropes. Character titles, dialogue titles, or Nightmare Fuel, etc are no longer welcome; from what the guidelines and staff comments tell me, a YTTKW consisting of "When the guy falls on his face, like Ted, Xan, or Cindy" isn't acceptable either nowadays.

Come on, the YKTTW I was refering to flat out said "I DON'T WANT TO WORK, YOU DO IT". And if there's anything I've learned from lurking the workshops it's that arbitrarly deleting stuff that seems wrong to me is probably vandalism and not helping the wiki.

Am I completely wrong on this?

There's a difference between deleting things on the wiki and correcting things on YKTTW. One of these is a very rough draft that needs a lot of editors doing large scale changes so that they get one.

The other is a page that is expected to be somewhere stable.

I try to mod the YKTTW but there's a lot of stuff to do there and people don't always listen very well.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

@shimaspawn: People don't listen very well because the YKTTW is cramped. It's hard to pick out any comment over another.

Also, I sometimes think we need to limit YKTTW to people who have passed a quiz about what makes a good wiki page.

@Rotpar: Nobody has singled you out.

About post #1:

• About crowners, I remember proposing it back in the older thread but now I have misgivings about it after having been in Trope Repair Shop for just under a year. Crowners are good at establishing consensus about names but I don't see how they would improve name quality in the YKTTW environment.
• I don't think that the lack of mod presence is a problem (other tropers can do the same job just as well) by itself.
• The YKTTW does predate the forums by 4 years. Fast Eddie said so in the older thread.

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

Not my intent. The vast majority of the items on that list were either my own observations, or taken from posts on the thread. Yours was just the one post I could single out as an example of what I was talking about. In fact, my intent was to use it to illustrate a broader cultural trend on YKTTW. And let me be clear: All of that is still problematic. If you can't figure out the trope from the OP, and the OP doesn't want to help out in clarifying it, it should be discarded. In fact, I'd like to think that ideas that (in my idea) aren't ready for drafts could be discarded quicker if they were in an in-between stage, rather than if the system treated them the same as ideas with drafts. But as soon as it's ready for an actual draft, the OP's only responsibility - and it should be a shared one - is making sure people understand what the trope is.

I have to ask: do we really want YKTTW entries to be "drafts anyone can edit like any wiki page"? If not, we should stop pretending otherwise. If so, we should be thinking about how we can set up YKTTW so that they can be. That means thinking big, thinking beyond how YKTTW works now. But I think we may have to answer that question first.

By the way, there's something else bizarre about the fact that YKTTW was originally about coming up with titles for tropes, and now you're expected to come up with a title before even showing up. I think that's a big reason why we see so much Trope Namer Syndrome and stock phrases in new YKTT Ws, though the lack of TRS presence doesn't help. Using laconics as titles was suggested in the last thread, though it attracted a non-negligible number of no votes, but I'm not sure even laconics would be necessary in my idea.

edited 10th Dec '12 4:16:03 AM by MorganWick

One idea that was floating for me here was to turn the "comment" section of a YKTTW into a forum-thread-like thread.

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

The YKTTW page itself still says "You have a trope that you have seen a million times. It just needs a snappy name!" as if the name is the most important part of a new trope. It's not.

I also agree that maybe the current YKTTW just needs to have a bridge dropped on it so we can build a new one from the ground up. I would love to see, for example, a forum-style YKTTW list.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

And maybe show only the laconic, and not allow to add a name right away. This way, we might get names about tropes instead of tropes about names, if you get the difference.

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

Having YKTTW generate an actual Wiki page draft (using a Sandbox or YKTTW namespace?) would be great, especially if it was soldered to the new page-creation system such that you HAD to put it in the correct namespace and give it a page type, and it generated correct format so we wouldn't keep getting new pages that look terrible and have to be cleaned up by somebody else.

Also, yes, if there was an easy way to link a YKTTW to a TRS thread, such that launching the YKTTW reminds you to go find the thread, then all those threads that are stalling and waiting for their YKTTW to launch could just be locked and gotten out of the way. They could be revived again when their YKTTW launched, for the final wick movement and so forth. It would reduce the dead space in TRS.

edited 10th Dec '12 12:39:20 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.

If YKTTW drafts were actual wikipages in a "YKTTW" namespace then it would be trivial to link them to a forum thread. And it'd have a functioning edit-history-diff.

edited 10th Dec '12 1:00:59 PM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

One thing about having a YKTTW namespace - the page for a YKTTW discussion needs to be transcluded on top of the thread to be useful, not just linked. It should not be a third form of a TRS/IP tag.

Eta: Weird, what just happened to the thread here...

edited 10th Dec '12 1:12:05 PM by SeptimusHeap

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

Elaborate. I know you've complained about YKTTW looking cramped, and I also know there's a significant subset of YKTTW users who will scream bloody murder at YKTTW being made to look more like a forum. It's funny; when YKTTW started, the name was its most important duty. That's not because the writeup wasn't important. It's because those writeups came easy for our userbase, but they needed help coming up with a name. Now that we apparently can't even trust our Eternal September userbase with the sort of quick description that used to be enough for a YKTTW entry... I think that says it all about the sad state of coming up with good names these days. The current layout of YKTTW is basically a forum with very fat, centered thread entries. What specific features of a forum do you think the main YKTTW view should have? As with Septimus, keep in mind that this idea WILL run into resistance.

An interesting question we should consider, though: how much would you say that the people who have called for making YKTTW more forum-like are people who tend to frequent places like TRS and thus tend to think more on a high level about what a trope is, and how much would you say the people who want to maintain the YKTTW status quo as much as possible tend to simply chuck out examples?

One thing to keep in mind about that: even as it stands in YKTTW now, some drafts can be long. Perhaps instead of transcluding the page on top of the thread, the thread can be transcluded on the page? Otherwise, it may help to have the draft be an expandable button, defaulted to closed. Maybe launching a TRS-linked YKTTW could do something automatically. Not sure what.

First, a few replies to Morgan's points:

Hard to elaborate when I don't know what to elaborate upon

Anyway, we are doing a big fixing of YKTTW and thus complaints will be inevitable. It also does not need necessarily to be like a forum thread - just in a form that you can actually see replies without them being drowned in the interface.

In terms of forum style YKTTW list, we have also the basic issue of it being extremely space consuming. You can fit 2-3 or more (thumb calculation) threads into the space occupied by one YKTTW in the main list.

Concerning draft length: This is in fact why I prefer to use the current basic YKTTW layout (the structure), but not necessarily with the same interface.

Also, we want people to be able to see the draft without clicking a link.

Now a bit on my own: I don't think we need to outright disallow bad drafts, but we need to disallow their launching. An idea to consider about this - a feature that allows any user to abort a launch if someone's trying to launch a bad YKTTW? Maybe a "takeoff queue" where users can abort a bad launch in the last moment?

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

For starters? Liposuction◊.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Yes.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

I like that. Looks far more airy.

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

!

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

Care to elaborate, Rodney?

I like that design and it's more space-efficient; things like creator don't need to be instantly visible and all.

That was the amazing part. Things just keep going.

Sorry I meant "!" as in "Great Scot!" or "I like that!"

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

Stratadrake's suggestion is, indeed, awesome.

Coding issues are something I'll leave to others.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

While I personally have no objections to that design idea, I know in the last discussion there were YKTTW regulars who vehemently opposed making YKTTW forum-like, and that design is definitely forum-like.

It is already forum-like in functionality, that would just be a change to how it looks.

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

I like the suggested look.

Fight smart, not fair.

I don't see how replies are "drowned in the interface". Are you referring to the blue border around everything? Do you think replies on Ask The Tropers are "drowned in the interface"? It's funny; my impression is that the forum haters have the same issue with the lists of forum threads on the forums as you have with the display of comments on YKTTW. I am tentatively impressed by Stratadrake's mockup, but I know I find tags useful even if I'm not sorting by them, and I don't see how it's more airy than the current list of YKTT Ws.

It's worth noting that some of the problems people have with forums are such that even the move to linking to each YKTTW rather than making them expandable on a single page probably pissed some of them off. Here are some examples from previous threads:

---

Drafts are pretty long already; if replies are "drowned" by anything, it's the length of the draft they're replying to. Not needing to click on a link to see the draft is a good thing, but so might being able to switch between the draft and thread easily, especially if we're serious about getting people to edit the drafts directly. Right now there is no "hide draft" button, and the "hide replies" and parachute button is below the draft. That sounds like an artificial hold-up and, more importantly, ripe for abuse. Perhaps a mod, or perhaps designated TRS users who have proven their understanding of such things, needs to approve a trope's description, name, etc. before it can be launched? Dunno what the use of the hat system would be if we did that. Speaking of which, is there still a reason not to require five hats before launching?

edited 12th Dec '12 8:09:43 AM by MorganWick

A short bullet point reply:

• "Drowned in the interface", because it doesn't do anything to be surrounded with blue borders. Basically, it's like a forum without gingerbread but with much bluespace.
• Concerning the hats and abort thing: My suggestion would be completely unnecessary if people hatted stuff for being launchworthy. Hats are supposed to signal that the YKTTW's ready to be a wiki page, but they aren't used that way - many of drafts with hats are by no means launchworthy.
• A need for approval for launching is not going to work:
  • People will start bypassing YKTTW.
  • As the history of Wikipedia vs. its predecessor Nupedia suggests, a need for approval is just going to choke the process.

More generally speaking, one thing I am thinking of is that the combination of different purposes and different interface has lead to a segregation between TRS and YKTTW, which causes conflict. But since their purpose is remarkably similar - except that TRS starts with bad pages and YKTTW with drafts - would it be a consideration to merge or replace TRS and YKTTW with a "hybrid" that incorporates features of both?

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