The NRLEP and LRLEO criteria

I'll say that I have without a doubt seen the thread user's edge closer and closer to the side of "just get rid of all of it and also fuck crowners", but I'm fully willing to admit that it might be negativity bias at play here (just as I think the anti-RL sentiment is also a form of negativity bias fueled by what cleanup threads actually discuss on a daily basis).

There's absolutely times where multiple people are willing to consider that the problem might not exist, though I think this is a newer change of pace now that outright complaining about the process has been banned; before then I do feel like it was very heavily negative. Maybe not hostile, but very likely biased.

And maybe it's that some people stopped posting there or maybe it's just that the pages being brought up nowadays aren't as bad, but I can admit that things have been changing for the better lately.

I mean, TBH, while there are exceptions that have slipped through the cracks, honestly I think that a lot of the really bad real life sections have simply long since been cut.

"Eliminate the bad example sections" is the objective of the thread. If there aren't any, then it doesn't need activity.

The thread is not intended to judge every article to determine if the trope is possible IRL. Because a narrative convention only exists within a narrative. Every trope violates "impossible in real life" by that metric.

If an example section for RL is not problematic, then it doesn't need to be removed.

Well, yeah. My point is that in recent history a lot of people have immediately jumped to the side of "it's problematic, cut" and were rude about it to the point of wanting to skip crowners altogether. It's just true; I don't think we should just go on a section-purging spree, but for a long time I was in the minority as far as the thread-goers were concerned. That's changing now, but of course there's also sentiment that every NRLEP section is bad, expressed earlier in this very thread.

Or, to put it another way: People were bringing up every section that might've been in bad shape for the crowner, even if they had issues that didn't necessitate cutting or if the problems were more subjective than objective. So it wasn't simply a case of "getting rid of problematic sections", since there's been plenty of times where counterpoints were either disregarded or lumped in with "bad faith votes" and the like even if the sections weren't bad enough to cut.

This is less common now, but it did happen.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 4th 2022 at 5:14:35 AM

i recant my statement that every real life section is bad; that has been demonstrated to be untrue.

i still don't think the ones that are ok are worth keeping in the face of all the work the bad ones cause us, but if i haven't demonstrated sufficiently my understanding that my opinion is not policy, i don't know what else to say.

oh i know, dw. but i did say that, and now i admit that i was wrong.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Sep 4th 2022 at 2:19:15 AM

Oh yeah, not calling anyone out specifically right now, just trying to clarify the point I was making above.

I can't be bothered to find it, but I made a large post that can be summarized by that pov.

I just don't believe it justifies eliminating them piecemeal. Policy is "only when specifically problematic", so the only reason anyone needs to vote "keep" for any given article is "I'm not convinced there's a problem". Because "keep" is the default, it falls to the people who see a problem to argue their case.

Getting emotionally invested enough to be expecting one outcome makes it difficult, even crushing, to find that others don't share the opinion.

This might be controversial, but I think that the crowner threshold should be lowered from higher than 2:1 positive to higher than 1:1 positive to make a trope NRLEP. One thumbs down is worth 2 thumbs up and sometimes I feel discouraged to vote for NRLEP on tropes with a lot of thumbs down on them. It also feels weird to call KRLE when more people than not wanted it to be NRLEP. I feel like a crowner vote should be equally valuable regardless of which way you vote.

That was what we were (initially) discussing here, actually.

That was the main thrust of this thread, but there wasn't much support for making that particular change.

Edited by laserviking42 on Sep 6th 2022 at 8:06:39 AM

A recent problem being brought up at the cleanup thread is that there's no category or specific rule that allows the banning of "uncomfortable" or "overly morbid" sections. We're forced to shoehorn these pages into other categories because the category system is all-encompassing even if there are some problems that don't fit neatly into a pre-designated reason.

Take Please Wake Up. People want to ban it on the justification that it's too upsetting to read about real-life examples of this, and I'm pretty sure we've banned RL sections for upsetting pages in the past, but because there's no actual category it can go into there's a chance that it might not be banned due to a technicality.

Outliving One's Offspring was just mentioned, and while it could go under "too common" it is also described as something "ghoulish" to have a real-life page on and it's another page where the content might not fit into a particular category but is something I'd like to get rid of because I find it distasteful.

So... basically I think the category system is way too limiting and makes people need to shoehorn things in to justify a cut everyone otherwise agrees with if there's a more complicated reason for the ban. If we're at the point where some sections are getting spared just for lacking a category then it seems the category system has gone too far.

I disagree with that idea. If you think something is too morbid or sad, don't read about it. Not everyone (readers or editors) shares the same level of sensitivity.

Edited by Piterpicher on Sep 10th 2022 at 9:22:54 PM

So then why ban TearJerker.Real Life? Or ban notable, famous examples of Abusive Parents from being mentioned (multiple come to mind)? Or the suicide tropes?

There's already precedent for banning upsetting RL content from being mentioned, the only difference is that we can lump these things in with "too common" when it's pretty obvious what the real reasoning is.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 10th 2022 at 3:29:11 PM

That's not a really good defense, the equivalent of "don't be a baby about it".

If the community can reach a consensus that we don't want things like that on here, then we don't have to have them.

that's never a good argument. "just stop being triggered" doesn't work.

it's not our jobs to protect people from themselves, but there's also no reason we should go out of our way to inflict stuff on them. no one's talking about summarily banning stuff because one guy found it difficult, either. it's just a new category that when brought up will face the same consensus requirements as everything else.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Sep 10th 2022 at 12:32:57 PM

I agree with Piter. Real Life folders have an implicit content warning attached to them. It might be worth making it explicit, however.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 10th 2022 at 8:35:33 PM

didn't we make Body Horror NRLEP partly just because we didn't want the gross pictures around? how is that not the same as this?

They have an implicit content warning attached? Really? Half the arguments made for keeping RL folders boil down to "it's just for fun" ... but now there are "implicit" content warnings?

I also want to stress that a big part of my original point wasn't just "hey, we should start banning uncomfortable things", but that I find it absolutely ridiculous that the only current reason it's "not a ban reason" is because of the damn category system

Like I'm not looking for everyone to necessarily agree on these sections in particular. Some people will think they can stay. Whatever. That's why we have crowners.

My concern is that if there is consensus to remove these things but no category for them, on a technicality we can't do it even if people want to.

And I'm sure there's other reasons as well to ban real life examples that don't fit into categories, such as a section that's a target for vandalism and edit wars.

What I'm saying is that the category system as it is now leads to shoehorns just for people to justify banning things everyone already wants to ben, while making it more or less impossible to ban things that can't fit into a category at all.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 10th 2022 at 3:45:16 PM

If you've already read the trope page, you have a good idea of what the contents of the RL folder will contain. If you're already troubled by the trope, the presence of the real life folder is irrelevant; if you're only troubled by the potential details of real life examples, you can simply not open the folder to read the examples. So, yes, implicit consent.

Aside, I don't use Just For Fun as a defence. I find Real Life examples informative for how they influence art and are inspired by it.

The better argument would about be triggering content in real life examples on unrelated tropes, or on tropes whose example sections are too small to be folderised; there, I would suggest individual content warnings and spoiler tags.

This part confuses me somewhat, I think because I don't really frequent those threads. There's no 'other' category? Is the thread more rigid about its category system than TRS is?

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 10th 2022 at 8:52:23 PM

Part of this can be a different perspective. I have grown up on very different things than many of you and have never been someone who prides myself on empathy. And I mean, in the end the community wins, but you still technically have to open the folder or move to a different page in 99.9% of cases so I still believe the choice should at least depend on the reader. If you want to read about some guy's suicide on a news website or a wiki, nobody says you can't. If you want to play a game or read a page on a game about a president getting shot, nobody says you can't. But nobody says you have to either, nothing forces you to do so (there are no forced links, intrusive pop-ups, whatever, at least on a good website).

To be clear, I do think the current categories are mostly good, mostly covering things that legitimately lower quality of the wiki, would lead to contention between editors when it comes to what should be put on it, or put us in issues with advertisers. We could use an "Other" category if absolutely needed, but I'm still against people removing things because it's not something they specifically can handle.

Also agreed with Noaquiyeum. And I wouldn't use "Just For Fun" as a defense either. And I believe Tear Jerker is legit too common.

Edited by Piterpicher on Sep 10th 2022 at 9:55:43 PM

I mean, ya'lls arguments can be used to justify any real life section existing. Are you gonna say that we shouldn't ban them because they're optional to look at? Or are there arbitrary lines where suddenly the policy matters... even if your logic would still theoretically apply? For example, why does it matter if it's "too common" to you if you think that these sections should get a pass in other areas? Can't you see how that might be a hypocritical angle to take?

And yes, at the moment there's currently no real way to ban a RL section if it doesn't fit a category. People have to explicitly state what category it belongs to and there are genuine debates on occasion when someone disagrees with the category even if they think the section should be banned.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 10th 2022 at 3:56:54 PM

Like I said, "legitimately lower quality of the wiki, would lead to contention between editors when it comes to what should be put on it, or put us in issues with advertisers". "Can offend people or be seen as in bad taste" doesn't inherently make something worse unless it's like literally made for trolling like a game called Sex with Hitler (which actually exists, though AFAIK that's not a good game in terms of gameplay anyway).

Edited by Piterpicher on Sep 10th 2022 at 10:07:44 AM

So you don't think the possible backlash from talking about real-life tragedies as if they're tropes couldn't lower the quality of the wiki or cause trouble?

And look you're still arguing the point I wasn't actually talking about in the first place: My argument isn't "these sections must be banned", it's "It's fucking dumb that we can't ban them if we want to under the current system"

Like if we come to a consensus then we can argue to our heart's content on the cleanup thread about whether or not these sections should be banned. I'm literally just asking for the ability to do so without needing to shoehorn things into dumb categories that were just intended for organizational purposes.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 10th 2022 at 4:01:34 AM

I'd say those people who want to cause backlash are the problem and the fact that this wiki has mostly prided itself as a "fun" site rather than "info and sometimes fun", but these things may change someday. Sensitivity is not an inherently good or bad trait as long as you're not using a lack of it as an excuse to harm others on purpose or out of continuous ignorance, though that is my opinion. And I did say that we can have an "Other" section, not necessarily put because of this.

Edited by Piterpicher on Sep 10th 2022 at 10:04:52 AM