Roleplay Namespace Cleanup and Maintenance

Grumble, please see The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours; creators of a work hold no special rights over the page for their work, and it's been that way for years. tvtropes is a wiki, and like all wikis it's a collaborative, community-based project- attempting to claim ownership for one of its pages is inherently antithetical to its purpose.

To be honest, I'm not sure why you're being so defensive. Anyone who casually happens across the page and decides to sign up because of it is not likely to know that someone who wasn't part of the work edited the page. On the contrary, people cleaning the page and keeping it to a professional standard is only beneficial to drawing in interest.

Grumblefloof, are you sure you're familiar with wiki rules? These have been our rules for years. Don't call our enforcing them goalpost-shifting. It just means nobody noticed your pages have problems.

• The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours. So no, your pages can't be deleted just because you might want to; you used this wiki as your platform, that is fine and allowed within reason, but now the content belongs to the wiki. Not you, not your roleplaying group, not me, not the moderators, but the wiki (i.e. wiki admins/owners of the site). The wiki mostly works on consensus reached by this whole community.
• There Is No Such Thing as Notability. Everything fictional can be troped. Your roleplay, any one-shot fanfic, students' obscure films, tabletop games, pulp sci-fi, famous novels of western canon, ultra famous movies... anything. As long as it's published in any form and accessible to public. Oh, and we can't trope porn or real life. It doesn't matter who wrote the page either. Lots of fanfic writers trope their own work but they have no special privilege over it. They can't control what others add or remove. (If there are disputes, we need to talk it out and reach consensus.) The important part is that if you have an account here, that makes you a troper and you must follow our rules.
• Zero-Context Example: This is where your pages (not your-your, but created by your roleplaying group) needs the overhaul most. It can't be useful even to your group if you just post several tropes without explanation of what they are and how they're used in the storyline of the roleplay. There is no story to tell. Nobody can understand how the trope is used, or to check if it's used at all or if it's accurate. It's not been removed, though, just commented out with %%. You are encouraged to remove the mark-up and make the tropes visible again if you provide context to the example.

• How to Create a Character Page: This page with policy for character sheets is fairly new. It states that without a trope lists, characters can't be included on character sheets. It makes sense though: tropes are bread and butter of this wiki; it's basically what this wiki is all about. Without tropes, you can describe the characters and their stories on any blog or perhaps start your own wiki. Those character sheets for your roleplay have many, many characters listed without a single trope or even a single line of description. Just a link to the roleplay and a picture. That's not okay. However, they have not been deleted, just commented-out with %%. Again, you're more than welcome to fix it and gradually improve the pages. Add the context.

So instead of being angry at us that we do cleanup work on the wiki, direct all this energy in fixing the pages.

I'd like to say that your roleplay page is actually one of the better ones, with some explained examples and relatively few example-indentation issues.

Edited by XFllo on Nov 18th 2019 at 1:27:20 PM

Oh, and Grumble, this notice you put on Characters.Freedom City Play By Post is inappropriate:

As is this:

Please don't put it on the page. Do you think that looks professional?

I'm with WarJay and the others on this. This is not vandalism, it's maintenance.

I just thought that the first sentence needed deleting because it had "we" in it. But then I saw that is basically "our role play is not for bigots." That is about who the role play is made for, and does not describe anything setting, character, plot(?), etc. If I saw that paragraph on any other role play, I would have done the same things.

THAT'S NOT HOW YOU USE THE TROPE! Tv Tropes As A Gate Way Drug is supposed to be a place where tropers list works that they found via TvTropes, not that this work gets more roleplayers via the TvTropes page. So, is it ok if I cut this?

Edited by Playing_with_boy on Nov 18th 2019 at 8:24:09 AM

Please cut it. It's a Just for Fun collection of Troper Tales anyway.

Cutting it right ... now.

On a different topic, the creator of Beyond Infinite Crisis responded to my notifier. They're aware that the page is in a poor state right now, but they are planning to fix that issue once they have more time. So, hold off on cutlisting it for a while, guys. I want to give them a chance to work on it.

And was it put on the cutlist? Or cut already even? If so, they can ask for it to be restored on ATT with Sandbox namespace.

Not yet.

I should supply a courtesy link :P

Roleplay.Beyond Infinite Crisis

Progress has been slow and people discussed cutting it, but since it was being actively worked on I wanted to give the creator a chance to take action. So let's just give them a little time.

However, if that lasts long, we can move it to Sandbox.

In the future it would be appreciated if effort is made to reach out to the FC Pb P community prior to mass deletion of content.

We have been writing collaboratively for over a decade so we would be more than happy to take the load off TVT.

"mass deletion"? What was deleted besides the character deletion warnings and advertising bits? The rest of the content is still there... just uncommented, so only editors can see it; so if you're referring to that...

What was deleted: if I remember correctly, I removed some examples of Expy which now has a tighter definition (there can't be two or more sources for inspiration; and it has to be clearly stated by the creator of the new character that they're based on another one).

Now, for an example what the cleanup looks like and what we want of you.

This was on the page:

• Badass Lesbian: Jill.
• Badass Longcoat: Jack.
• Bare Your Midriff: Jill.
• Battle Couple: Jill and Dragonfly.

This is now still in the source, only hidden. That's what %% does. Nothing was deleted.

• %% * Badass Gay: Badass Lesbian Jill.
• %% * Badass Longcoat: Jack.
• %% * Bare Your Midriff: Jill.
• %% * Battle Couple: Jill and Dragonfly.

This is what we want:

• Badass Gay: Jill is a Badass Lesbian. She's a superheroine who fights for... She's badass because... She's in a relationship with Dragonfly who is also a superheroine.
• Badass Longcoat: Jack wears a black leather coat and he's a crime-fighting superhero.
• Bare Your Midriff: Jill's standard outfit is a red tight two-piece dress. Her bellybutton is revealed all the time.
• Battle Couple: Jill and Dragonfly are together in a loving relationship and they both fight crime.

If your roleplaying group can work on this collaboratively, it would be awesome.

See Zero-Context Example for more tips.

Edited by XFllo on Nov 18th 2019 at 9:55:00 PM

Oh, and I can't help but say that the only one who mass-deleted things from the pages was Grumblefloof, i.e. one of your own / one of the roleplay participants.

Edited by XFllo on Nov 18th 2019 at 10:02:16 AM

~Fighteer: I am fully aware of how wikis work, and have made zero claim of ownership to the page(s) contained on this site.

I am sure you understand that I have a responsibility to advocate for my community, and seek clarification where it is felt that it is needed.

e: I see the posts above and will pass things along to our team.

We apologize, some of our entries are old and this isn't the first time TVT has changed things and we've had to play catch up.

Edited by Sorus on Nov 18th 2019 at 3:50:01 PM

I can see where the consternation must come from, if your participants do not have accounts to see the edit/source, but as pointed out above, nothing has been deleted that can be salvaged. There were a lot of commented-out things that must look like outright deletions to the unfamiliar, but as pointed out, those can be restored with a bit of work.

To be honest, FPBP has had Character pages like this for years, so I can't help but wonder if the disassociation most of its participants seem to have with TVT results in bad troping habits being profligated until they are assumed to be how things should be done.

I dare say that's the problem with most of these roleplay pages. The people who make them are usually not intimately familiar with how the site works, and so take their editing tips from the other pages they've just happened to look at once or twice, rather than the actual rules. Because cleanup work is always slower than it actually takes to create new pages, this just sort of leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of "this is how a lot of work pages look, so I guess this is how my page should look".

The other problem, I think, is that when the participants in the RP are the primary tropers writing the article, it turns into a scratch pad for documenting the game among themselves, not something meant to be public-facing. This occurs whether it's intentional or not. It's why I am still very concerned about broadly accepting such articles. Why not make a shared Google doc if you want everything in one place? Are you doing this for a wider audience or for yourselves?

Good point. The fact that it's on our wiki means it's published for a wider audience whether they want it to be or not. That's just how it works. And because of this, any one of us can edit the page at any time... which is clearly not what they had in mind.

Just to chime in as another one of the FCPBP site-runners - at the end of the day, it's your sandbox here and we'd like to play in it.

If some of us come over to make some adjustments to the page, what should we do?

Missed a post made earlier - we are definitely maintaining the page for a wider audience, to chronicle the continued story of the oldest Mutants and Masterminds site on the Internet! It's a nice bonus that we get to talk about ourselves a bit too.

It is possible.

Things have been added and rebuilt on an ad-hoc basis for some time, and so gained a certain amount of inertia.

One way or another things will be corrected.

Personally, I'd start with adding context to any example with a %% next to it. That markup means the text has been hidden from readers for being a Zero-Context Example. All examples need proper context, which the page explains in detail, but the rule of thumb is to write for the people who may be reading your page in the future, not for yourself and the other members of your roleplay. Write as if you're expecting a big audience of tropers who've never even heard of your roleplay, and describe every trope in a way they can understand.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 18th 2019 at 4:12:32 AM