Outdated Administrivia Pages

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Yannow, that policy page now has a misleading title (or rather, lots of text was put under the wrong title) and seems to have a bad case of Thread Mode besides. I think a broader recast is needed at some point.

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

Guidelines For Work Authors?

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Sounds good. Sometimes creators of the works that get put up on This Very Wiki actually get visited by said creators, like The Daily Object Show.

This deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.

TV Tropes Translation Project has outdated references to the wiki lacking UTF-8 support. Specifically these paragraphs:

• Typing diacritical marks can cause problems if the text is affected by any other markup. If it's affected by other markup, the characters can be entered via Alt codes^note An Alt code is where you hold down the Alt key, then enter the character's ASCII or Unicode number on the numeric keypad (it has to be the numpad; doesn't matter if the Num Lock's on or off), and then release the Alt key to insert the character specified. All listed Alt codes will use the Unicode number. To determine the Unicode number, open Microsoft Word, go to the Insert Symbol box (Alt, I, S), and highlight the character you want on the grid. Check the character code box, which probably has a hexadecimal number (where the digits are 0-9, then A-F, with A representing 10 and F representing 15; 10h is 16 decimal). You can't use the hexadecimal code, so just use Calculator (scientific view) to change it to decimal. (in Windows); note that leading zeroes in Alt codes are mandatory. If it isn't bold, italicised, or linkified, the following codes using ampersands (called "HTML Entities", should you need to look up one not listed here) should work, where the ampersand (&) marks the beginning of the "entity", the hash sign (#) is the letter you wish to type, the sequence between the hash (#) and the semicolon (;) denotes the kind of accent you wish to type, and the semicolon (;) marks the end of the entity:
• At present, the wiki cannot be translated into languages that are not written with the Latin alphabet for technical reasons (specifically, the titles are limited in what characters you can use; these characters common throughout Western Europe, including numerals and punctuation, are permissible, but outside those, the characters will turn into HTML entities,^note HTML entities are those codes with the ampersands (&) and semicolons (;), some of which are listed above. rendering the title unreadable to humans); using other alphabets and logograms within articles will work just fine, although editing this text afterwards or reading it while editing can get clunky (because, once again, they will be converted into HTML entities).
• Dragon Quest Z (aka Lord TNK) and Zetaseal have expressed interest in creating a Japanese version, but that is not feasible until we can convert the storage encoding to something other than Latin-8.

In addition the herald message mentions the workaround script here, which I assume isn't needed now.

If any pages stil have text that references the now-fixed lack of proper support for non-English characters, I don't think it would be a problem to make adjustments to account for the conversion to UTF-8.

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Now that I think about it, remind me regarding Example Indentation in Trope Lists, which I may have asked at some point:

• Trope: Generalized statement that the trope is common for a specific group of characters and why is it shared among them:
  • Character A's specific case.
  • Character B's specific case.
  • Character C's specific case.

Is it wrong? Should the cases be un-indented into the same paragraph? Use linebreaks? It's probably worth bringing up on the policy's page in either way.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I'm not sure if this is something that's made clear on any current policy pages, so it might be worth making a dedicated Wiki Talk thread to settle the issue, similarly to what was done with gendered redirects last year.

The first-level bullet point's text might violate Examples Are Not General and/or Word Cruft, but I don't think those pages say anything on the matter either.

Edit: Might as well mention that I'm personally against having headers like that; I'm just not 100% sure if they're actually forbidden.

Edit: The "if there is only one item at the indentation level, it ain't indented right" text at the beginning of the article might apply to this, and if it does, I feel like the later parts of the article should probably be clarified.

Edit: I will say that one thing that I'm more sure about is that un-indenting those into one paragraph (with or without line breaks) would violate Examples Are Not General, because that would violate the rule of only one example being allowed per bullet point, since the individual characters are separate examples of the same trope.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 31st 2023 at 6:21:23 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

fair.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Just a thought, is About Images and Copyright's title redundant? It's not "about images", it's exclusively "about copyright", which includes copyright issues with images and videos. If anything it should be just About Copyright

Also a note that the Administrivia.Plagiarism redirect has 170 wicks due to being used in a template.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I think Administrivia.Copyright Policy would work as a name.

Edit: Or maybe Administrivia.Plagiarism Policy, less because of the alliteration and more because it's about avoiding plagiarism (which overlaps a lot with copyright infringement, but not 100% since it's good practice to avoid plagiarizing public domain works even if it's not illegal).

Another edit: Yeah, I think Administrivia.Plagiarism Policy would work better, since this piece of text on the page confirms that we require attribution for public domain works as well:

Though "not copyrighted" and "public domain" are synonymous, meaning the current text is redundant and we only really need to say one or the other alongside mentioning copyrighted works with licenses that permit copying.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 4th 2024 at 5:55:22 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

So, it's been a few days since my previous post. Any objections to moving Administrivia.About Images And Copyright to Administrivia.Plagiarism Policy, between it not just being about images, and the fact that it's not just about works that are copyrighted (due to the rules against plagiarism applying to public domain works as well)?

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 7th 2024 at 2:39:35 PM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

My question is if "plagiarism" is applicable to the entire page, as it also talks about proper quotations, fair use of images and channel bugs. This is possibly semantic, as to me plagiarism is specifically about presenting work/writing as your own and technically Tv Tropes claims everything that's on it unless stated otherwise.

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 7th 2024 at 11:47:16 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

That's true. Maybe there's another word that would fit better.

Edit: The page opens up by focusing on excerpts and attribution, so maybe the title should focus on those two (unless that part of the page needs adjustments of its own).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 7th 2024 at 3:16:38 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

"About Crediting, Plagiarism and Copyright on the Wiki"? Really not concise though.

I'm not a law expect, but I've already asked does not Copyright cover each of these?

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 7th 2024 at 12:17:35 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Plagiarism is more about ethics than law, especially when it comes to works that aren't copyrighted (though plagiarizing a work that is copyrighted would infringe the work's copyright).

We could probably still call the page Administrivia.Copyright Policy with a note saying that a lack of copyright doesn't make plagiarism acceptable, though, since the majority of the page is about works that aren't in the public domain.

Edit: Oh, yeah, and I'm also not a lawyer, and I didn't study law either (plagiarism did come up in classes unrelated to law, though).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 7th 2024 at 3:57:42 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Since nobody else has weighted in yet (despite it being a few days), I'm interested in any more comments from others.

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 7th 2024 at 12:58:18 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I agree with waiting for more feedback from more people, especially since the forums have been less active lately (between Christmas, the new year, and now the weekend).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 8th 2024 at 4:07:04 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Any objections if we add this to Creator Page Guidelines, as a final paragraph just before the "Creator names" subheading?

I believe this is settled policy, it's just not obviously documented - and this seems to be the best place to add it, although I'm open to other suggestions.

Speaking of Creator Page Guidelines, I'd like some clarification on one point from it.

Specifically, this part:

My question is: if the work the trope is from doesn't have a page yet, is it permitted to keep a trope from a work on the Creator's page until a page is made for the work, and then transfer it to the work page?

Until next time...

Anon e Mouse Jr.

That's how it's always been.

... Which I can't find on the guideline page.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

What about playwright/composers? I made Joe Iconis under Creator/ but should he go under Music/ ?

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

Much appreciated on the clarification then... and a formal request to have this clarification added to that section of the page, to avoid further confusion.

Until next time...

Anon e Mouse Jr.