To-do list:

• Merge Stock Dinosaurs with Small Taxonomy Pools and turn the former into a redirect to the latter and removing or moving all wicks for the former.
• Since Small Taxonomy Pools is now a Definition-Only Page, examples must be removed, though references to the term can stay.

Continuing from the Seldom Seen Species TRS discussion.

Small Taxonomy Pools is a Tropes in Aggregate where listing any individual examples would inevitably boil down to a meaningless "Work features this species" statement. For some reason, though, it's not listed on Definition-Only Pages nor No On-Page Examples, which means that it's technically not disallowed to add specific examples to individual work pages. Stock Dinosaurs, which is basically a dinosaur-specific subtrope to Small Taxonomy Pools, should probably follow suit in wherever we end up indexing Small Taxonomy Pools.

I'd personally go for Definition-Only Pages.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 15th 2022 at 10:11:56 AM

Opened for discussion.

If we need to make it Definition Only, that would be fine with me.

Def only. Should we bring officially bring Stock Dinosaurs and other "stock lifeforms" tropes into the fold?

Edited by badtothebaritone on Oct 9th 2022 at 10:48:27 AM

It depends on what "other stock lifeforms" you're referring to.

Stock Dinosaurs is a sub-trope to Small Taxonomy Pools, i.e. "works that feature dinosaurs tend to only feature these select species". Other "stock lifeforms" tropes (that I know of) are tend to be subtropes to Artistic License – Biology instead, where "fictional animals tend to look like X, even though they don't look like that in real life". At the very least, they at least can describe how the lifeform is actually portrayed in specific works, instead of solely relying on whether or not other works feature the species, the same way Stock Dinosaurs, Small Taxonomy Pools and the now-cut Seldom-Seen Species did.

Personally, I think the latter should also be Definition-Only Tropes in Aggregate, but they serve different purposes, so I don't think we can decide that in the scope of this thread.

Edited by Adept on Oct 9th 2022 at 11:30:34 PM

Gotcha. I just phrased it like that to catch things like "Stock Fish" or "Stock Reptiles" if we had them.

AFAIK, we don't have such subpages (thank goodness), although if they exist, they'd probably need to be merged to STP for being redundant and pointless.

Def-only

Def-only

Definition-only.

Definition-only

(Ignore)

Edited by BlueXIII on Oct 11th 2022 at 6:12:55 AM

Should it be clarified that whatever we decide on Small Taxonomy Pools will also apply to Stock Dinosaurs?

Maybe we could make Stock Dinosaurs a redirect to Small Taxonomy Pools?

Double posting because I tagged the pages for Small Taxonomy Pools and Stock Dinosaurs because that was overlooked.

If Small Taxonomy Pools does become definition-only, it’ll keep the list of which organisms are most common, won’t it? Or something like that, but I’d rather not have it be a page with just a few paragraphs.

I believe so. It just can't be wicked as trope examples.

I don't think we'll be making any changes to the page aside from adding the usual "No examples, please" text seen on definition-only pages, though maybe some text from Stock Dinosaurs could be moved to it since it looks like it's on its way to becoming a redirect to Small Taxonomy Pools.

Should we keep the Stock Dinosaurs Useful Notes subpages?

I don't see why we wouldn't.

OK, so I copied the list of Stock Dinosaurs Useful Notes pages to Small Taxonomy Pools and indexed the latter as definition-only (and tagged the page as such). Does any text on the main Stock Dinosaurs page need to be moved to Small Taxonomy Pools, or can it be redirected now? If anyone here thinks it can be redirected now, go ahead and do so.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 15th 2022 at 10:07:29 AM

I moved the list of critters from Stock Dinosaurs to Small Taxonomy Pools under a "Prehistory" section. Some examples from the reptiles category might have to be moved there, since there seems to be some duplicates.

Or we can fold the new list into the reptiles subsection of the animal kingdom, although that might not be taxonomically accurate given that dinosaurs are more closely related to birds than reptiles.