Useful Notes Cleanup

Per conversation in Ask The Tropers, this thread is an attempt to clean up Useful Notes, which has become clogged up with a lot of pages that many view as not relevant to our mission.

To reiterate the purpose of Useful Notes, it is to:

• Debunk stereotypes presented in media.
• Give advice for writers and others who produce creative works.
• Provide education on things relevant to storytelling, such as aspects of media creation and delivery.

I will be adding pages to vote on a few at a time so they can be discussed. Minimum voting time will generally be a week unless a page immediately gets a lot of votes to keep it.

If you believe that a page could be altered in some way to make it useful (such as becoming an index,) post your thoughts in the thread.

Edited by DracMonster on Feb 9th 2019 at 7:10:39 AM

I'm going to start with the "Other" section at the bottom, since it contains the highest proportion of questionable pages.

Such as Air Guns, Airsoft, and NERF Brand? The first two aren't needed, but the third could be cut by 90% and moved to the Toys/ namespace.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Airsoft has a list of appearances in media, so it might squeak by. I'm on the fence about it.

Courtesy link to the crowner while we wait for the hook.

My personal opinion is that the less it has to do with tropes, storytelling, fictional works, the more dubious it is. Are you looking for a starter guide for high quality children's literature? Well, go to Newbery Medal. Want to know why that 1970s Star Trek cartoon looks so terrible? Read The Dark Age of Animation.

But this is not Wikipedia and we should resist efforts to make it into Wikipedia and Driving Stick is just not something that should be on this wiki.

We could also have a list of chairs in media and the tendency of characters to sit on them, but that doesn't strike me as useful. I vote cut.

Edited by HighCrate on Feb 9th 2019 at 4:59:51 AM

Why do we have SlidingScale.Furry Fandom? I thought it was a bit questionable reading it, but I realized now that it's been around since 2012.

Edited by rjd1922 on Feb 9th 2019 at 7:02:17 AM

Keet cleanup

That's... odd.

Cut Airsoft- it's just a thing that exists.

Current Project: The Team

Ok guys let's not add too many at once. Discussion could become too noisy, and it'll make it a headache to keep track of. We'll review them all in good time.

Edited by DracMonster on Feb 9th 2019 at 8:49:44 AM

I saw a holler requesting a crowner hook, but I am a little wary of the idea of using an omnibus crowner to cut pages. The last iterations of this system we've had have raised concerns about rubber stamping and superficiality. Any take?

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

Well, there are dozens of questionable pages.

We could do them as individual threads but that's going to really clog up TLP.

Edited by DracMonster on Feb 10th 2019 at 8:18:21 AM

Where do the psychology/psychiatry pages fit into this? I know Hollywood Personality Disorders is in TRS to be changed to UsefulNotes.Personality Disorders and it's been mentioned before that Self-Harm's page is too medical and should probably be split into a Useful Notes page. Are these pages Tvtropes-worthy?

Edited by Pichu-kun on Feb 10th 2019 at 5:26:38 AM

What are the "last iterations of this system" you're referring to?

The closest analogue I can think of is the Grand Unified Appearance Trope Cleanup thread, which seems to work well enough, although it does seem to have a tendency to stall out for long periods.

I don't think individual TRS threads would work, but I do think individual crowners a la the GUATC thread would be a good idea. After all, the options aren't always going to be as binary as "cut / don't cut." There are likely going to be Useful Notes pages where heavy editing or merging with similar pages are options to consider. Individual crowners would also make it easier to track how long which options have been up for vote.

At the very least, there needs to be a better system for deciding when/how pages get added to the crowner. The OP announced his intention to add them a few at a time, at which point people promptly ignored him and tripled the size of the crowner in a day with little or no discussion.

Edited by HighCrate on Feb 10th 2019 at 5:57:53 AM

TRS is soooooooooooooo slow. It would be better for moderators to take unilateral action. There is low-hanging fruit here: we don't need a Useful Notes page on how to drive stick shift and we don't need a Useful Notes page on K-mart and honestly we shouldn't need a laborious process and a public vote to make those calls.

• I think we should keep UsefulNotes.MAME because it's directly related to arcade games, which we have lots of pages on.
• UsefulNotes.Bees might serve as a useful starting point for Analysis pages about the portrayal of bees in fiction versus real-life bees (how about Analysis.Bee Afraid?). Similarly, UsefulNotes.Cat Communication might contain information for an analysis page about fictional cat communication (assuming the animals can't just talk, of couse) versus real-life cat communication.
• UsefulNotes.Left 4 Dead looks like something out of a walkthrough. Cut it.
• Why have UsefulNotes.Driving Stick? We're not a driving school.
• I'm on the fence about UsefulNotes.Airsoft because it at least has a list of appearances in media.
• As for the rest, I don't see how they're relevant to the wiki's mission.

Edited by MathsAngelicVersion on Feb 10th 2019 at 5:27:24 PM

This Is A Wiki. The reason cleanup threads and the TRS (and for that matter, getting tropes launched on the TLP, most of the time) take a while is because people disagree, and we need to account for that. Unilaterally deleting anything unless it is a clear-cut violation of existing rules (i.e. we already have an established policy for it) is undemocratic and exclusionary. This is why Edit Warring is so forbidden for example.

For these reasons, I do not support unilaterally deleting Useful Notes pages, some kind of running crowner would be preferred. While nobody wants us to be a worse^note  due to the lack of citations version of Wikipedia, I would argue that bad useful notes pages are less of a problem than say, bad works pages, and shouldn't need a TLP requirement. Bad tropes promote confusion and misunderstanding of media, bad works pages encourage incorrect entry writing, bad indexes clutter pages and obscure good indexes, but bad Useful Notes pages? At worst, no one reads them and they waste bandwidth. And no one has demonstrated that the latter is a significant issue.

The most problematic ones in my mind are ones that are misusing the namespace (i.e. UsefulNotes.Dancers), which provides no useful notes and is written like an index of creators (usually in Main).

Here are some suggested criteria for whether something should have a Useful Notes page:

1. Is the page about Real Life?
2. Does the topic of the page have a trope (including Trivia) or works page that relates to it in some way?
3. Is the content of the page incompatible with any other namespace (Creator, work, Recap, trivia, etc)?

If the answer to any of these is no, then the page can be cut. If the answer to any of these is yes, the page should stay.

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

Maybe so, but if that's the case I'll have to support Repressive, but Efficient.

Eh, I guess we'll see how this works out, this thread is a good start.

Ain't these pages already against the rules on the Useful Notes page? They aren't helpful information for creators in any shape or form.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 10th 2019 at 7:27:05 AM

Current Project: The Team

I agree, because I think there's more options than "leave or cut". The solution to one page may be "turn it into a trope" while another page is "cut half the information and leave it". A running crowner (like what Trivia-tropes uses) won't encourage the proper discussion and action.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Perhaps the crowner should instead ask "Should x be Useful Notes" and if no then we decide what to do with the page.

Current Project: The Team

I agree. As I've mentioned, some of the pages have content that can be salvaged and used for e.g. Analysis pages.

If the mods won't hook the crowner, I'm going to assume we don't have their blessing to do this.

I guess they could be taken to TLP individually.

The crowner was hooked, but it's gone now that we pointed out that, in it's current "cut/not cut" state, it was unhelpful. The crowner should be "Useful Notes / Not Useful Notes".

Current Project: The Team