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

The Appearance tropes thread deals with tropes where a lot of them aren't genuine tropes. The cases you are talking about are underexampled tropes, different issue. Also, good ideas often become bad ones from overuse so I would be careful with "this one works, so another one will too" logic.

That's true enough, but I'm still not seeing a huge difference from cutting them (or salvaging them) via TRS or a cleanup thread. Either way, the result would be the same, assuming the attendance at the thread is the same...

...Which admittedly is a point against making a big thread: Cleanup threads, if they aren't CM or MB, tend to attract less posters than your typical TRS thread does. So I can see how that might be a concern.

Still, these "Not Thriving" threads tend to clog up TRS. They're solved relatively quickly, but they're also made relatively quickly, and it'd be nice to have a way to clear them faster to make room for bigger threads here. (Says the girl who made one of these not long ago...)

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 30th 2021 at 3:35:06 PM

The amount of not thriving threads can get a little annoying (well that that easy threads attract more attention than older thread that require grunt work for obvious reasons) but they get resolved fairly quickly so I don’t really care about them. I don’t think moving them somewhere else will help much with backlog because the biggest contributors to it has always been threads that seem complex or need a lot of work to get through. We have unresolved threads here that have been around long before rounding up no thriving tropes became a trend here.

I admit that I make a lot of threads for these tropes, but there's no limit for how many TRS threads there can be of a certain type I know of. "Not Thriving" has 20 threads right now, but "Misused" has 31. As for clogging up other things, that is kinda true, but I see this as just getting rid of parts of the backlog that can go by faster, since both Tropes Needing TRS and Pages Needing Wicks have a lot of pages, but the former has approximately 400 and the latter has over 600, with some overlap. I'm sure that if we can keep a great pace, we'll make significant progress by 2022 and you won't be nearly as bothered by these threads in the future (since some of this stuff is from as early as 2007 and I don't see a need to inflate wick standards for a long time).

Edited by Piterpicher on Apr 30th 2021 at 9:54:14 PM

Fair.

My main concern, I guess, is just the ever-growing backlog. I did some cleaning and bumped some threads to help out, but some of the older threads stagnated and I have no idea how to revive them.

Well, I still think we should close TRS temporarily, focus on the 91 threads we have now so there won’t be a steady stream of new ones burying the old stuff.

Edited by MacronNotes on Apr 30th 2021 at 4:00:58 AM

I'd support that.

I'd support that, but how would it be done without admin assistance? Would the mods just Morgue any thread made between the temporarily closure and the resolution of the 91 threads that have already been posted?

Edit: Now that I think of it, after the 1.8 site update in 2018, Image Pickin was closed for a while, and Willbyr made a thread whose title said to not to make new threads.

Another edit: Found the thread in question.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 30th 2021 at 8:18:25 AM

IIRC those threads gradually got resuscitated from the morgue once we got image uploading back, so maybe do something different? Toss all new threads made during this period in the morgue and don't let them come back, otherwise we're just moving the backlog elsewhere.

That would need a lot of advertising though (bulletins, wherever else we can make announcements — can the mods send P Ms to everyone?)

Permanently sending them to the Morgue sounds better than what was done for Image Pickin, due to what you said about temporarily moving them there essentially meaning moving the backlog elsewhere.

Edit: The mods using the bulletin function sounds good enough unless there's a better way to get the word out. That was done with the Hair Decorations project in the Appearance Trope thread due to how many wicks there were to clean up. I think more than one bulletin can be on there at a time; I'm positive there were two on there simultaneously earlier this month.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 30th 2021 at 8:39:29 AM

(Also — One Mario Limit just needs a look-see on the sandbox to wrap up; please help me ahahah)

Well, the Cukoloris thread is done now that the page has been moved, the wicks have been cleaned, the page is on Tropes Needing Examples, and alternate spellings have been added as redirects (including one from Eberts Glossary Of Movie Terms that Wikipedia didn't list for some reason).

Can we still keep an exception for not thriving somehow? I can clean up some of the old stuff (but don't expect too much as I'm having exams next week, but I did help get rid of the Game and Watch thread for instance), and I can wait before some other old stuff gets closed before continuing the thread-making, but I still think I've been doing a pretty effective job here.

Edited by Piterpicher on Apr 30th 2021 at 4:52:29 PM

I'd be fine with that, actually. If we need to rename a trope that lacks wicks due to a bad name (such as how Knees Knocking Together was renamed to Quaking with Fear because it was a very common trope with surprisingly few wicks due to its Non-Indicative Name), moving the wicks to the new name wouldn't take long after the mods move the page.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 30th 2021 at 10:16:23 AM

Yeah, you make a good point Piter. These threads don't take long to resolve, and the more we do of them now the less there'll be later.

I'm opposed to specific thread to cut advertising tropes. On the contrary, I don't think we should be applying the same standards of wickiness to tropes that apply mostly to things that aren't well represented on the wiki, like art and advertising tropes, Forgotten Tropes, or genre conventions of older media. These things are tropable works with their own conventions, and cutting perfectly valid tropes for not meeting an arbitrary wick standard is shooting our selves in the foot as it will ensure these media categories won't grow.

To be clear, I'm not against cutting tropes for not thriving as many of them have other issues like unclear descriptions or being overly narrow. I am against attacking entire trope categories for failure to thrive.

Well, we wouldn't necessarily be cutting them. If we deem them legitimate tropes, we can send them to TLP or do some crosswicking, or anything to make them thrive and grow.

Anywho, went through and bumped some of the older ones to get some discussion moving.

If there's a thread or two you guys want me to pitch for the June Trope Report, lemme know. My focus now is on trying to get threads to close, so I feel like most of my spotlight suggestions this time will be TRS threads.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 30th 2021 at 5:27:21 AM

As WarJay thread, the suggested advertising trope thread wouldn't just be for cutting them, and I don't know how you got the impression that the posts were saying the thread would specifically be for cutting them.

The only type of cutting I could see happening is if there's too much overlap between a given pair of advertising tropes to keep them separate, such as how Serving Suggestion was cut because it was basically a worse version of Adjacent to This Complete Breakfast, to the point that it wasn't even about works (it was about product labels instead of advertising).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 30th 2021 at 10:44:18 AM

I think the concern is that such a thread will be by the nature of the problem inclined to apply the scissors frequently.

It's the same problem that the NRLEP thread has. Too many people boarding the "cut everything" train.

There is a name for that: Mob Mentality. When someone presents a very convincing argument, it takes less effort for the rest to just say "I agree, cut" rather than taking their time to decide whether they truly agree or not.

Honestly, I think mob mentality is not something that happens here. If an argument is extremely strong yet you don't agree with taking a course of action relaved to it, the only thing you can really say to defend a page's existence is "I liked using it", or other inherently subjective reasoning. Chances are that even if you think about why you may agree or disagree, you won't be able to state why in a good fashion, so there's little point in doing so in such cases.

Edited by Piterpicher on May 1st 2021 at 11:18:51 AM

For a trope that isn't thriving, for example, the reason may be because the name isn't helping. If a rename can allow it have more wicks and entry-pimping, then the most ideal consideration would be a name to help that cause. The "I like using it" argument wouldn't hold water because, well, it's barely used to begin with.

And with all due respect, you're not exactly the one to speak when talking about the "not thriving, so cut it or bust" situation, because nearly all of your proposed TRS thread end with a straight "I vote cut" suggestion, regardless of whether the trope can be salvaged or not. I can understand that the current backlog of TRS threads makes us want to wrap up as many of them as possible, but I'm not sure if saying "cut it" as the sole proposal for the more vulnerable articles makes it worth it.

Also, please don't misunderstand my post as being confrontational, I'm just puzzled and curious over the trend of beheading many trope articles that could need some wiki love. Or has the name Trope Repair Shop drifted its meaning nowadays? We don't take an ill or wounded person to a hospital just to instantly tell them "you're evicted, wrap up any pending issues in this world before you die", do we?

There's a lot of times when we do decide to salvage the trope. Most often, we end up saving the ideas on the Trope Idea Salvage Yard, because we think the idea is tropeworthy but that the actual state of the trope is unsalvageable, and "yarding" it is better than sending it to TLP with an unwilling sponsor, especially if we can't find enough valid examples to begin with.

Point is, a lot of page cuts lately are more like cutting the page itself, and sending the idea to the Salvage Yard in hopes that someday, and interested troper attempts to recreate it and does a better job.

We don't just send things to the inferno without at least considering how to fix them, but in some cases it's blatantly obvious that the trope needs to be cut. A lot of the time, they're stock-phrases, The Same, but More Specific, created without the TLP process and full of ZCEs, or pages that should be in another namespace entirely. In those cases, a cut is the only thing we can do, because any salvage attempt will be recreating the trope from scratch anyway.

Not to mention our standards have generally raised these past few years, and a lot of the biggest issues and least-thriving tropes are ones made back when standards were lower, and we're only now trying to catch up and fix the wiki.

So, I can see where the concerns about the TRS being too "cut happy" are coming from, but I also think people need to take a closer look at these threads and look for other patterns. Because we don't cut tropes just for the hell of it, and we salvage what we can how we can.