Troping-by-Proxy Clean-Up Effort

I recently asked about this in Ask The Tropers.

This project is about cleaning up examples that break the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment and other Wiki policies (e.g. Examples Are Not Recent, Examples Are Not Arguable, examples are not general, complaining/gushing, gossiping about RL persons, etc.). Most other clean-up threads so far concern themselves with the articles of RL persons, the RL sections of tropes, or the wicks of particular RL persons (e.g. Trump). This clean-up project is focused on...

1. Work Pages that are magnets for RL examples
2. "Subtweeting" ^note This is when someone adds an example, but doesn't wick the article. Examples should be wicked to their corresponding pages if we have them. Wicking to the article is not enough to solve the problem here, because if the example breaks policy, it should be cut.
3. Troping by Proxy (tropers giving their personal opinions via quoting someone)

Important Information (taken from this post from a similar clean-up effort):

• Current political figures "should not be a subject of any trope example on the wiki, except:
  • When the work in question specifically mentions the RL individual.
  • When the entirety of the example has to do with the portrayal of that individual in the work.
  • When the work is fictional.
• All three of these must apply.
• Alternatively:
  • When the RL individual has a creative role themselves, such as writing or acting in a work. In this sense we give them no more nor less treatment then we would any other creator.
• Additionally, please make sure to take out any examples of "Funny Aneurysm" Moment, Harsher in Hindsight, or Hilarious in Hindsight regarding these political figures. A political event that may be seen positively by some people may be seen negatively by others."

We should probably focus our work on politician articles and non-fictional works. I think we should concern ourselves with article types that demonstrably have these issues. My (opening) suggestion is to tackle Political Programmes and then look at other genres within Show Genres and go from there. I recently tried to clean up Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, so I guess that would technically be first on my list of to-do’s.

Honestly, I don't really see those three issues as being necessarily related. I'm of the mind that each of them should get their own Projects thread, assuming they're a significant problem currently on the wiki.

It's not that they are related issues, but there is a logic to it. The main issue I was hoping to address is the troping by proxy, but there's no reliable way to address that issue by using wick lists.

• The "subtweeting" issue is not something we can use wick lists for, though such lists certainly will contain some pages with examples that aren't wicked. The only way to be sure that the subtweeted examples are taken out is to search for the person's commonly used name (e.g. "Nixon" rather that "RichardNixon," etc.).
• The troping by proxy issue does not always include RL events or persons that have wiki pages, so there's not really a wick list we can rely on. Effectively, these examples can only be addressed in the way that regular "subtweeting" would be. Also, if a troper knows they "probably shouldn't" write an example that "probably" breaks the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment, they'll probably write "Tricky Dick" rather than "[[RichardNixon Tricky Dick]]" or something else just as difficult to find in a stack of letters.
• Works tend to be indexed somewhere.

So, if we're searching for troping by proxy, we might as well also search for subtweeting. And if we're going after troping by proxy and subtweeting — and if this is a systematic, cooperative effort rather than a "lone wolf" sort of thing — we need some sort of list to look through. Normally, clean-up efforts search through wick lists, but for the aforementioned reasons, this particular sort of effort can't rely on wicks. Thus, indexes.

But, going through every index looking for two or three types of problems will take forever and a metric tonne of labor. So, whittling down the options, the types of indexes should include or be the focus of works that attract this sort of problem. Basically, any non-fiction index (or index including non-ficiton works) could have this issue. I suggested Show Genres because of the prevalence of "news shows" and "satirical news shows" that have become popular after The Tonight Show with David Letterman and The Daily Show with John Stewart.

As for the concern that these issues aren't a significant problem for the wiki, I'm not sure if there is a way to tell without going through a sampling of the non-fiction works on the wiki. It's why I think we should stress that the indexes to go through ought to have a demonstrable problem. Political Programmes, in my opinion, does. There was also talk of certain Web Video genres having this problem as well.

I don't understand who "John", "Person A", and "Person B" are supposed to be, so the examples don't make sense to me.

edited 8th Mar '17 5:43:26 PM by rodneyAnonymous

Would changing their names to Alice and Bob and Charlie help or is it because they aren't RL persons' names (e.g. "Sarah Palin" or "Angela Merkel")? I was just trying to be general.

I can't really agree with this policy if it holds by a strict definition of "fictional," which would practically amount to a wiki ban on semi-fictional works treating Real Life politics whimsically.

If that's the price we have to pay to avoid Flame Bait and ROCEJ screw yous, then so be it. We aren't about politics.

I mean, non-fiction isn't that difficult to spot. It's generally self-labelled as non-fiction, news, parody, or satire.

If you're talking about the jokes themselves being based in non-fictoin, my response is: There's "That is satire" (an explanation), and then there's "That's just satire" (an excuse). Outright mockery is not the same as satire, and if there's a question about the validity of the example as "just a joke" or "actually mockery," then I'd say we look to the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment and the context already on the page or the context of the event (e.g. "How 'hot button' is this topic right now?").

Vis a vis cleaning work pages: I've been working on The O Reilly Factor (I skipped Meet The Press because I forgot that it's still on the air). Issues include(-ed):

• Troping RL persons (O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Juan Williams, Glenn Beck)
• Arguable Examples
• Recently Examples
• ZCE
• Natter
• Subtweeting: Radio.Glenn Beck, Jon Stewart (The Daily Show), Ellen DeGeneres, Al Franken, Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report), and Countdown With Keith Olbermann.

edited 9th Mar '17 10:06:19 PM by WaterBlap

5: Neither would help. One is too general, the other too specific. Is "John" a troper? "Person A" a creator?

• None of them are tropers. (Obviously excluding the editor who added the example in the first place.)
• "John" is the creator/celebrity/actor who is talking about "Person A" on John's show or in John's book (or other work).
  • The editor who added the example is voicing his or her opinion on "Person A" by using "John" as pre-text. If you take out "John" or "John says" in the example, you are left solely with the editor's opinion.
    • "John says that Person A is the Lesser of Two Evils compared to Person B." ... this becomes...:
    • "Persona A is the Lesser of Two Evils compared to Person B."
    • The example breaks Wiki policy (in this meta-example, it's troping RL persons), and the editor who added the example is using "John" as an (more or less transparent) excuse to break policy.
• "Person A" could be any of the following:^note I am including non-politicians and politicians for the sake of the examples. I think this issue is more likely to occur with politicians.
  • A Creator (e.g. Andrew Hussie, Al Franken)
  • An Actor (e.g. Anne Hathaway, Ronald Reagan)
  • A celebrity (or equivalent) with a TV Tropes page (e.g. Ellen Degeneres, Hillary Clinton)
  • A celebrity (or equivalent) without a TV Tropes page (e.g. Sean Hannity, Juan Williams)
  • A Historical Domain Character (e.g. Lucille Ball, Benjamin Franklin)
  • etc.

edited 10th Mar '17 5:19:15 PM by WaterBlap

Okay, so let me know if this is right: Let's say I think King John Doe is The Caligula. Stephen Colbert also thinks this and even compared him to Caligula in his show. The Caligula is NRLEP, so instead of putting him on there I put an example under live action TV saying something like "On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Colbert compares King John Doe to Caligula."

In this example, Colbert really does think King John Doe is The Caligula, but the only reason I'm putting it on the page is because I think so too and I want to add my opinion.

Is that it?

edited 11th Mar '17 10:59:52 AM by NervousShark

I would say yes. The trope is NRLEP and the example is actually about a RL person, despite the fact that the framing of the example is a work.

Luckily, if we want to shift this to include tropes, we could use the indexes that are already around (e.g. No Real Life Examples Please, YMMV or Audience Reactions, Trivia, etc.).

Edit: I just checked out The Caligula's subfolder for Live-Action TV and found Series.Kitchen Nightmares has an entire subfolder trash talking RL persons Amy and Sami (whoever they are) from Amy's Baking Company. It just seems to be gossiping and spreading rumors...

edited 11th Mar '17 11:37:28 AM by WaterBlap

The issue with "Steven Colbert said that John Doe is The Caligula" is that we only trope real people: "

• When the work in question specifically mentions the RL individual.
• When the entirety of the example has to do with the portrayal of that individual in the work.
• When the work is fictional.

All three of these must apply.

Or, alternatively:

• When the RL individual has a creative role themselves, such as writing or acting in a work. In this sense we give them no more nor less treatment then we would any other creator. "

That example would fail to meet both 2 and 3 of the first scenario and misses the second one altogether.