On the subject of pre-release work pages

I'm with Discar—this entire issue is an answer looking for a problem.

YMMV pages for unreleased works have consistently proven to be problematic. I think we can all agree on this. Other issues with main pages tend to be small and often fix themselves as new information comes out. We shouldn't be locking work pages over this.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

25% misuse, according to the more conservative of the two analyses, is not a "solution looking for a problem."

Round Robin's solution (folder separation) is probably my next preference now given the uproar over the failed pagemove experiment.

Except that is going to be redundant. With rare exceptions like Deadpool 2, where the marketing was this whole event that had its own tropes and everything. Most of the time, everything in the trailer folder will be in the film folder. It's just unnecessary duplication of effort.

We have a cleanup thread. Why don't we just try that for a while and see if it works before doing anything rash?

I still think locking the YMMV pages is pretty much required at this point.

Yeah. I mean, I'd still prefer not to, but it really is necessary. YMMV pages in general have lots of problems, and adding in it being an unreleased work just makes it more trouble than it's worth.

I suppose the question there, though, is should YMMV pages for unreleased works be nuked wholesale, or locked wholesale, with the normal option of making edits through the locked pages thread.

I'd prefer locking them rather than removing them, as it makes sense for the pages to exist.

I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.

In what way does it make sense? They can just be made post-release...

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I see absolutely no reason pre-release YMMV pages need to exist at all. That said, locking seems like it would be enough to stop the hysterical knee-jerk edits that are the real problem here, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.

The problem with locking is that it tends to freeze things in this weird half-assed state where only the most egregious misuse has been cleaned up, but what remains is still pretty bad.

The big problem with YMMV pages for upcoming or very recently-released works is that people are making knee-jerk reactions to every trailer or headline, meaning things change very quickly. Freezing that in place at a moment right after someone's noticed that the page is enough of a problem to warrant locking strikes me as the worst possible solution, resulting in a page that's instantly out-of-date and unlikely to be updated in any kind of coherent fashion due to the barrier-to-entry that the Locked Pages thread represents.

It is, effectively, the worst of both worlds compared to either leaving it open and letting the chips fall where they may, or nuking it until the work is actually released (which would be my preferred solution).

Edited by HighCrate on Mar 1st 2019 at 5:35:52 AM

I think we've established everyone's opinion on the matter.

I'm pretty sure the idea is to institute preemptive locking from now on.

I'm confused then. If it's pre-emptive, then what's being locked? An empty page? A note saying "this is locked, come back on release day"? That sounds fine too.

Creation locking, I assume, based on some of the Permanent Red Link Club members that are also Locked Pages.

Contains 20% less fat than the leading value brand!

Here's something I thought of that hasn't come up yet.

Animal Crossing has all the tropes for all its games listed on a single page. It also has a game that's coming out in 2019 that's highly anticipated. Currently nothing's been revealed about the game so there's nothing to trope... For now.

When a trailer does come out for it, would the whole page be locked as well?

"Some" is an understatement - a locked cut page is the very definition of joining the PRLC.

Edited by Albert3105 on Mar 1st 2019 at 6:59:37 AM

I did an analysis of Disney.Frozen from the first version, and every month afterwards, until the month before release. I intended to do the month of release, a month after release, and a year after release, but I'm too tired.

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Sandbox.Case Study Frozen: More than 50% ZCE every month, and many of the tropes with context have/had inaccurate information anyway. This is acceptable for the wiki?

Edited by crazysamaritan on Mar 1st 2019 at 9:58:37 AM

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Well, the main franchise page needs to be split between individual game pages. That's what every other franchise does. I haven't played any game since the first one, but I highly doubt that they are all so functionally identical that they should be on the same page.

Then once they're split, the unpublished work would be the same as any other.

I wonder if a side-effect of the possible getting rid of YMMV pages for unreleased works would be a cleanup of And the Fandom Rejoiced pages, which often (I'm looking at you, Super Smash Bros.) basically become prerelease news pages with added gushing. Holding off on those until the work is actually released might help focus the pages more on the most significant bits of information that got the fanbase excited.

...Actually, now that I'm posting this I noticed that ATFR is a Sugar Wiki page rather than YMMV and says not to link to it on other pages. So should there even be subpages about it in the first place? Or is the fact that it is Sugar Wiki enough to give it a pass there?

Edited by Kayube on Mar 1st 2019 at 1:19:02 PM

^^^How does that case study compare to other YMMV pages?

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

I didn't look at the YMMV page, I was looking at the main work page.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

A direct apples-to-apples comparison is kind of impossible, since there are so many variables that we can't control for. The time period we're looking at was a very different time for the wiki, with different standards for proper example context, formality of writing, etc, so a more recently-created page wouldn't be a fair comparison. Also, we'd want to compare it to a page that had existed for the same amount of time at each point, so that one page hadn't had more time to get cleaned up by enterprising tropers (or get fouled up by careless ones).

Ideally, what we'd want as a basis for comparison is a movie in the same general genre and demographic, that came out around the same time, with roughly the same buzz level, but where the work page wasn't created until the day of release. Good luck finding one like that.

I got the closest I could, though, and analyzed Brave. As nearly as I can determine, the page was created about a month before release date, as opposed to years in the case of Frozen, so it had much less time to accumulate misuse, Zero Context Examples, and general crapitude before being troped by tropers who had actually, y'know. Seen the movie. While the amount of work that went into crazysamaritan's monthly snapshots is admirable, I went with only two data points: shortly after release, and roughly a year after it.

Analysis here.

I found much lower (but still unacceptably high; as I said, it was a different time) levels of ZCEs and misuse (32%-35%) compared to crazysamaritan's analysis of Frozen (70%-75%). Overall misuse levels went down slightly (35% -> 32%) in the year after release. There did not appear to be any concerted effort at cleaning up the misuse from the earlier version of the page, and what cleanup did happen incidentally was largely counterbalanced by more misuse being added over time. However, most of the new entries that were added during that year were much better than the ones during the release window, meaning that the % rate of misuse stayed relatively stable.

TL;DR Conclusion: Pages that start out at poor quality, tend to stay poor-quality. Pages that are created a long time before release tend to start out at poorer quality than ones that don't.

Edited by HighCrate on Mar 2nd 2019 at 7:29:16 AM

I've disagreed with almost every single mention of misuse you've brought up in this thread on at least some level, so I'm not going to go through that list point by point. But partly because of you we now have a thread for cleaning unreleased work examples. If you think any of our current unreleased work pages need cleaning, help us clean them.

Part of the issue is that this site tends to gather younger people who are enthusiastic about the work in question and they want to be the first to add new stuff. Its the same principle as someone spamming "first" in the comment section of a given video only to be the first comment. Popular stuff will be populated by more people and asking them to not contribute (whether it is meaningful or meaningless) to something because of reasons that are arbitrary to them (like release dates) would be difficult to near impossible.