Wiki and Forum Policy - General Discussion

I've thumped or redacted some more comments in the Jimquisition thread and closed down that Ask The Tropers thread as out of place.

As someone who focuses on the wiki-side of TV Tropes and barely touches the non-wiki-related forums, I don't necessarily agree that a ban on one should affect the other. I think a better distinction to make than "wiki and forum" would be "wiki maintenance and community". I'd prefer the two halves of the website be more clearly separated by purpose, which would fall under different rules and moderation, only overlapping when needed. That way we won't restrict users from more things that we need to.

I don't know, I think we should expect a base level of behaviour from wiki editors, and if they can't do that on the forums, then that would reflect poorly on their wiki work. It also makes it much harder for them to work together with others on wiki projects.

That would make sense on paper, but the issue is that not every forum user participates in the wiki itself. There are those who dedicate their time on the forums with rarely any edits or without a single edit on wiki content.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on May 26th 2021 at 7:55:58 AM

And vice versa with dedicated editors who never journey into the forums at all.

^ and ^^ On the other hand, if somebody is only active on one side of the site, it wouldn't matter if they were suspended or not from the side where they aren't active, would it?

The point of the suspension system being modular is so we can apply judgment in cases like this.

Well, we've already agreed that bans from places like FG or YF wouldn't necessarily contribute to these things because they don't necessarily have anything to do with the wiki proper or how people act on the wiki. For the most part, the right-siders who actually venture onto places like the TLP or projects can be really helpful and it would be odd if they lost all their access just because, say, they had drama in a forum game. However, for the most part regulars in that part of the forums don't contribute to the wiki much anyway.

Projects, TRS and to a lesser extent OTC speak a lot more about the potential wiki contributions of the people in the discussion. Whether one contributes properly, wonks about politics, or disrupts the threasds, their behavior in those areas is more likely to reflect their wiki behavior. It would make sense if a user banned from projects would also get banned from the wiki, and I can't think of too many cases where people from the left side don't contribute to the wiki.

I still feel that forum bans coming packaged with wiki bans feels extreme, but I've suggested packaging wiki and TLP bans before and I can't deny that it would stop certain issues, like that ATT thread. The problem IMO is less "forum banned tropers trying to do wiki things" and more "forum banned tropers unable to discuss things like everyone else".

Edited by WarJay77 on May 26th 2021 at 12:40:50 PM

Sure... *whistles innocently*

I think OTC bans especially shouldn’t inherently spin into a wiki ban. A lot of OTC bans come because people have specific political bugbears that get them would up. It’s often less about actual opinions so much as it’s about people having a poor ability to manage protracted debate on heavy topics.

OTC isn’t inherently a high-stress area, but it’s probably more prone to have conversations turn high-stress than almost anywhere else on the wiki.

Honestly, I don't think anyone on the staff side thinks that the large rearrangement of the ban system mentioned here is the way to go. I'd like to prevent edit banned people from launching TLP drafts but that's it.

My thoughts with the TLP thing is because the TLP is still an effort to add contributions to the site, and in every case I know about, edit banned tropers always make the same mistakes on the TLP that they did on the wiki proper. If they can't get edits on the wiki through normal means, I don't see why they should be allowed to get edits on the wiki via the TLP, especially since people in the past have used it to circumvent their bans.

The launch issue is a big one but is honestly not my biggest concern.

Launching a trope is serious business (even though some tropers seem to think of launching as many tropes as possible as a fun game). If anything, we should be more restrictive with TLP rights than main wiki rights.

To be fair, it's harder to get away with launching a bad trope than making a bad work page. You'd need at least five people to agree that your bad trope is actually not bad. For a bad work page or other bad wiki edits, you can make as many cruddy stubs as you want.

I do think the wiki and TLP bans should be linked, partly because things like formatting issues are usually consistent across TLP and wiki editing, but mostly because of the glitch that sends drafts to limbo when someone's edit banned but launches a trope. The one case in which I think a TLP ban doesn't need a wiki ban would be if someone's suspended for being rude in TLP comments, as that's an issue more specific to the culture of TLP.

I think making a poor work page is more excusable, though. Even a poor work page can inspire others to add and improve it, but a poor trope page just leads to poor use.

The only part of TLP that I agree needs to be closed due to a Wiki ban is the ability to launch the article, because launching involves (at minimum) the editing of indexes and crosswicking.

That said, despite Arvine's heroic efforts, I think TLP is still frequently infested with bad example writing, which spills over into the rest of the wiki upon launch. These terrible examples, however, are mostly from unsuspended editors. I hold the sponsor of the draft responsible for the terrible state of examples upon launch, and the community as a whole for their lax attitude to example writing. The rare case of Wiki-banned editors contributing to TLP drafts is lost in that noise, and extending the ban to cover that area as well is not going to reduce the problem to a significant degree.

Besides, I don't consider it an accident that there's a way to demonstrate/practice example writing for the wiki where you'd (theoretically) get your writing checked/verified by the draft's sponsor.

Edited by crazysamaritan on May 27th 2021 at 12:32:47 PM

Honestly, I frequently want to call out people who post poorly written examples in TLP comments, because it shouldn't be on the sponsor to do more than minor formatting fixes, but I always worry I'll come across as rude.

Yeah, I'm always frustrated when I see bad indentation and the like, but it's the same tropers every time and even if I call them out on one draft they'll do it again elsewhere. But a lot of the time the only way to actually get anything done about it is to check their wiki edits as well, because I don't think the mods would take a report seriously if it was specifically about TLP suggestions. And it's a lot harder to remember individual instances of TLP misbehavior if they aren't about the drafts themselves, since you have to go back through the backlog of current, nuked, and launched drafts just to try and find that troper's posts. So long story short, it's really hard to moderate things like that since the tropers who do these things tend to keep doing them even after being asked to stop, and by the time they've done it enough times to say something about it, it's impossible to actually find any of the evidence. I do want to continue discussing the general problem here, but this might be a better discussion for TLP community issues.

If there was a way to restrict banned tropers from creating drafts, that'd be one thing, but we can't, which is why I feel it's easier to just restrict the access entirely. This might be a bit elitist of me, but I do feel that TLP should be more of a privilege than it is. There's numerous problems with that part of the site that wouldn't exist if we could ensure the people who used it were a least more likely to know and follow the rules.

Tropers who've been suspended for things like creating stub pages and using bad grammar will keep doing that in the TLP, and it wastes a lot of the community's time to try and teach them since in a majority of cases, they aren't interested in actually learning, which is why they're still edit banned. One of them straight up said they saw no need to improve their writing skills since they couldn't actually edit the wiki, so our attempt to fix their draft was entirely pointless...besides that little issue of them not actually being allowed to launch a draft anyway. It just feels like an extra amount of work forced on the community of people who actually are trying to improve the TLP's track record, when we already have to deal with non banned tropers doing these things. On top of that, I'm still convinced that edit banned tropers using TLP is technically a form of ban evasion or Loophole Abuse.

And yes, a lot of these issues are the same reason I'd also like the TLP to be newbie-locked, though that's a harder sell since newbies can still launch drafts. I do have to wonder though, now that mods can see hat and bomb records, if there's any pattern of new accounts creating issues in those areas or if it's mostly the tropers who should know better.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 27th 2021 at 2:48:14 PM

Seems like the problem is that we don't have a way to track TLP participants' inputs there, not the ban system

Maybe. It's insanely hard to police the area because you either need to remember all the drafts issues occurred on, or the troper needs to do enough in a short time, short enough for all the drafts to still be at the top. So it ends up with a lot of frustration and headache for those of us who actually do try and perform some sort of quality control. Not to mention, since only mods can see the hats and bombs, those are near impossible to moderate unless we get you guys to check every single suspiciously high-count draft.

The Ban Evasion factor is still a big concern of mine, though. Isn't it technically a form of meat-puppeting? I thought the only way banned tropers could get their edits on the site was through the grammar thread.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 28th 2021 at 3:29:42 PM

On the Renamed Tropes thread, Septimus says he's requested the threads in FAQ be moved out but it's up to the admins. I thought mods were able to move threads. Or is it about moving the entire batch, disallowing new threads, and/or something special about FAQ?

Disallowing new threads and moving all locked and not stickied threads out, to be precise.

Noting here that because of upcoming exam preparations, I won't be covering the video threads and Ask The Tropers for at least a few weeks. Folks who need action there need to ask other moderators for the time being.

Good luck with that - Real Life comes first, after all.

Yeah, do what you need to do IRL.

EDIT: Oh and of course good luck.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 29th 2021 at 10:26:19 AM

Good luck septimus