Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment - Violations, misuse, and other issues

Alright, I've cut them. Not sure about these ones though. Also just copied the Real Life Troping tag from the Jimmy Savile documentery onto Quiet on Set:

• Karma Houdini Warranty: Subverted. Brian Peck would molest Drake Bell for years until Bell finally gets fed up and calls him mom who calls the police with Peck getting arrested but gets defended by numerous figures in the entertainment industry and received only 16 months in prison. He would then become a dialogue coach for The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and the worst he gets is getting fired which means he is somewhere walking free.
• Mean Boss: Dan Schneider as he yells and berates his writers, cast, and crew. Everyone is scared when he arrives and it's been described as an atmosphere change when Dan leaves set.
• Pet the Dog: For as sketchy as Dan Schneider could be and was, he was very supportive of Drake Bell upon finding out he was groomed and raped by Brian Peck and went out of his way to make sure he was safe. Whereas a lot of outside actors supported Peck and victim-blamed Drake (who was a minor at the time), Schneider did no such thing and made sure he was out of the business, at least as far as he could ensure it. To this day, Bell defends Schneider on this.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Mar 29th 2024 at 2:09:41 AM

I'm honestly suspect about whether Quiet On Set can have a tropeable page without contention. I haven't seen it yet but I haven't heard much about the artistry, and the only things on the page that felt connected to the narrative framing are Double-Meaning Title and Wham Shot. I recall I'm Glad My Mom Died having its page axed for being a real-life narrative without enough objective tropability.

Edited by mightymewtron on Mar 29th 2024 at 6:48:54 AM

Same, I'd be quite happy with cutting it for being too contentious.

Personally, I think documentaries skirt the line of being off-mission for this wiki, even absent other issues.

Edited by DoktorvonEurotrash on Mar 30th 2024 at 5:52:04 AM

There is a way a Documentary that portrays real life can survive on TV Tropes. It needs to be a narrative and make dramatric reconstructions, instead of just being a narrativeless factual documentary.

This was the only example from Tear Jerker/Documentary that survived the "just being a narrativeless factual documentary" purge.

• A documentary on the French Revolution's Reign of Terror brought this into a straight "My God, What Have I Done?" moment. A reconstruction portrayed Madame Du Barry being taken to the Guillotine, and the actress acted much like the historical documents say she did - constantly trying to escape and screaming, "You're hurting me! Why?!?". The narration mentions that her screams of terror could be heard all throughout the city, and how it took several men to restrain her.

Also on the subject of Quiet on Set, the use of spoiler tags on events that actually happened feels wrong to me. We're treating the real-life rape of a child actor like a plot twist in a scripted narrative.

I already brought the page up in the spoiler policy violations thread because there used to be a spoiler above the example line, so I'm not surprised about the rest.

Real Life, including documentary reporting and accurate docudrama dramatisations, doesn't get spoiler tags.

Docudramas sometimes get a top-of-page warning about that. Documentaries don't.

for sure remove all spoiler tags. Its not a plot twist that a real life rape occurred. I think theres probably enough narrative tropes to be worth having a page, but it does need to be cleaned for sure

I went and removed them. Still wondering about the examples I brought up.

Also, just noticed Quiet On Set got a Nightmare Fuel page with this example:

• The series doesn't pull any punches in showing that multiple pedophiles were working on Nickelodeon's kids shows and took advantage of it to claim several victims from among the underage case members. Their crimes are recounted in graphic detail, if not by the victims themselves, but via excerpts of court documents from their trials. And, to make matter's worse, even after these horrible things came out, business as usual continued on, both at Nickelodeon and in the industry as a whole. The incidents barely registered in the media, and multiple Hollywood big shots even sent letters of support asking for leniency for Brian Peck and even going as far as to blame the victims.

You guys okay with deleting the page, right?

Edited by PlasmaPower on Mar 30th 2024 at 1:47:46 AM

Yeetus Deletus that page.

I went through the trope list on the page, checked to see which ones were NRLEP, and removed the tropes that were NRLEP, including the ones mentioned at the top of the page.

There is also a Tear Jerker page. Is that allowed if it's describing events described in the documentary or does it count as Real life troping, since Tear Jerker is NRLEP?

Edited by costanton11 on Mar 30th 2024 at 5:36:06 AM

The Real Life Troping rule is that you can have Tear Jerker or Nightmare Fuel examples because of artistic elements in the documentary (e.g. Blackfish got nightmare examples because of the poster image and credit sequence). But not simply because of the real events its reporting.

The page seems to be about Drake Bell recounting the real life events that happened to him.

Honestly the fact there's even a NF and TJ page for the docuseries makes me squeamish as hell. Is it so hard to make a moments page (or a page for that matter) for a documentary without veering into uncomfortable RL troping?

I cutlisted the page.

Personally I think the spoiler entry could count in theory if the documentary was building it up as a reveal (which, like it or not, some documentaries do frame horrible events with this sort of narrative buildup). But they openly advertised that Drake was going to tell his story in the documentary so I don't think it's a "spoiler" even by that metric — though Wham Shot might still apply.

There's curreently an ATT about the scope of UsefulNotes.Criminals, following some edit warring on the page.

It's intended as a list of Real Life criminals ("murderers, rapists, thieves, smugglers, gangsters, bandits, pirates, terrorists, etc") who have their own Useful Notes pages due to their presence in media.

However, it's since listed Vladimir Putin (currently deleted again), Saddam Hussein and others.

I'm wondering if it needs rules for one or both of the following:

• Exclude anyone who's identified (e.g. not Zodiac Killer), still alive and not yet found guilty by a court. There's an arrest warrant for Putin, yes, but he's not stood trial.
• Exclude world leaders and other government and military figures whose war crimes were in support of (and supported by) their regime.

So, if we did that, Osama bin Laden still meets the terrorism condition, and would stay — but the likes of Hussein and Nazi Hermann Göring might not fit on the page?

Views?

I wonder if Saddam Hussein being impeached and executed by his own country may be relevant, which would mean he's declared a criminal even in his own state.

The challenge is coming up with an objective standard that allows Hussein but not, say, Nelson Mandela or Alexei Navalny.

That's mitigated by the fact that they need to have a page, and they need to be "most" famous for being on the wrong side of the law — but there is a long tradition of harsh regimes prosecuting people who opposed or preceded them. Sometimes justified, sometimes not.

This is why I'm wondering if we might be better to take political figures out of the list entirely (at least when the criminal charges are in any way related to politics and government).

Probably

i would consider a standard-issue criminal to be someone who is subject to the law (so not a king or dictator or something), who breaks those laws for some kind of personal or practical benefit (such as making money). Political enemies of state oppose the law— they may break it, but they are doing so with the intention of getting the law to be changed

that's the best definition i can think of without resorting to, "criminals are the ones that we disagree with"

and yes, i would probably remove saddam hussien as well.

Edited by Tremmor19 on Apr 1st 2024 at 4:36:21 AM

As I said in the ATT - we also need to pay special attention to the "criminal" moniker - war criminals, even those who were prosecuted, belong in an altogether different category.

And then there's the international aspect. Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters means it is difficult, if not impossible, to get an objective voice of who's a criminal or not. I'm sitting here in Denmark, I can list a lot of crimes leaders of other nations have done. Does that make them criminals?

I'm honestly tempted to suggest the entire page being cut. There's a reason The Other Wiki has "criminal" be an index - the term is so broad that on its own it is nigh-meaningless.

Edited by Theharbo on Apr 1st 2024 at 7:43:59 PM

I'd be fine with just banning political leaders from that page entirely. The page is there so that people know where to look to find useful notes pages on Al Capone and Blackbeard. Not so that we can talk about which world leaders committed war crimes.

There was a Wiki Talk or Projects thread (forgot which) around either 2020 or the late '10s that cleaned up UsefulNotes.Criminals, because previously, the page listed pages in the Creator/ and Music/ namespaces instead of sticking to Useful Notes, and the thread decided to only allow Useful Notes to be listed (mainly for historical figures).

I'm fine with the suggestion of banning politicans from the page, and maybe the page should be locked to further enforce that.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 1st 2024 at 3:31:07 AM

I wonder if we should leave the page unlocked for at least a little bit to see if people actually follow the “no politicians” rule.