Outdated Administrivia Pages

The formulations on the page predate him quite a bit, actually.

...Huh. Yeah, that's the problem when the history only goes back so far. I get to the end and only see Eddie, so my assumption was that the page was written by Eddie.

I sometimes forget that TVT history doesn't start at the recorded page histories.

So, is the original author of the page just lost to the sands of time?

Also there's still this on the page I missed.

How did we miss ...: Some individuals are addicted to sticking How Did We Miss This One? or other Verbal Tic nonsense onto their examples like ugly verbal warts.

I agree policy pages shouldn't be abrasive, and they don't need to be self-demonstrating. The point of policy pages is to be clear and concise, not to be comedic.

I just think it looks hypocritical as hell to use so much informal language on the page that acts like informal language is the biggest blight on the wiki.

The argument in favor is that the hypocrisy is part of the joke, but we know that a lot of people don't get that around here. But let's be clear: "informality" is not a problem on the wiki. We encourage a "breezy" tone to distinguish ourselves from the more academic styles of sites like Wikipedia. Tropers are supposed to have fun writing work and example descriptions: make them entertaining instead of dry and boring.

As Clear, Concise, Witty says, first the writing should be understandable, then it should be brief, and then it should be entertaining.

Edited by Fighteer on May 25th 2022 at 10:04:09 AM

Well, even outside of that page, that era seems to have had a greater issue with snark taking precedence over constructive criticism (not just with mods but I don't think mods are exempt from it), so I genuinely can't tell if ranting about brain damaged gibbons on a section about rhetorical questions is really getting the point across or if it's just bein' goofy.

And like, CCW should apply to policy pages too, so if enough users can't tell that this weird insulting style is a self-demonstrating joke, maybe it's not clear? I don't mind informality as long as it's not obnoxious and distracting (i.e. policy pages that insult people who don't know the policy yet).

It'd need to be even more exaggerated to work but that'd probably be fine.

Edited by mightymewtron on May 25th 2022 at 3:12:10 PM

Maybe preserve this as a Self-Demonstrating/ page?

Maybe that could be done.

I think that Mew knew the hypocrisy was part of the joke, but thought the joke was inappropriate?

Also, my interpretation of CCW is that the "witty" part is good, but not a requirement; the biggest priority is that it shouldn't be confusing or too long.

No, I actually don't know if it's a joke all the way through because A) it isn't good self-demonstration to put different kinds of word cruft on different sections and B) this was very likely not the only policy article to be written snarkily, it just hadn't been changed as recently as others.

I feel like this discussion regarding snark in policy pages would be better suited to a separate Wiki Talk thread, since the specific page that was brought up was already dealt with.

The Tips on Grammar page says to always add 's to a singular word even if it already ends in an "s", but from what I've researched — and been taught in English class — while some grammar style guides advocate always doing so, others — for example https://www.grammarly.com/blog/possessive-case/ and https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/apostrophe-rules.html — maintain that it's perfectly acceptable to just add an apostrophe to the end of it. I'm inquiring this because I've recently seen some editors going through pages pedantically adding an "s" to every possessive that ends in an "s", and other editors pedantically going through pages and removing them.

There was an ATT thread on the matter where the general consensus was to make it a "first-come, first-serve" matter akin to the Oxford comma and American vs. Commonwealth English spelling, and it was suggested I take the discussion here.

Edited by Arawn999 on Jun 4th 2022 at 7:12:42 AM

That should likely be acceptable (speaking as someone who generally would lean towards "s'").

I see no reason to pick a side on that when we don't do the same for other punctuation styles (like whether periods and commas go inside quotation marks or outside them), so I went ahead and changed it.

To save you the time of scrolling down to it, this is what I wrote, but feel free to make changes to it:

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 5th 2022 at 11:52:24 AM

I was directed here from this ATT query by a mod. The relevant portion is the third paragraph, where I suggested that the various pages on Administrivia.Locked Pages could be formatted based on the type of locking applied (for example, bold, italics, both, or    c   oloured)

I noticed that there are three types of locked pages:

• "Perma-locked, but still editable pages": As this presumably makes up the majority of the pages on the list, no formatting needs to be applied here.
• "Temp-locked pages": They aren't editable at the moment, but they soon will be
• "Pages which cannot, will not, and should not be edited": Like Archives and Newsletters

The links to the last two types of pages can be formatted in an appropriate manner.

Edited by magnumtropus on Jun 7th 2022 at 1:02:03 PM

A pretty good idea. I think the temp-locked ones could be italicized, while the archived ones could be bolded (the latter is stronger).

I support re-sorting Administrivia.Locked Pages by categories, namespace folders are kind of useless. For perma-lock, Administrivia and retired namespaces can go as well.

That had a TRS thread. Didn't say anything there and probably wouldn't have supported it if I did, but you can read that up for why it was done.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 7th 2022 at 4:11:49 PM

So if we want to take it further, we can take it to the locked pages thread.

The mods probably know best about which page is what type, though we as tropers may have a general idea of the same. For example, the Archives and Newsletters can never be edited, and the sub-pages for Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard will never be unlocked.

I guess it just needs a sandbox with the proof of concept to present as an argument.

A different mod (one who was a mod before I was) was the one who proposed the idea of sorting Administrivia.Locked Pages by namespace, and I'm against switching to categories because different pages are locked for a lot of different reasons, as opposed to how multiple members of the Permanent Red Link Club often share a smaller amount of reasons for being permanently nuked.

However, I think applying formatting to the page links would be a good idea for differentiating the three types of lock.

I agree with making a proof-of-concept sandbox, and any corrections could be made after reviewing the mod tool that lists locked pages (which is also the only way to unlock a page, which is inconvenient because the option to lock a page is right on the page while the option to unlock it isn't).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 7th 2022 at 10:43:24 AM

When I brought it up, another reason that was used was that sorting by namespace would make it easier for people to find out why a page is locked, compared to sorting by reason, because one would expect that the viewer knows the page namespace beforehand.

Administrivia Locked Pages. Would this help?

Edited by magnumtropus on Jun 7th 2022 at 3:59:51 PM

I added a third paragraph to my previous post regarding the sandbox suggestion. (Just noting it here because it was added one minute after the post above this one was posted, so I wasn't sure if it was noticed.)

Edit: Yes.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 7th 2022 at 11:53:42 AM