The NRLEP and LRLEO criteria

To me it's clearly not, evident by the cleanup thread occasionally declaring that some sections don't have rocej problem.

While I have expressed my desire for a stricter standard, the current one — only declare a trope NRLEP if it causes issues (or if it is preemptively decided to be NRLEP in TLP)— seems to be working well enough for the time being.

what should we do if the real life section is very long?

In case if we're not removing it, and of course some page has to actually grow that large, we can split it in two like other medium subpages. It may be a bit of a pain since there's no alphabetization.

One of the criteria for considering a RL section problematic is if it grows much larger than the other sections. It either means it's too common or it's just attracting a ton of misuse and natter.

"Too common" is a valid reason for NRLEP'ing an article. No trope should be dominated by RL examples.

indeed, real life examples should at the very least be short and simple.

Did we ever decide whether tropes with currently non-troublesome (or non-existent) RL sections but the trope itself fit into one of the NRLEP categories can be added to the crowner? That was why I made the thread but the conversation got derailed.

The conversation got "derailed" into discussing if that was even necessary to begin with. Why would we spend time and effort on identifying tropes that might have a problematic RL section? We have enough trouble dealing with the problematic ones as is.

Edited by laserviking42 on Aug 20th 2022 at 1:10:23 PM

Personally, I think RL examples are fine unless they're something likely to attract Flame Wars. Just as fiction reflects reality, life sometimes imitates fiction.

People going "if it ain't broke don't fix" is an answer to that question, not a derail.

The exception I'd say would be folks deciding on it preemptively in TLP, but that's also not really what the OP is asking.

Edited by Synchronicity on Aug 21st 2022 at 7:15:23 AM

From my understanding, the philosophy of NRLEP is three-pronged:

• 1. Too Common: If nearly a majority of the trope page consists of nothing but RL examples, then that is just excessive. We really don't need to document every single instance of events that happen to qualify for a trope. A few examples to demonstrate some Truth in Television is enough.
• 2. Too Controversial: Self-explanatory really and covers RL examples on the spectrum of either being Flame Bait or violating Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment. These should be yanked immediately to avoid soapboxing and potential Edit Wars.
• 3. Impossible in Real Life: Not everything in fiction can be applied to RL, especially from fantasy and sci-fi works. I don't think I need to explain that RL entries that are actually impossible, improbable, or impractical to replicate are shoehorns and need to be removed.

To me, if RL examples don't check one of these three boxes, they're fair game to be added.

No Real Life Examples, Please! lists seven.

Unless Morality Tropes, Sex Tropes and Stereotype are lumped with #2 and Characterization Tropes, Narrative Tropes, Plots are lumped with #3.

Yes, the former three are lumped with #2 while the latter three are lumped with #3. I consider "Too Common", "Too Controversial", and "Impossible in Real Life" to be the three main pillars of NRLEP.

Edited by CytoZytokine on Aug 21st 2022 at 1:45:19 AM

I am confused. Tropes that get crownered will be put into one of the three boxes if they get enough votes so I don't see what wouldn't fit into those boxes.

I take the question is to put those entire indexes into NRLEP.

There are plenty of Real Life sections that are harmless and good fun and a blanket ban would be a metaphorical "sledgehammer to kill a fly" problem. I'd personally enjoy the site far less if a measure to cut all Real Life sections was taken, as I found them informative on several occasions.

Well it's a good thing then that nobody here is seriously suggesting cutting all real life sections. You seriously need to dial back the hyperbole if you actually want to have a discussion. People saying they wouldn't miss them is not the same as proposing something so drastic, and I'm not really sure a Wiki Talk thread would be sufficient for that. What we are discussing here is if certain tropes should pre-emptively be made NRLEP as they have the potential to be problematic.

Commander_Ysenir, I'm not sure that TVTropes is the place for you, as you seem to want the wiki to do things it was not set up to do. You may find RL sections "informative", but I have found them mostly a mass of unsourced natter, some of which I know to be false. We are not Wikipedia, we don't have sourcing and verifiability policies for real life issues, nor do we really have any way of enforcing them. I'm fairly sure the mods don't want to be refereeing such disputes anyways.

Ignoring your off-topic second paragraph, I'll quote Fighteer up in the thread:

From namra:

From: ChloeJessica

So no I wouldn't consider it hyperbole to say I'd rather not see Real Life examples cut since some people forwarded the idea to do just that (which, granted, was just that, an idea, and not a definite "this is what we'll do" order).

Moving on, and adding to CytoZytokine "Too Controversial" category, I'd suggest having a "no examples more recent than X years" criteria. Reddit's /r/askhistorians subreddit has a similar rule and it seems to work fine for them.

I personally don't think preemptive NRLEP are critical, at least outside of the most obvious cases (like "Always Chaotic Evil"). We're talking data on a wiki, not the human body where prevention is better than healing. A NRLEP would have to be enforced anyway, the same way that bad edits/examples would need to be scrubbed out or fixed.

Edited by Commander_Ysenir on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:20:02 AM

Commander_Ysenir has a point there that not everyone are not in favor of cutting.

"no examples more recent than X years", have you checked No Recent Examples, Please!?

Yeah, multiple people have expressed the opinion that all sections are bad and that they should be cut. So it's hardly a misinterpretation when almost none of this discussion is about the original topic.

I knew of that rule but it didn't really cross my mind that there was an official page for it (which in hindsight makes sense). Thank you for forwarding it.

In any case I feel like before making a blanket preemptive NRLEP (outside of the aforementioned most egregious cases like "Always Chaotic Evil") we should first take measures like "ROCEJ" and "No recent examples please".

Edited by Commander_Ysenir on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:23:32 AM

The necessary condition for not cutting all RL sections is tropers behaving responsibly with those sections. If that weren't a problem, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

All RL sections exist on sufferance because TV Tropes is not about real life. So you have to give us a reason to keep them that goes beyond, "I find them informative."

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:34:22 AM

EDIT: self redacting, off to stare at wildlife and ease off

Edited by laserviking42 on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:37:27 AM

On the subject of false/biased information in real life example sections, I'll point to my comment from the RL cleanup thread back in May concerning a biased entry on the Disaster Dominoes real life page. Basically, to summarize, there was a horrific train crash in 2015 in a town near where I live (Valhalla, NY was the town) that started with a car that had been on the tracks when the train was coming, with the blame being placed on several factors, but the entry was written in a way that implied it was the fault of the car's driver alone. Not only was the entry insensitive, I question whether or not we even need to be discussing train crashes with no relevance to fiction on TV Tropes.

Real life sections have a habit of attracting these types of irrelevant entries with no connections to fiction, so I could see why some wouldn't miss them. On the flip side, I'm aware there are many non-problematic, interesting, and fun RL sections that would also be axed if we axed all RL sections. Is it worth losing those to get rid of the bad ones?

I don't know what to do with RL sections. I don't want to suggest overruling some of the "keep" crowner results for questionable RL sections like the Disaster Dominoes one but I wonder if some of these RL pages could legitimately be harming our image offsite—I know for a fact that a criticism I've heard of TV Tropes is that our site is filled with inaccurate information. Are these particular sections worth keeping if they are contributing to turning possible new tropers away from our site? And on the flip side, what would we do with the good, non-problematic RL sections that are both fun and legitimately interesting? I have no idea what to do here.

(Sorry for the long post, I just had a lot I wanted to say.)

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:53:40 AM