Useful Notes tropes being removed

Troper phoenix is going through all of the Useful Notes and Real Life pages and removing tropes en masse. I don't mean for this to be a tattle-tailing post or anything, but while for some articles its understandable, why do it to, say, the UEFA Champions League, or the US Presidents articles?

Has this been approved by the mods/admins/etc., or has he gone rogue here?

Yes. See Ask The Tropers. Tropes are not to be applied to Real Life people and things. Useful Notes are supposed to be aids for writers to help them get the details right (or get them deliberately wrong), not an opportunity to gossip about people.

Yeah, I got that part. I did go and look through and see that there was a Real Life cleanup and stuff going on.

But still, I don't see why tropes had to be removed from from the UCL page (and by extension, other sports pages and stuff). They are Real Life, yes, but Sports are an entertainment medium of their own.

Which makes me wonder if we should create a Sports category for that purpose...

As I said in that topic, professional sports can utilize tropes in their marketing, advertising, production, and so forth. Sports players, however, are real people, not actors putting on a stage persona, and so troping them is inappropriate. Similarly, sports games cannot contain narrative elements because they are not scripted (the production elements surrounding the game can, however — an example might be the Super Bowl halftime show).

Professional Wrestling is an exception because it is scripted and the wrestlers are explicitly actors playing roles.

It is worth noting that Useful Notes page for a sport may list characterization and narrative tropes that frequently appear in fiction featuring that sport.

edited 4th Aug '15 2:38:42 PM by Fighteer

I'm very sorry if I've caused any alarm. I've tried to be as open and public as possible about the whole thing.

I asked a few days ago in Ask the Tropers whether tropes on Useful Notes pages were okay, and if so, what kinds. After receiving an answer, I created a thread to cover anything that didn't fall under the department of the preexisting Real Life People Cleanup thread. I've also tried to get as much clarification as possible regarding any gray areas, such as sporting events and athletes. I've just been trying to do something that I perceived as being a needed project.

"Tropes are not to be applied to Real Life people and things."

Evidently many many people have disagreed with that point of view over many many years. And the statement I quote is given as a bald absolute without any supporting justification or logic.

"Useful Notes are supposed to be aids for writers to help them get the details right (or get them deliberately wrong), not an opportunity to gossip about people."

Seriously? Anyone using a Useful Notes article might as well be writing their screenplay in crayon. The text content of TV Tropes Useful Notes articles aren't good enough to references for fourth-grade Social Studies reports.

I've found the quality pretty hit or miss. There are a lot of really stubby little pages that barely have a description, much less a list of fictional portrayals. But some, Marie-Antoinette for example, aren't bad at all: It gives a description of who she was, talks about common perception vs fact, lists tropes associated with her when she pops up in fiction, and lists the fictional works in which she appears. Other pages, like Benjamin Netanyahu, start off with a good description of the person's importance but then make no mention of fictional appearances or tropes associated with fictional appearances. They seem more like a Wikipedia-lite than a page meant to inform about how other writers have used them in works and how to do it yourself. To me, that's what would make a page fail the "useful" part of Useful Notes, not having a short description or lacking details on real life events.

Locking this so we can have the conversation in one place. Please use this topic.