All-Purpose Policy and Meta discussion: Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop

I would love that, but I don't think it would divert attention to cleanup...

The clocking I have been doing has definitely been helping the backlog. Four threads morgued due to clocking out.

I'll open up a few more threads.

If something is currently listed on Tropes Needing Examples, does that mean it can't go to TRS? Because a trope I brought recently to the TRS in a currently-unopened thread is listed there, and if things on that list aren't allowed in TRS I will request a close.

I don't see why not, especially since they often fit the category of "not thriving" (as few on-page examples often correlates with a low wick count).

If anything listed there or on Pages Needing Wicks is a stock phrase, it should probably be taken to TRS. No New Stock Phrases has Stock Phrases Are Not Tropes as a redirect for a reason, and I've noticed that stock phrases often have low wick counts (including Go Figure, which surprisingly wasn't used as a Pothole Magnet in the vein of So Yeah).

The trope in question was Best is Average, Better is Best. Would that be considered a Stock Phrase?

Not a stock phrase, but quite underused (12 wicks in over 13 years!) and the title is confusing.

I agree that the title could be better. Part of why there's a lack of wicks could be because the Advertising/ namespace doesn't have as many pages as other work namespaces, rather than there being anything wrong with the trope itself (aside from the name being unclear).

The fact that "Adjective"/"Adjectival" and "Advertising" begin with the same letter might mean there's some potential for alliteration, but beyond that, I can't think of any name ideas at the moment.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 14th 2021 at 11:52:31 AM

Yeah, a lot of Advertising Tropes are undercooked and can't thrive because they were made before we had a lot of pages for specific campaigns.

Forgotten Tropes also tend to have low wick counts, and in their case it's due to their limited lifespan (I checked at one point and two-digit wick counts are very common with them). There are also some we don't have pages for — there was an ATT query from a few years ago regarding a gag-based Forgotten Trope that we apparently never had a page for and may have come up due to the Mandela Effect.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 14th 2021 at 11:58:16 AM

The “wick check” for the recently-created Transgender thread doesn’t seem to provide an actual wick check- OP seems to have selected random examples from the page examples, and not actually checked the wicks. Furthermore, they cut down on many of the entries they used. Here’s an example that was in the “wick check”:

• Gintama has some characters who are transgender, mostly trans women who belong to the okama club.

But here’s the actual example on Transgender.Anime & Manga:

• Gintama has some characters who are transgender, mostly trans women who belong to the okama club. Their portrayal is mostly unimpressive (the okama club members for example are very perverted and get frequently called monsters), but there are two standouts:
  • The widowed okama club leader Saigo has her own story where she has trouble raising her bullied son as a trans parent and said son (who's otherwise supportive) feels the need to prove that he's a man. After she saves his life, he gets the courage to invite her and everyone else in the club to parents' day and writes about how "beautiful" their hearts are.
  • Kubei is biologically female and was Raised as the Opposite Gender but does not consider themself to be either male or female. A whole arc is dedicated to this realization: the arc's antagonist questions Kyubei's feelings about their gender identity, and changes everyone's sexes as "punishment" for not abiding to gender roles. Despite having considered a sex change before, Kyubei finds little satisfaction in being male and eventually decides they are neither "manly nor womanly".

Furthermore, with how controversial Bi The Way’s de-tropification was, I think we should look more so into how trans characters are portrayed in media, so that even if the trope is decided to not be tropeworthy, we can derive some new tropes from it.

Edited by jandn2014 on Apr 15th 2021 at 2:10:47 PM

Update: OP is attempting to do a wick check. It took some time to get them to understand what wick checks actually are, but hopefully this pans out well.

Which is going on here.

I can't post this in the Transgender thread since it's currently locked, but most of the third folder's examples sound like they belong under Trans Tribulations.

Edit: I might as well add that while the opening post has been edited, I'm not sure if the thread creator got around to replacing the original example list with a proper wick check. There's no listing in any of the folders in the wick check project sandbox.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 15th 2021 at 8:18:55 AM

The recently-created thread for Kindness Ball lists it as “Not Thriving”. However, the trope has been around for only 3 years and has 41 wicks, which means that it counts as “Healthy” according to Administrivia.Wick. I think it just needs something to draw attention it, such as making it a Featured Trope or promoting it on Trope Report.

Pitched the suggestion and closed.

The newly-created Mole Monster TRS thread is literally just two sentences. Also, the question can be easily answered by "Mole Monster is about video game enemies/bosses that primarily burrow and reside underground, and does not necessarily encompass Sand Worm examples".

Edited by I--Vanya--I on Apr 25th 2021 at 8:05:03 PM

It should probably be redirected to the Crash Rescue Thread, as we're already discussing unlaunching the trope.

So the Overtook the Manga thread references a wick check, but I'd like to know more about it, since we barely get any of the results...unless that's all the wick check was... Can we get more info, ~Merseyuser1?

This is the third time they have tried to get this thread started BTW

They keep mentioning ZCEs, but how is changing the name of Overtook the Series supposed to solve its ZCE problem? The reason it has a ZCE problem is probably because it was launched in 2008, not because of the name.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 26th 2021 at 3:29:31 AM

That's a good point. Practically every trope I've ever wick-checked has had a ZCE issue. At some point, it stops being the trope's fault, unless it's literally all ZCEs.

Which is why I often ignore ZCE when it comes to calculating the minimum number of wicks in my checks. That is, if I'm checking 50 pages and ten of them had only a ZCE, I check ten or so more pages to get the number of non-ZCE wicks to 50 or more. That way I'm only comparing the meanings, not against ZCE (unless I'm arguing that it attracts ZCE, them I'm looking for 20% or more ZCE wicks).

It might be worth suggesting that other people do that on the page for How to Do a Wick Check, and since a proposed revision of that page came up recently in the Outdated Pages thread, I'll bring it up there.

Makes sense, the downside is that it makes the check even more time consuming and might mislead people as to how common each usage is. If the ZCEs are really that common, ignoring them completely skews the results and implies the misuse or correct use shows up more often than it actually does.