Victoria Cleanup

-m95 It does not set a bad precedent to delete obscure works of Neo-Nazi propaganda on the grounds that we are the primary platform via which people are hearing about it. It is not, nor should it ever be, the goal of TVTropes to provide a platform to otherwise unknown works of Neo-Nazi propaganda for the sole purpose of "It's ok, we're only drawing attention to these works to warn people not to pay attention to them!" If we platformed extremist works on the grounds that if we didn't, they might be platformed by worse people, this site would immediately become a cesspit.

Without trying to immediately pretend that a consensus has been reached, this conversation is coming from the 'Troping Works That Promote Bigotry' thread, from which there were 5 users in favour of cutting and 2 for keeping.

Wait, if we cut the page, why would we need to leave behind any wicks? If we're cutting a page for the reason that it draws undue attention to extreme bigotry, surely it would make more sense to just cut the wicks too. There's no point letting people know that there was a valid trope in a story that we don't have a page for and that we cut specifically because we didn't want to draw attention to it.

Again, there's just no precedent for cutting all the wicks, and such a thing would have to be something we're explicitly told we can do before we do it. Otherwise, we'd have to do the thing we do with content-policy violators, which is to cut the violating examples but to keep other redlinks.

I don't remember if Stonetoss had a wick purge, but I also don't remember if it was even crosswicked, so

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 25th 2023 at 5:18:29 AM

"5 in favour and 2 against" is a biased selection based on the most recent handful of posts. Looking back just two pages, I count myself, WarJay77, miraculous, StarSword, Amonimus, Cutegirl920fire, Mrph1, AegisP, ANonagon9, Irene, m-95 and themayorofsimpleton as all espousing views that seem to be on the side of keeping. If I've misread or misrepresented anyone's views then I apologise.

I'm fine with waiting to be explicitly told whether or not we cut everything, but if the decision is made to cut the page due to concerns re: platforming a work that promotes Neo-Nazi ideology, I can't really fathom why we would delete the work, but keep some of the wicks.

Admittedly I was mainly looking at the conclusion of the conversation but a lot of the users you've listed mentioned pros and cons to keeping and cutting. Cutegirl920fire never gave an opinion on cutting or keeping, and Amonimus' last statement on the matter was "if we can unambiguously define "untolerable levels of hate speech", sure why not."

Edited by Elmo3000 on Jan 25th 2023 at 10:57:29 AM

100% keep.

There is no legitimate evidence of this possibly causing harm(number of views don't count. Nobody can discern any reason for said views, making the data completely useless in doing anything with it). We already have a user who has no issue looking into the work to make sure it has correct tropes. Some are willing to bite the bullet for the team anyway, meaning cleanup is not an issue either. Cleanup has always been rather smooth in the first place.

As there is no plausible reason to believe it can be a stub, the only good cut reason is down the drain.

All wicks are kept unless said example violates some policy. No work gets special treatment here. That's why. And I stick by that as well. There's no good reason to cut a legitimate example. We at most don't link to said page.

Edited by Irene on Jan 25th 2023 at 5:26:30 AM

100% cut, it's impossible to find evidence of whether or not we have brought this work to wider attention but we are undoubtedly the primary platform through which people discover this work; a work of obscure Neo-Nazi propaganda. The view count is not useless because with a total of 30,000 views, it would be remarkably unlikely that not a single person was introduced to this work who may have been influenced by it. And even though it's impossible to prove, it also doesn't mean that it's worth the risk of platforming otherwise unknown Neo-Nazi propaganda when there is literally zero benefit to doing so.

Unless the work is already as widely known as Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries, we have absolutely nothing to gain from giving exposure to Neo-Nazi propaganda, but the potential negative consequences are equally horrific and unnecessary.

Edited by Elmo3000 on Jan 25th 2023 at 11:44:14 AM

FWIW, I'm undecided on cutting, I just didn't think a couple of arguments that were made in favor of cutting made sense.

Agreed. Keep unless we have a good reason to cut, and in this case we don't.

This.

I don't want to just be argumentative with anyone who disagrees with me, but like... is 'free exposure for obscure Neo-Nazi propaganda, for which we are the primary platform, written by author cited as inspiration in mass-shooter manifesto,' not a good reason to cut?

I don't think we should be bringing this work to a larger audience is all, and that is undeniably what we are doing and what we have done.

I've thought about it more, and I'm leaning keep and clean. As it is, the YMMV page, i.e. the main tab that displays troper and public opinions of the work, is entirely negative as far as I'm aware. And if we can expunge the main and wicks of the gushy BS using that sporking that was linked earlier, all the better.

I would, however, be 💯% in favor of making the various Moments subpages part of the Permanent Redlink Club, and I'll suggest that in the broader "bigot propaganda policy" thread.

I see no reason to PRLC the Moments pages. The odds of them being recreated are next to none.

Would red-linking Moments subpages include cutting NightmareFuel.Victoria, too?
Plus, I think putting every Moments subpage is complicated by the fact that many of them have to share space with a television show of the same name, that being Series.Victoria.

Which brings me to another point: Literature.Victoria and Series.Victoria sharing subpages has always kind of bugged me, even if it's kind of a minor thing. So I wanted to ask you fellas before I did anything rash: would it be a good idea to move the page from Literature.Victoria over to Literature.Victoria A Novel Of Fourth Generation War instead? That way, it doesn't show up first every time anyone searches "Victoria" on this site.

Edited by m-95 on Jan 26th 2023 at 9:51:00 AM

If kept it needs to be disambiguated from the series anyway.

Not all subpages need to be cut even then. Nightmare Fuel is about things being outright scary. Something like Awesome is easily praising the work, and you can possibly get that with any other crowning moment pages too.

Another good point brought up in the other topic is how often we need to clean up these kind of pages for ROCEJ. Like, yes, some will have a well-written or whatever moment that isn't effectively a good thing about the bigoted message, but that's unlikely. That means by letting them open, we do need to keep an eye on them/clean it up often. Is it worth the effort in that case? That's a good question. I mean, I don't have an issue with trying to keep 'em clean(as we should clean first, cut second), but that can also be a factor of multiple people willing to read said work to keep it clean. So it kind of has an issue, yeah.

Sort of a general point from the Troping Works That Promote Bigotry thread that applies to most works of bigotry but also specifically Victoria, in regards to the whole-

-then I've already stated quite a few times that this is a work about killing Cultural Marxists written by an author whose work on Cultural Marxists was cited extensively as an influence/inspiration in the manifesto of a terrorist, Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people, so 'no evidence of this possibly causing harm' seems a little inaccurate, but the larger point was-

In this case, 'compelling evidence' would be proof that by exposing this work to someone susceptible to its message, we had actively helped to radicalize them. I'm very glad that we don't have any compelling evidence of that, because that would be a) really, really, really bad, and b) too late for us to fix the monumentally terrible mistake we had made.

The idea that we shouldn't cut a work of Nazi propaganda until we can be certain that platforming it has caused harm, is the same idea as refusing to install a fire alarm until you're certain that your house has burned down.

That's putting the cart before the horse there.

No, it's taking action to prevent a problem before it happens, instead of waiting until after, by which point it is too late.

Or basically you're comparing the safety of a person in a house, which is required for any reasonable amount of living, to a fun website.

In other words, that makes no sense. Let's stop with the extreme analogies and focus on cleanup again, please.

If you want to use a fire alarm analogy, the wiki already has one. The cutlist. But putting a page on there if it can be salvaged is like pulling a fire alarm because someone started the oven; it might become a fire, but it could be harmless. We don't know and we don't take extreme action just because of a possibility it could be needed.

And yeah, we have to focus on cleanup first.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 26th 2023 at 9:15:54 AM

This work on the evils of Cultural Marxism was written by an author whose work on the evils of Cultural Marxism was literally cited extensively as an influence and inspiration in the manifesto of a terrorist who murdered 77 people?!? They're not extreme analogies when it's extremist content that could have extreme consequences.

Edited by Elmo3000 on Jan 26th 2023 at 3:43:18 PM

Not really? If it can be salvaged and cleaned to everyone's satisfaction, there's not much reason to clean the page.

I support moving the page to Literature.Victoria A Novel Of Fourth Generation War to disambiguate it from Series.Victoria. The page should be cleaned but I don't think it should be cut. If we need to, we should instead blow it up and start over, then lock the work page and subpages.

Apologies for derailing the thread into a discussion on cutting VS keeping when the cleanup was still in progress. I think everyone knows my overall stance by now but in the meantime I would also advocate a change in the name to Victoria A Novel Of Fourth Generation War.