Misused (New Crowner 6 Nov 2020): Getting Crap Past The Radar

Stricter standards could very easily and quickly just spiral back into the mess we're in right now since, over time, people have a tendency to lapse on the rules, and then we're back to square one.

I would vote for the second option or some variation of it.

Edited by ImoleTroper on Jun 30th 2020 at 4:17:11 PM

I think we should wait on considering that. Let's try options that aren't quite so drastic first, and if they don't seem to be working, we can re-examine the idea.

The issue that we've been discussing here though is that more relaxed solutions won't work for something like this. People don't read descriptions so new standards won't change that; people don't realize other tropes exist so the subtrope and supertrope / disambig ideas might not fix the problem of it being wicked where it shouldn't be; people don't probably won't even change their usage if we go through a title change that isn't massive.

Are some of these things more likely to have an impact? Yes. But with a trope like this that's suffering from extreme misuse, the extreme solutions are simply more likely to be effective and I'd rather not have to re-open this thread in a year because our "new standards" didn't mean jack.

Anyway, the new standards thing is something that, as I've said, only works in-tandem with other solutions. There is literally no way that setting arbitrary new standards is going to fix this if we don't also do something else. It's just not possible. The most we'd do is make it unnaturally narrow and get rid of currently-valid examples in addition to misuse. It wouldn't stop the misuse at all.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 30th 2020 at 1:43:31 PM

No this is NOT misused. Using this term is the best idea to tell that when something inappropriate tries and/or have tried to get passed the "Radar", or if hate speech is interrupted, cut-off, or substituted.

Except that it is extremely misused. This trope isn't just about any Parental Bonus or innuendo or whatever in a work; it's about when something that normally should have been censored somehow makes it past.

Sorry, but the rest of us disagree with you bud.

This post in the thread is a good summary of how it's misused.

So... can we officially rule out "stricter standards" as an option then? I don't think it will help because the standards that already exist aren't being followed, so newer, stricter ones probably wouldn't accomplish anything. And I haven't seen anyone try to defend it here in the thread beyond the first two pages, which tells me it got a bunch of drive-by voters who had no intention of helping to figure out what the standards will be.

Edited by Serac on Jun 30th 2020 at 9:12:37 AM

I don't mind "stricter standards" if we also make it clear it cannot be done alone.

I also think the current standards are fine. The problem is that they're not being enforced.

If setting higher standards had a chance of doing anything, there wouldn't be an issue in the first place! Whatever the solution is, it can't happen in the trope's description, because that will accomplish jack shit.

I personally support moving all of the examples to one central page for easier curation.

And I'm against it. Honestly, I don't think this is quite as tall an order as some of you seem to believe. There aren't that many pages in the namespace, so it can be done. We can look through the pages that already exist, remove any obvious misuse, and delete some pages if we have to.

Hell, I'm willing to do it by myself if nobody else wants to be involved. Why not? I work from home, so I have the time.

We're not talking about subpages, which might I add only need to exist if there's enough examples for them to be split- we're talking about wicks in general across the wiki, be it subpages, normal examples, potholes, and more.

We need to clean up all 9000+ wicks. A massive majority of them are misuse. The subpages are not the priority here.

And remember, we still need a way of stopping the issue from happening, not just slowing it or cleaning it up.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 30th 2020 at 1:08:44 PM

Ok, so I'm starting to fill out a third crowner that is not ready to be hooked yet. Should I add these options that have been suggested?

• Make the page a disambiguation page, then dewick it and cut/redirect all subpages.
• Cut/redirect all pages in the Radar/ namespace and salvage the valid examples, but allow them on work pages.

By the way, I can't think of a good way to word the stricter standards option with the caveats that if you vote for it, you should pitch ideas for it and it won't be the only thing done. If we hadn't already run one crowner in this thread, I would consider making it a single-prop crowner.

Edited by Serac on Jun 30th 2020 at 12:25:24 PM

Well, you can't eat an elephant in one bite. Really, I was volunteering to tackle one aspect of this first in the hopes that it would get the ball rolling. Though you bring up a good point; we probably should start with stopping the misuse. Otherwise trying to clean things up would be like trying to collect water with a sieve.

Honestly, I don't know. I need to think about that.

People are being real pessimistic here. It's a lot of work, but I think that if we have 4 or 5 people dewicking and rewicking we can get through all 9000 of them in ~four weeks, and from there given enough time the new standards would spread.

I refer to a quote from CGP Grey: "If the trend is going in the right direction, so are you. Just moving a trend from negative to positive is hard enough without defining falling short of a goal as failure. Heck, even just decelerating the negative is a positive."

Also, for the discussion on a new supertrope/disambig, there might be some miscommunication. Turning GCPTR into one does not include also turning its definition into one of its subtropes. It's simply that it's easier than creating a new supertrope to fill the role.

So the hierarchy of tropes would go like this:

• Getting Crap Past The Radar
  • Parental Bonus
  • What Do You Mean It's For Kids?
  • Double Entendre
  • Does This Remind You Of Anythng?
  • [possibly some other tropes]

• Censorship Tropes
  • [new trope with intended definition of GCPTR]

Edited by BreadBull on Jul 1st 2020 at 9:40:14 AM

The problem you're missing isn't that there's too many wicks to go through, it's that people have been proven to not read descriptions and won't bother to check out the GCPTR page to see what has changed about it. They'll keep using it the way they always do because that's what happens when people misuse a trope and no drastic change is done to it.

Hell, sometimes cutting a trope isn't enough to make the misuse stop because people will just move their misuse to another trope if they have to. People like misusing things way more than they like reading descriptions and doing things properly. It's just a fact about the community we have here.

Big change is the only way to stop big problems, and the subtrope/supertrope/disambig/etc thing will only work if people...well, again, read the descriptions. Supertropes also can only be used if the subtropes don't qualify so there might be an entirely new form of misuse if we make GCPTR a supertrope.

If we must do the supertrope thing, I would prefer for this to be a subtrope rather than the supertrope. The idea of "innuendo that should have been censored, but wasn't" works better as a subtrope of "innuendo in general" than the other way around.

The crowner is missing the option to cut all the pages in the Radar namespace but still allow off-page examples. Several people voiced support for that in this thread.

What I'm trying to say is not to be so sure/adamant this will be an exercise in futility before we've even started. I'm of the opinion that if we maintain a semi-long-term project to redirect misued GCPTR to the proper tropes the word will spread, even if it might take a good year. Changing the wicks is step one of that.

Edited by BreadBull on Jul 1st 2020 at 6:50:48 PM

I'm just speaking from experience. Since even massive changes can fail, smaller changes are more likely to fail and I'd just rather not have to go through this all again if we can nip it in the bud early on.

Besides, if your plan would work, wouldn't just doing a normal cleanup with no changes at all work? Why change anything if the cleanup is the most important step?

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 1st 2020 at 2:59:46 PM

I did list that as an option in the post where I linked to the crowner. I'll go ahead and add it.

Are we ready to get the crowner hooked, or are there more options that should be added?

Edited by Serac on Jul 1st 2020 at 1:59:13 PM

It's really quite simple: If a trope is misused, cleanup and PM. But if a trope continues getting misused, then that likely indicates an underlying problem, which means it should be looked into and fixed (changed).

Is the extreme amount of misuse not already communicating an underlying problem? Why do you assume the underlying problem isn't evident until a relapse?

For the record, I'm not saying that there is no underlying problem with GCPTR. There is. But I believe the extreme misuse is exacerbated because it's been sitting for years, allowing the misuse to spread exponentially with new tropers getting a warped idea of what the trope actually is from incorrect examples since, as you mentioned, people tend to not read descriptions. It's like trying to cleanup the mess left by a giant snowball tumbling down a mountain when obviously stopping it while it was still small would be much easier.

Edited by BreadBull on Jul 1st 2020 at 9:54:26 AM

Bump. Are we ready to get the crowner hooked, or are there more options that should be added?

Crowner looks good to me.