The NRLEP and LRLEO criteria

e: Laser redacted their last post so im redacting this too.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Aug 22nd 2022 at 3:39:14 AM

Real Life and fiction go hand in hand (Life Imitates Art and Art Imitates Life). Tropes occur in Real Life. Are we documenting tropes or not? Plenty of works are directly built on Real Life anyway, there will always be some measure of "Real Life" on the wiki so I fail to see the point of axing Real Life sections entirely on the measure of "some tropers behave irresponsibly". Tropers can behave irresponsibly in any other kind of section.

We can maintain real life sections like any other kind of section.

EDIT: If Real Life sections are so problematic to you (not everyone would agree with you), maybe you should just not look at them?

Edited by Commander_Ysenir on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:48:52 AM

I think the problem is, the people that are reading them may be getting inaccurate information from the poorly-sourced ones (such as the Valhalla example I brought up). That, and they can sometimes be Edit War magnets that end up just creating an unpleasant mess for everyone, especially the mods.

A fair point, but this is not exclusive to Real Life examples, and a complete blanket ban on RL because of possible inaccurate information arguably outweighs the good content on Real Life example.

With respect to the mods, this is an issue that can potentially affect more than just Real Life sections, and I don't believe a blanket ban is an elegant or proportional fix, especially when more moderate case-by-case approaches or rules like No Recent Examples, Please! seem to be working fairly well (in my opinion).

Edited by Commander_Ysenir on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:59:56 AM

Yeah, that doesn't work. I'm a moderator. My role is to enforce our policies. Whenever someone has a dispute over these sections, I look at them. What I near-uniformly see is a mess of general examples, shoehorns, and natter.

You are welcome to start your own wiki dedicated to Real Life Tropes if our policy is not agreeable to you.

We are not "blanket banning" RL examples, or there would be none. We are banning them from tropes that prove, by example, that they cannot sustain them.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:58:25 AM

"Tropes occur in Real Life"

Not last time I've checked, according to definition of Trope and Tropes, which explicitly tells that they are writing elements. Writers borrow elements from Real Life, but Real Life is not a fictional work so you can't use a trope to shape it, even if you imitate a character as your role model or are inspired to become a politician after reading too many novels.

"If Real Life sections are so problematic to you"

Please be cautious of the tone, not everyone agrees with you either.

My concern on the first point is that RL sections are more likely to attract inaccurate information than non-RL sections. Especially when politics and history get involved.

I'll mostly concede on the Edit War point, but I will say that the idea of less Edit Wars is something I personally consider desirable.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 22nd 2022 at 6:59:29 AM

suggesting that people worried about the overall quality of the wiki just blind themselves to problems is not especially productive.

NRLEP is part of the process, and it's decided by supermajority vote. no one is making these decisions unilaterally and you cannot overrule them unilaterally.

So, there are a lot of legitimate issues with real-life example sections, from making moral judgement on real-life people to just flat out lying and people getting into edit wars over politics and history. Many of them are a mess. There's a reason the cleanup thread even exists. Ignoring problems isn't and never will be a solution.

The debate right now is basically whether or not these sections are so inherently bad that we'd be better off with a blanket-ban on all of them (even if such a ban would never actually come to pass, some people clearly wouldn't be upset if it did), even the ones with sections that haven't caused any hard so far... or at the very least if they're bad enough to warrant preemptive action.

Personally I do agree that there are real-life sections that don't need to be cut, and I feel like a lot of people have become a bit too worried about them to the point of repeatedly derailing the cleanup thread or accusing people of bad faith for voting the way they think makes sense. I think that cleanup editors in general tend to have a problem of only seeing things from the perspective of how much misuse and controversy there is, but of course, the only examples anyone brings up to discuss are the bad ones. So unless you really try and separate thread work from how the wiki is as a whole, it's very easy to become convinced that things are way worse than they actually are.

(And no, I'm not saying I'm exempt from this either; everyone does it at some point. It's just never been RL examples for me.)

I'm not in favor of cutting things that don't hurt anything just because other things in the same category are causing problems. It's just too extreme, and it paints the issue as being too black-and-white. But at the same time, it's also equally extreme to suggest that getting rid of them is somehow a problematic thing to do.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 22nd 2022 at 7:04:47 AM

You make excellent points Jay.

I keep feeling like there's some middle-of-the-road compromise between "cut them all" and "keep the current situation" that we haven't found yet. I was trying to think of one earlier, but I couldn't come up with anything.

The current situation, the one I feel we should stick with, is to deal with problematic sections as they occur. Whether through a cleanup or outright NRLEP'ing. Maybe we should try cleanups prior to NRLEP'ing, I'm not entirely averse to that idea.

When I say I wouldn't shed a tear if they disappeared, I don't actually want to fight that fight (I suspect it would be a losing fight anyways).

I went too far with the "Don't Look At Them" idea and I apologize.

I get from your posts that you wouldn't mind forwarding such a motion for a blanket ban, and I'm disagreeing with you on that. I agree with banning them from certain tropes, but banning them preemptively should be a rare thing.

But how would you quantify "more or less"? Can the idea of a cutting point even apply here? What if, hypothetically, Real Life is cut entirely and then it's, let's say, Video Games that inherit the title of "Most edit wars"?

True, but tropes also describe patterns and these patterns appear in Real Life.

Relaying facts about real life is a form of storytelling in my opinion. An author writing a fictional story based on his experience in, say, World War 2, would inevitably relay Real Life facts and trope them, and a page about his work would indirectly trope Real Life.

I've proposed a middle-ground of cover-banning or simplifying crownening only specific indexes like Morality Tropes that get brought up with the same reasons like "Morality Tropes aren't applicable to real person and too much of a judgement". If there are good exceptions I'll drop this idea.

That's not quite true. Documentary works — those that purport to relate true facts about real life — are not inherently tropable. We can only trope the narrative structure they create around RL events, plus presentation and related tropes.

A fictional story based on real life is of course tropable, but that's because it's a fictional story.

Anyway, we are not changing our policy. My griping should not be taken as anything other than expressing my position. The current state is that we only prohibit RL examples after filtering them through our policy and taking a vote.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 22nd 2022 at 7:16:19 AM

That's a reasonable middle ground.

Edited by Commander_Ysenir on Aug 22nd 2022 at 7:16:32 AM

I was going based on proportion. I will fully concede on that point since I admittedly do not have specific facts and figures.

I will note that I am not for or against RL examples by the way. Like I said, I feel like there's a middle-of-the-road solution that just hasn't been proposed yet.

EDIT: Amonimus's idea is interesting. It could work—I'll wait for other opinions though.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 22nd 2022 at 7:18:55 AM

The only exception I can think of are the ones that don't have and never had these sections... which goes back to the question of if preemptive strikes are ok.

Personally I'm not inherently opposed to the idea but I'm worried about how much would have to pass through the thread if these things were allowed, when there's more pressing issues to talk about. Sort of like how the current TRS policy is to only make changes when there's a problem to resolve, which is partially in place because there are just so many problems to resolve that we don't need to start making more work for ourselves when it's unnecessary.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 22nd 2022 at 7:17:55 AM

Thank you for the clarification. Personally the idea of "Prohibiting RL examples through policy filtering and voting" is reasonable to me.

my position is identical to laserviking's.

but they don't have narrative significance when they occur in real life because real life does not have a narrative. the mission of TV Tropes is to document patterns that have narrative significance. that's why real life sections are fundamentally off-mission for the wiki.

storytelling (less charitably, editorializing) is also off-mission for the wiki.

"tropes also describe patterns and these patterns appear in Real Life"

In Real Life these would be called "patterns" then, not "tropes". These are not equal objects because "tropes" is a larger group.

"Personally the idea of Prohibiting RL examples through policy filtering and voting is reasonable to me."

So you wouldn't mind if the voting decides to remove RL from a trope even if it's well-documented and has historical value?

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 22nd 2022 at 2:21:28 PM

Ouch, you got me there. Would I mind it? Yes, but ultimately if there's an overwhelming vote against it then that's it. I'm not omnipotent and the wiki doesn't belong to me. I'd think it's a poor decision but I wouldn't make a puerile and futile attempt to defy it.

EDIT: (Removed my personal opinion about what constitutes "controversy").

EDIT: Will also take a break and go do something else.

EDIT: One last thing before I take a break: I believe Real Life examples of tropes help contextualize their narrative use and I believe that this enriches the wiki as a whole.

Edited by Commander_Ysenir on Aug 22nd 2022 at 7:31:43 AM

One other thing I want to say is that until the thread's voting process was updated relatively recently, I do think a lot of RL sections got cut either without many votes or with unacknowledged counterpoints (the one that comes to mind is Only in Florida, which seemed a little ridiculous to me since it's literally what the trope is about, so it's one of the only times I felt like people jumped the gun a little). Edit: To be clear I'm passed the point where I care enough to argue for a reversion; it's just a case where I did attempt to argue in favor of the section, but got completely ignored and then the section got cut with, like, 7 votes. It is what it is, but it did happen.

Nowadays the opposite tends to be true; more and more sections are getting saved, and it's making the people on the other side annoyed.

My whole point here is that these things have always been wildly polarizing and any solution does need to account for the fact that there's always going to be outliers that are/aren't cut when they shouldn't/should be, simply because the process is fallible and it's ultimately subjective unless the problems are undeniable.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 22nd 2022 at 7:39:57 AM

Allowing RL examples promotes the misunderstanding that tropes are something other than a trait of storytelling, typically being mistaken for an "event" or "item" or (worst of all) "person". This kind of nonsense is exactly why I find allowing them at all to be risky; because it encourages a fundamental misunderstanding of what a trope is.

Misunderstanding the purpose of tropes leads to misuse and shoehorns because editors are discussing those "events" instead of the meaning intended by the storytelling shorthands.

I'm not understanding what the point of "we should be prohibiting/removing RL examples faster" is.

The current policy, as I understand it, restricts voting to pages where a problem can be demonstrated. If the goal is to prevent problems, then the most efficient solution is to ban all RL examples. With the assumption that we are going to continue to allow RL examples, the goal of the current policy is essentially a "one strike" rule, where once an article has caused above a (subjective) degree of problem, we eliminate the problem by banning RL examples from the article. Below that amount, and we clean it up instead.

Opening the policy up a little, like "90% of tropes on this index are already NRLEP, so we should have a yes/no vote on making 100% of the index NRLEP", is effectively lowering the bar on what is considered a "problem". An article that gets voted "Keep" must be revisited if more problems occur within the RL examples. When do we revisit indexes that get voted "Keep"? Time spent discussing "this article could become problematic" is time not spent on existing problems and we already have plenty of those. "This article could become problematic" also ignores my earlier point that allowing RL at all is problematic, which is why they get effectively a "one strike" rule.

Since I think they're all problematic, it's only the degree to which they cause problems that we are discussing/debating. I want to know what the objective is, if we are looking at proposals to vote on articles (or groups of articles) before the RL example section becomes demonstrably problematic.

As someone who's advocated it: mainly that there are certain pages/types of pages, like the oft-mentioned Morality Tropes where it's pretty much a guarantee that a RL section causing problems is a when, not an if. Ideally they'd be made NRLEP in the launch pad, but that's not mandatory.

I'm not sure it hurts us particularly to wait until the problems do manifest, but I'm also not sure how it does any harm to just act preemptively.

a major concern i have for real life examples is the inclusion of propaganda, especially in relation to recent events.