Scope of laconics

to Laconics for Useful Notes, Recaps, and Creators, per the previous arguments. I've already said I oppose Laconics for Administrivias, so there's that.

I guess we should have a crowner to make things official, I think we've coalesced around these options:

Laconics are appropriate for:

• Trope pages only
• Trope and work pages only
• Trope, work, creator pages only
• All pages as long as not a problem

Am I reading the room correctly?

Each type of page should have a separate entry on the eventual crowner. That way, if someone wants laconics only for tropes and creators, they can vote that way.

To avoid over-complicating things, "creators" should only mean the literal Creator/ namespace for the moment. Content creators in work namespaces (e.g. musicians) should be a separate crowner, only run if works and creators have different results.

Right something simple like: "vote up or down in favor of or against the types of pages that should have laconics:

• Tropes
• Works
• Creators (not including Creators in the Music namespace)
• Other namespace creators
• Useful Notes
• Administrivia
• Recaps"

Are there any page types I missed?

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 20th 2022 at 10:00:55 AM

And how would we determine which ones actually get laconics and which ones prohibit? A vote of 12 for trope pages and 10 for works pages and 8 for administrivia tells us what exactly?

That's a good point. We can't really use the usual 2:1 threshold.

I'm not quite sure I understand. Why would the 2:1 not work in this case?

we typically use a 2:1 ratio on up vs down for each proposition of a crowner to decide unless there are "mutually exclusive" caveats written into the options. None of these options seem mutually exclusive, which is why I'm not sure where the issue lies.

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 20th 2022 at 11:28:16 AM

Strictly speaking, Creator/ is the only namespace where we collect examples of a real person's career. The Music and Wrestling namespaces are for whatever persona they adopt.

Someone who uses multiple dramatically different personas could be argued to need a Creator page for their Music/Wrestling careers. It is unlikely more because of practical reasons for them not to do it in the first place. With that in mind, I'd rewrite the two this way:

2:1 doesn't work because the purpose of the 2:1 rule is to force consensus to change the status quo. Here, we'd be voting on which pages the status quo (of allowing laconics) should be maintained for. If we were to use the equivalent of a 2:1 rule, it would be <= 0.5:1 here, which could lead to confusion when something inevitably ends up at 0.77:1 and gets called as keep.

The obvious solution is to reverse the crowner from the above plan, and use "vote up to BAN laconics, vote down to KEEP laconics", which allows 2:1 to be cleanly used.

gonna be real, I still don't quite understand, but from where I stand if what you're ultimately proposing is to flip the question then sure. I got no problems with that. the question i put was just a suggestion to show how individual page type categories can be voted on in a single crowner

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 20th 2022 at 2:51:45 PM

I think Laconics could work for Useful Notes on a case-by-case basis (thinking stuff like Nintendo Entertainment System or The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983), but I won't shed any tears if they're banned for the namespace wholesale.

Edited by Karxrida on Dec 21st 2022 at 12:02:19 PM

I actually agree that Laconics can work for Useful Notes pages; the former provide summaries for pages and, since UN pages are often long (from my experience), it would make sense to provide a summaries of them. Plus, Laconic Wiki doesn't give any limits on what the Laconic pages have to be for.

I agree that laconics Useful Notes could be useful. Some of them seem to be the most description-heavy pages on the wiki.

For Administrivia, it might be worth pointing out that Wikipedia often has an "in a nutshell" summary for policy pages. There are some important differences that might make this less workable for TV Tropes, like the site's informality and weaker protections against vandalism.

The Laconics that strike me as unnecessary are human Creator pages, because they'd either be biased towards certain "notable" works or redundant with the indexes (i.e. X is an author and director), as well as Laconics for pages where the main description is already laconic (such as many Recap and index pages).

Useful Notes pages are already supposed to be condensed versions of real life topics of note that impact fiction. I really don't see how reducing them once again to a sentence or two helps anything. But I can see many problems with doing so, especially with some of the complicated topics (try to imagine a short sentence describing topics like the Troubles of Northern Ireland or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can go wrong).

The current state of trope laconics isn't all that great, we already have a cleanup project going on there. Do we need to add more things to oversee and overstretch the few people who participate in cleanup?

EDIT: I already mentioned the cleanup thread, it was part of my argument ...

Edited by laserviking42 on Dec 21st 2022 at 3:29:46 PM

It still doesn't hurt to have a summary of a long page. Also, there's a thread for Laconics EDIT: which could use more support.

Edited by RandomTroper123 on Dec 21st 2022 at 11:23:18 AM

"It could possibly go bad" generally isn't a strong argument because it's extremely difficult to prove the possibility.

I'm aware it sounds contradictory to remove them on recap pages, but isn't the point of a recap to be a shorter summary of events(before the trope list) so it's not too bloated? Useful Notes don't really work the same way, as it's actually long as intended. So at least that having a laconic isn't necessarily bad? Or at least it needs to be proven it'd be outright bad.

Useful Notes intended to be long?

...Ah, more that some can be very long. Fair. I've seen some prettttty long ones even then.

The Auteur Theory And for one example of a pretty long one where it could be useful.

The ATT that started this was specifically about the laconics for various politics pages which some people already were taking issue with, so it's not just about something that might be a problem.

Also, Useful Notes were supposed to be short entries relating real life topics found in fiction. Somewhere along the way people decided that we should also be wikipedia, and now we seem to have ones for everything little thing.

Well, UN did evolve to be more than "short summaries". So basically that reasoning no longer really matters to the scope of this thread, nor does it provide a sufficient reasoning any longer. A lot of them are not short, and are long enough where a Laconic could be, heh, useful.

I do agree it's a problem for political pages, but I don't see how that would apply to any other kind of UN page. Being "real life" alone doesn't show why it'd be problematic. What it used to be isn't really meaningful to what I asked. Why is it problematic again? Beyond political pages specifically, which at least have ROCEJ reasonings. Why would it be problematic to a specific company's video game page? I can get why they wouldn't have certain subpages, but how does that apply to a simple summary?

My take is that it's entirely unhelpful to have a "short summary" of a page meant to teach you things. It'd be like skipping an entire class on a book and just getting the summary from the back of it before you take the test. It doesn't help anyone, and Useful Notes pages are designed to be informative. Ergo, there's nothing informative about laconics attached to UN pages — they simply aren't compatible, even if they aren't outright harmful.

^Right, Useful Notes are meant as a teaching resource to help tropers understand or contextualize certain tropes that may be related to them. A summary seems counterproductive to that goal.

^^I'll also argue that many of our Useful Notes pages are still just shortened descriptions of different concepts and historical events. As long as UsefulNotes.American Political System is, it is by no way, shape, or form, a detailed or encompassing explanation of the US Political System and involves lots of summarizing. ^note  Take this sentence from the page: "The majority of elections for office are a competition between two major candidates, one Republican and one Democrat." As far as statements go, this is a somewhat accurate summary of modern American politics, but is a wholly imprecise statement about the US Political System. While these two parties enjoy dominance now, historically this hasn't always been the case; any of the several parties can and do field candidates, as well as independents; many elections, especially at the local level, have far more than just two candidates running, etc. Because of this tendency towards summarizing, I've at times questioned the actual usefulness of these Useful Notes, which honestly can feel like a poor man's Wikipedia with far less review/source management at times (no offense to those that have written or participated in writing them. I have, myself, written a few in the past).

And this applies to many different Useful Notes pages:

• political ones like the one linked above
• historical events summaries (UsefulNotes.The Arab Spring, Laconic.The Arab Spring)
• descriptions of places (UsefulNotes.Los Angeles, Laconic.Los Angeles)
• time period summaries (UsefulNotes.The Nineties, Laconic.The Nineties)
• philosophical concepts (UsefulNotes.Existentialism, Laconic.Existentialism)

Compare any of those pages to their counterpart on wikipedia and you'd see that they are all much briefer and less detailed. This isn't necessarily a bad thing since, again, these pages are often created to help those not in the know further understand the context of some works or tropes. That said, the majority of Useful Notes are in reality primers on topics. So to reduce them down further seems to me not that dissimilar from the recap thing: what's the point in further summarizing a summary?

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 21st 2022 at 7:48:30 AM

We aren't Wikipedia. That's... meaningless. We go by our own rules, etc.

Existentialism is also a very very long summary, more than any other example you just game. In fact, I've seen many proper Wikipedia articles where the basic opening summary is way way shorter, if you want to really go into the comparison. Meaning that the comparison doesn't work because they're different sites that have different rules. And no, a shorter summary isn't a stub there either. Stubs are outright tiny articles in every way, lacking tons of information.

Thus? I really don't see how the comparison works. Those with massive summaries like the one I just noted takes a long time to read before you get into the normal details. Now, whether a laconic really makes sense for UN is a different story too, since Warjay has a good point about how the point is that the details are too meaningful to be shortened. I can agree with that. I just don't see how these comparisons, well, work due to different standards, rules, etc.

"We aren't Wikipedia." That's kind of my point. You're claiming "UN did evolve to be more than "short summaries"." I'm disagreeing. Covering the entirety of the Arab Spring, LA, the 90s, or Existentialism would take much more than what we already have written. The articles themselves are long in comparison to trope articles, but they are still condensing, reducing, and summarizing these topics by a large amount. Bringing up Wikipedia was to show how long an article about such topics would actually get if they were more than just giving a general overview on the topics.

We aren't Wikipedia. The Useful Notes articles we have may be longer than most other article types on the site, but within the scope of all articles describing these things, they're still brief summaries on the topics, not in-depths needing their own summary on the back cover like a book.

Useful Notes still tend to be long pages (e.g. UsefulNotes.Spanish Language). Also, Laconics usually don't provide examples of something, while UN pages can (e.g. UsefulNotes.British Accents). Also, they're still harmless.