Walking Shirtless Scene trope needs a new name

I mean, seriously. As troper Good News Evry 1 put on the page discussion a year ago:

And I agree. The problem that this makes is that most people don't get the difference between a Shirtless Scene and a Walking Shirtless Scene, and they keep editing in examples that fit the other trope instead of this one. They have the idea that Walking Shirtless Scene is about walking around shirtless, which is very vague and not actually what the trope is about. The most recent entry was about a Chinese actor who had ONE shirtless scene per movie, and I had to remove it. I also had to remove a bunch of entries about athletes simply giving an interview without a shirt on.

There sure are many other examples who probably don't fit the trope which I skipped. Even the page quote refers to Twilight's Jacob, a character I don't think actually fits the trope. Sure everyone remembers the character for being shirtless, but he doesn't spend most of his time shirtless in-universe. I just don't remove it because I know someone will add it again anyway.

The biggest issue with the title is that a Walking Shirtless Scene trope refers to a character, not a scene. A character is a Walking Shirtless Scene, he doesn't have a Walking Shirtless Scene. So I suggest we change the name of the trope to make that clearer to the readers and editors.

Edited by Cineking on Apr 19th 2020 at 9:37:28 AM

This is the sorry of claim that could use a wick check. I mean, if people really are confused then there would be evidence of that.

You need wick check. And if it confirms your suspicion, which honestly I have no problem believing, then post in Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop.

It's perpetually clogged and in need of more manpower, but new threads are being opened if the opening post is good. It's the proper procedure and tropes can't be renamed without consensus from TRS.

I can see how the name could be confusing, but please make a wick check to show that other people on the wiki are being confused as well, and that this leads to major misuse outside of the page. The page itself can always just be cleaned up to remove minor misuse, which is expected for every trope.

If the wick check does not provide evidence of misuse, we can always make "always shirtless" or similar a redirect to improve searchability. See Administrivia.How To Do A Wick Check for more information.

Reiterating the previous concern to not start anything in TRS without solid evidence.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 19th 2020 at 1:27:04 PM

I thoughts are split on this. Yes, I believed it should be renamed since it gets misinterpreted as "Walking Shirtless" Scene and not Walking "Shirtless Scene", evidence is still necessary.

Okay, I might do this. I saw the misunderstanding in many pages and am already searching for others. I'm not the first one to notice the constant confusion regarding the name btw, I found a thread about this dating back to 2010 and people in the replies weren't very open to discuss it... I'm afraid this might become a waste of time, but anyway.

Just a question (since I never did a wick check before), can I still use the entries on the main page I removed yesterday for evidence?

Edited by Cineking on Apr 19th 2020 at 1:46:28 AM

I do get the trope as "Walking [Shirtless Scene]".

A more accurate name would probably be Perpetually Shirtless, but misuse not only has to be noticed but identified as especially prevalent. A random wick check (at least 20-30) should show the sample size as having 25% or more literal examples to justify a rename, not just identifying 10 isolated bad examples. Sometimes one bad editor can spread 20 bad examples.

It's recommended that wick checks are either 50 wicks or the square root of the number of wicks (which in this case is sqrt(3163) = approximately 56) whichever is larger.

Ideally not as wicks should be selected at random, but if whatever selection process you use gets you to a work sub/page that lists those instances of misuse, then sure. On-page examples don't count but can be used as 'additional' evidence.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 19th 2020 at 4:23:07 AM

Speaking personally, I've never found the title confusing, but I can see how others might. So, I think a wick check is a good idea.

I'm a bit confused... How exactly can I make this "random selection"?

And say, out of 56 wicks, how many should be bad examples?

To get random wicks, I use Excel.

1. Copy and paste wick list in column A. Delete rows where the entry is a header rather than a wick.
2. In column B, namely cell B1, type: =random()
3. Copy this function for every row in the list.
4. Highlight columns A and B.
5. Sort by column B, lowest to highest.

You would then have a randomized ordering of wicks.

Also you do not want to look specifically for good or bad wicks. Ideally, you just want to describe the wicks you find.

Sometimes a wick check shows there is no significant misuse, and that's okay. It's actually preferable to mostly find good wicks because then we don't have to drag the trope through TRS.

Edited by WaterBlap on Apr 19th 2020 at 6:15:16 AM

The way I randomize wicks is pretty different:

• Usually, I go to a random number generator site and get a list of 50 randomly generated numbers going from 1 to however many wicks there happens to be.
• I awkwardly copy and paste the entire list of wicks onto a google doc, delete anything that isn't actually a wick link, and number them.
• From there, I just go down the list and look at every wick that applies to a generated number.

Recently that's become a hassle, so I've started to cut the middle-man out by pasting the wick list into a randomizer and using the first fifty at the top of the list. Sometimes I cut the list in half and pick, say, the first twenty five from each list.

Either way, using a randomizer is a good way to assure the wicks are genuinely random, not based on personal preference but based on the list being scrambled in some way outside of your control.

And yes, all wicks, whether good, bad, or iffy, should be mentioned in the wick check report. You don't want to give false results by being biased towards specific wicks.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 19th 2020 at 7:22:04 AM

It's a time consuming, grueling thing no matter what you do. The easiest is basically start at the beginning, chose one from what you can see on screen and open in a new tab, use page down, select another, repeat. Priority should be with media pages as you're more likely to find individual examples rather than just a blue link pothole.

Although in this case, it may be difficult to properly wick check as badly formatted examples doesn't mean the character in question is not a good example of the trope anyway.

Yeah, for well-used tropes with thousands of wicks I would focus on the media namespaces and stick those into a randomizer like random.org.^note I'm not sure if this is actually 'recommended', but I skip Main/ for well-used tropes since that dilutes your actual usage stats with "related" tropes and sinkholes. If I can help it, I also skip Pantheon/ since most of those wicks just rephrase the trope name or laconic. Sandbox/ I tend to gloss over, since those pages are 'experimental' by definition. Wiki things like indexes (eg. Image Source) and the work's subpages (eg. Laconic) don't count either.

As for how many bad examples are needed to warrant a name change... that's difficult to answer. Misuse/bad examples of around 10% means the trope is in good shape and nothing besides some pruning needs to be done, but higher numbers are a different story. Usually the wick check should shed light on the next course of action — if the trope is used in several distinct ways it might result in a split or a rename, if it has many zero context examples it might mean it's not tropeworthy at all, and if there are just 20% or so bad examples and everyone agrees the name and description are fine maybe all it needs is a cleanup effort. It really depends.

Regardless, it is just best to go into this without bias, so it does not skew your interpretation of the wicks.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 19th 2020 at 9:39:57 AM

I'm not sure there's any widespread problem here, but I put in a custom title request to make it Walking "Shirtless Scene" anyway. More clarity can't hurt.

Anyway, context:

Eh, sometimes Main/ wicks can be just as telling if the potholes are being used incorrectly or the trope is being referenced in another trope's description, but with the wrong usage; it's not always the case, but I find them helpful.

I don't find Sandbox/ and Pantheon/ wicks helpful though as those are very rarely anything informative.

It's mostly that if you randomly check 50 examples but it's all potholed trope pages you aren't getting an especially clear vision of how tropers are defining it. It should be reasonably even spread between all page types, but with a preference on media pages.

Conversely, if the problem was a trope that was too popular as a pothole and just not being used much as its own trope (is why They Just Didn't Care was renamed Creator's Apathy, as the ease of dialogue insertion made it easy to misuse it), checking the trope page potholes would be the priority.

Edited by KJMackley on Apr 20th 2020 at 1:10:06 AM

Eh, I just prefer to be as random as possible to get results that are more likely to be accurate, without making assumptions and discounting an entire category of wicks.

But it's really just personal preference. Maybe it only seems like my checks are more accurate when they're not. Who knows?

I'd love to see a way to automatically generate wick checks some day. One of the reasons I don't help out on the Trope Repair Shop as much as I could is that I frankly have a hard time wrapping my head around the whole thing. I get the concept of what we're doing: gathering a random selection in order to get a sense of whether the trope is being used correctly, but whenever I go to do a wick check, I swear I just end up with a list of random links that don't even have trope examples on most of them. Just as bad, trying to find the example in a link when they're just potholes can be extremely difficult (unless there's something I don't know). Even finding fifty relevant links seems to be a mountain to climb, let alone sorting them into categories of proper usage.

For what it's worth, I am totally behind a rename of this trope, wick check or not, because it's simply that bad of a name ^note I'd argue that proper usage doesn't excuse a name if it fails title goals like Clear, Concise, Witty, because exceptions will dilute the perceived importance of those guidelines, especially if those exceptions are widely used tropes and especially if it's a trope that brings people to the site. I certainly didn't realize that Shirtless Scene and Walking Shirtless Scene were different tropes (and not just a redirect I never thought twice about) until I pulled up this thread.

When it comes to a rename, I don't think putting quotes around the Shirtless Scene part is that much better, as even while reading this thread, it took me a second to realize how that even made a difference. Perpetually Shirtless may not be a particularly interesting name, but only being Clear and Concise is definitely better than, mostly being Witty I guess? Like I said, I didn't get what the name meant until I came here, so it wasn't amusing to me.

Edited by Jokubas on Apr 20th 2020 at 11:33:38 AM

For the pothole issue, that's why you need to open the edit tab or use source, and then do Ctrl F to find what you're looking for. Works like a charm and saves a lot of headache.

If we're changing this trope's name, we'd better change Walking Swimsuit Scene as well. it has the same issue.

The term "walking x" is a common colloquial term indicating a person is identified with a concept. Hence Walking Armory and Walking Spoiler, and we could also have easily combined Ms. Fanservice and Mr. Fanservice into "Walking Fanservice." It isn't just the wiki itself being witty any more than a trope named Jumping the Shark.

Since this thread's subject is more of a TRS thing, I added Walking Shirtless Scene and Walking Swimsuit Scene (an instance of misuse for the latter came up in a Projects thread, though I forgot which) to the Tropes Needing TRS sandbox for now (i.e., until/unless a wick check is done).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 20th 2020 at 4:55:36 AM

Any more arguments for or against a rename are better saved for TRS. Without a wick check, we don't know if a rename (or any TRS thread, really) is even needed at this point.