Wiki and Forum Policy - General Discussion

Going back to the banning politics outside of OTC, the issue is that a large number of works are influenced, either directly or indirectly, by politics. Banning politics outside of OTC completely limits what people can talk about when it comes to outside influences and talk about in-universe topics.

I think a ban on politics outside the OTC with the Asterix saying "except in cases that pertain to the thread topic in question" would work much better in getting the point across.

Would OTC bans be a better solution to widdle down the recurring tropers with issues.

The mods have been whittling away repeat offenders in OTC though, unless you're proposing a much more extreme criteria.

Yeah, I'm throwing my hat into the "banning politics outside OTC is completely untenable" ring if we're going to discuss pretty much any media at anything more than a surface leve, in addition to the concerns raised about lgbtq people and other minorities

Edited by Libraryseraph on Nov 30th 2023 at 4:59:47 AM

Yeah that’s my main confusion with the lock, if the mods feel OTC is being to unruly and requiring to much moderator time (and the team don’t feel that having OTC specific mods that are a free resource is appropriate anymore) why not just bring the hammer down on rule breaking users until OTC is populated only by those who will play nice or have earned another chance?

I’d have considered it a relatively heavy response if everyone who got thumped for grave-dancing has also gotten an OTC ban, but I’d at least see a solid logic train of grave-dancing being against the rules, the mods reminding everyone of the rule recently, a bunch of people violating it and then said bunch of people getting banned.

I’m also intrigued by both how this new “no politics outside of OTC” rule has come about and how it’s meant to work with the mod team considering OTC ancillary and possibly subject to jettisoning if it needs a lot of work.

If we want to drain all political discussions into OTC then that drain will need maintenance. I’d argue that that is the purpose that OTC provides to the primary wiki mission, it’s an outlet valve that political debates can be pushed down to keep them away from the rest of the site.

Moderating political arguments in OTC isn’t easy, but I’d guess that it’s easier than moderating political arguments all across the site because there’s no OTC to act as a drain/central space anymore.

You say that, but there’s already soft self-enforcement in that if you get into an extended political debate you’ll generally get told to take it to OTC, though as I noted that only works if there is an OTC to take things to.

Edited by Silasw on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:10:20 AM

I don't see how banning anything political in the other threads would work. "Political" is a very broad term and a lot of media makes political references or statements, a politics ban would be a nightmare to actually enforce

So, forgive me for asking, but is the Antisemitism Thread locked indefinitely as well?

The US Politics thread lock being called "indefinite" I think very much gave the wrong impression, a temporary lock on it is fine.

I would certainly want to see OTC and the US Politics thread continue. To be honest it's actually a not-insignificant part of why I come here, I sort of view the forums as a thirdspace of sorts where I can ramble with my buddies about things like politics. Admittedly, this is a peripheral use of TV Tropes, definitely not what it was made for.

Though I would say at the very least Politics In Media and Diversity pertains to the mission of TV Tropes in my opinion. Narrative is political, and you can't understand narrative without politics.

In fairness, I myself have only done admin on a facebook group that strictly bans politics, so I get that it's probably a nightmare to enforce civility on a topic like this.

I do agree it's sometimes necessary to give long-term locks to certain threads. There are certain issues where reasonable people can disagree, but are so incendiary that disagreement gets nasty. And I'd usually say the dividing line is "is the topic so incendiary that two reasonable people trying to be civil are still liable to get in a flame war?"

Now, if a certain Mango were to pass away, my proposal would actually be to just preemptively lock US politics and the RIP thread, not as a punishment, just as a pre-emptive measure.

Other proposals I'd...propose, are:

• I'd argue there should be a crackdown on "I'd say it but it's against the rules"

• I might suggest a rule against reporting on deaths of retired politicians, particularly if it's likely to primarily inspire grave-dancing. Like if an active political figure were to die, that'd be one thing, but somebody who's retired, arguably their death isn't on-topic.

EDIT: Actually going to retract my statement on gravedancing.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Nov 30th 2023 at 2:26:54 AM

I feel like there's a difference between Never Speak Ill of the Dead and actively cheering that someone just recently died. You don't gotta pretend to care about them — but you also don't have to make it obvious that you're celebrating it. Granted, sometimes it's hard to not be happy, but it's also not hard to just... not post about it on TVT.

As for the political topic ban, I do think that it's worth exploring more in-depth because I'm also not sure what exactly it means? Even on the left side forums politics comes up from time to time because we often find ourselves cleaning up political works or political-themed entries. It'd be insane if such a thing would get people in trouble, but I have a feeling that the actual intent of the rule isn't quite that extreme. We just need to know what the rule actually bans, otherwise people will be afraid to talk about, well... anything,

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 30th 2023 at 5:24:29 AM

My personal opinion is that not everything that goes inside one's head should be shared in a public or polite conversation with strangers.

Gravedancing is like someone talking about his diarrhea problems or explaining some sick sexual or homicidal fantasy that he had.

It may be cathartic for the person sharing, but other people may find it disturbing and off-putting.

And it also lowers the quality of discussion.

For a policy, I generally don't think posts that call for, support or celebrate harm of a real person are kosher regardless of who it is.

I'll just add my voice to someone who would be very suspicious of "no-politics outside of OTC", cause that can get nebulous very fast. To a lot of people today simply talking about black issues or lgbt issues is political. I don't think those things should be off-limits. Under this rule you wouldn't be able to discuss any David Simon work, which are often about things such as: The War On Drugs, institutional dysfunction, the War in Iraq, post-katrina life, prostitution, desegregated public housing, anti-semitism and a nation falling into fascism. He's hardly the only creator who's stuff gets very political and his work would by nigh-impossible to talk about with this new proposed rule.

It's pretty easy to criticize someone and not wish death or other grievous harm on them, or celebrate it when it happens. There are other social media sites for that. I can see it being hard to criticize someone who just died and not have it read as "I'm glad he's dead" but I guess maybe just don't say anything to that effect explicitly?

I'm not sure where an outright ban on politics was proposed but I agree that would be very very hard to enforce fairly. There are people who think entire marginalized populations simply existing is inherently "political." Do you really want to give them an excuse to make a bunch of spiteful hollers and cuts? We can just do what we always do and cut down on things that may provoke flame wars or are otherwise irrelevant anyway.

Politics outside of OTC and not relevant to the topic at hand would already fall under Off Topic posting and would be discouraged.

An explicit rule feels like overkill.

The post that started this debate was here:

This would seem to go further than just being off-topic to the thread, since the video in question was about how conflict and polarisation arise out of our modern social media landscape.

I am also not sure where this "fresh prohibition" came from.

Edited by Redmess on Nov 30th 2023 at 12:30:43 PM

Are... non-engineers/mods meant to be able to see the engineer & mod discussion thread in this forum?

Yeah, we decided it'd be silly to hide it since we're not really discussing anything confidential. Mostly just video notes and beta testing lol

Banning political discussions to the extent of explicitly banning the ability to agree or disagree with a stated thesis of a work is pretty much a non-starter. We could call it specifically political essays or thinkpieces (and for sure, the latest Kurzgesagt video is more openly political than their usual science-focused fare), but then the line starts to get blurry. What about game reviewers who bring up industry culture problems? Will certain videos be no-go for discussion and others not? And what about explicitly political works like Get Out! or, say, To Kill a Mockingbird? If there are disagreements in trope pages over what counts as "too political," where do those get resolved? Or will problematic tropes just be removed? If Fighteer's statement is official site policy moving forward, it should be restated somewhere more official than the Kurzgesagt thread.

I appreciate that the mods are in a difficult position, and to be frank I wouldn't want to moderate OTC either. But this new approach feels heavy-handed and poorly thought out.

Edited by RedSavant on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:58:23 PM

I’m guessing on Election Day, the 2024 US Politics thread will have to be slow mode or locked?

Since even though I mostly avoid the forums except for cleanup, given how inflammatory it can get, there needs to be a plan in place.

EDIT: Deleted a word by mistake. EDIT 2: Same mistake again.

Edited by MewLettuceRush on Nov 30th 2023 at 6:25:20 AM

I should hope not, communal discussion on election days is the most fun the very fate of the nation can be.

Though yes, I don't think it's a great idea to have a nebulous "politics" ban in any place when it's fundamentally unclear what politics means.

Edited by Florien on Dec 1st 2023 at 2:04:02 AM

I was thinking slow mode would lessen the need for cooldown locks once the mod tool for that is implemented (rather than slow mode needing to be hard-coded by the admins). As for the questions regarding the scope of the policy for discussion of politics on parts of the forums other than OTC, not too many mods are online at the moment, but there will be a statement clarifying its scope soon.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 1st 2023 at 5:11:55 AM

I think importantly we need clarifications of what counts as "political topics", "on-topic political topics", "discussions of political topics" and areas to discuss each of these.

For example, if a prominent youtube or a cartoon episode makes a video about US foreign policy, then we have combinatorics that could all have different degrees of acceptance

1. Discussions of video in youtube thread (if we have a specific one)
2. Discussions of video's topic in youtube thread
3. Personal statements on video in youtube thread
4. Personal statements on video's topic in youtube thread
5. Discussions of video in US Politics thread
6. Discussions of video's topic in US Politics thread
7. Personal statements on video in US Politics thread
8. Personal statements on video's topic in US Politics thread
9. ~ in other threads

Going back to the banning politics outside of OTC, the issue is that a large number of works are influenced, either directly or indirectly, by politics.

All works are influenced by politics. There isn't such a thing as a non-political work of media, and it's impossible to create one. All humans are influenced by politics, even being unaffected and apathetic toward politics is a clear political stance. No human ever could make a work of fiction that is truly apolitical, because even just the content and themes are going to be influenced by the culture that human was exposed to.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Dec 1st 2023 at 4:50:45 AM

And, again, this serves to narrow the number of people who can talk about their lives and experiences on these forums. I/P chat being banned, for instance, obviously means we're not interested from hearing from Israeli and Palestinian posters (or posters with Israeli/Palestinian friends and relatives) talking about parts of their lives that, say, American posters could, because much of those are heavily influenced at present by a topic that is banned on the forums. What happens when the next big geopolitical flareup happens, and the next section of our membership finds it difficult/impossible to talk about their lives and experiences?

I think we also need to point out that this is important because OTC isn't just a 'containment zone' or whatever dismissive term we're calling it today - it's an educational section of the site, anchoring the membership to the real world and expanding their perspectives. A great deal of how we talk about sexism and other bigotries on the wiki, for instance, owes itself to OTC feminism and racism threads. Chat about history, technology, and current events likewise provides a resource to help us talk about works of fiction and their context in a way that's accurate and informative. The fact that we've actually had to lock the antisemitism thread without a definite timeframe for it to be reopened seems like a significant failure of duty of care on the part of the mods, in that they were unwilling and unable to maintain a space for the membership of a media wiki to discuss a common and prominent bigotry, what it is, and how it manifests. If the current set of mods don't think they can hack it, then that's in and of itself a pressing reason to expand the mod-team so that we're more than just what a tiny clique of people feel safe and comfortable talking about.