Scope of laconics

I wouldn't say laconics are "harmless", at best that's true, but at worst they can actually be quite damaging. That's mostly for tropes, but it's probably easy for a UN laconic to stir up trouble by, say, focusing more on humor than on actually trying to summarize anything. Or, that summary could miss vital info and be biased. Or it could just provide so little useful information at all that it essentially just defines the words in the title with no extra impact.

Laconics are already on pretty shaky ground due to their many, many problems. I just don't see what purpose they serve for anything other than tropes, but at least with work pages you're not trying to summarize a real life thing or event on a page meant to teach you about such real-life thing or event... No matter how long the page may be.

Then those will just need to be tweaked then.

...And what purpose does their existence serve? How exactly do they help anyone?

They help summarize topics, helping people (like myself) get the gist of things.

I'm asking about laconics for UN pages specifically. What purpose do they serve in summarizing a page that you're supposed to read in full due to them being informational pages? (Again, my analogy being reading the backside blurb of a book the day before you're taking a test on it while skipping the class that actually goes over the contents of the book)

I know you're just discussing Useful Notes' pages Laconics, which I already answered. I also don't believe your analogy works; blurbs are for promotional purposes when Laconics aren't. I also feel not studying for a test is more urgent than just not reading one page on website which is less formal than something like Wikipedia.

That is one of the problems with laconics in general that I've seen both in the is this an example thread and in ATT. The reason trope descriptions (and Useful Notes pages for that matter) have multiple paragraphs is to capture the wide nuance that is almost always present.

Instead, people look the laconics and rely on them to describe something. Even if the laconics aren't flat out wrong (a big if), using the one or two sentence description instead of actually reading the descriptions (maybe four or five paragraphs, not like it's War and Peace) leads to bad examples that someone will have to go clean up.

I can't think of a good potential laconic for a UN page that doesn't either just the title or is just "The X of Y."

The ones Karxrida pointed out (Laconic.Nintendo Entertainment System and Laconic.The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983) looked fine to me.

Hm, thinking about it, while a lot of UN pages would not benefit from a laconic, there might be call to have laconics for some.

Changing our stance to "no by default, but allow exceptions on a case-by-case basis" on UN. ... though that also sounds like a pain to implement so it's kinda a tentative stance for that reason.

Affirmation of:

Tropes and works. They're ultimately harmless, and I certainly favor the creative referrals to the main page as they relate to the work/trope.

Administrivia, Recaps. My understanding of the latter is that for subpages, only YMMV and Trivia are permitted. The former is a no-brainer.

Case-by-case basis Useful Notes. I'm fine if it's a platform or something that otherwise is directly related to works. Anything pertaining to countries, politics etc I really don't consider comfortable.

That's my stance as well, basically.

Note I'm too tired to really reply to the wikipedia stuff from last page, so apologies.

eh... it's always felt odd to me that information about specific companies and consoles is slotted into UN. I guess there's nowhere else for it to go, but UN is meant to be about "information that helps writers write things correctly", and I don't think a page on the history of Nintendo really qualifies as that.

They're connected with media, but it just feels like there should be a better place to put them, which would also resolve this whole "only use laconics for some of them" issue we have. It's just too bad that we don't currently have a namespace that functions as a "media history" section; it's all lumped in with UN even if it really probably shouldn't be.

Again, going to challenge the "laconics are ultimately harmless" argument, especially as they pertain to Useful Notes. Recall that we we're brought here because of Laconic.Australian Politics, which to me reads as unnecessarily glib and potentially insulting.

And many of the harmless ones are simply redundant; they reiterate what the title already summarizes. UsefulNotes.American Political System? A page to describe the American Political system. I think we should limit as much redundnacy on the site as possible so those are easy cuts for me.

• Tropes
• Works
• Creators (this only affects the Creator namespace)
• Media pages for public personas (such as a singer or a wrestler's gimmick)
• Useful Notes
• Administrivia
• Recaps

If people want to keep laconics for some but not all Useful Notes, they can just vote down. Or would it be better to have two separate options for Useful Notes, one for an absolute ban/allow and one for a partial ban?

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 21st 2022 at 11:48:57 AM

In general, they're harmless, politic-related Laconics are the exception rather than the rule. EDIT: And if they're harmful like that, use "Report Page" like any other page regardless of namespace.

Edited by RandomTroper123 on Dec 22nd 2022 at 2:52:29 AM

I mean, we have been saying that laconics are not good for political stuff, but they aren't an issue for other kinds of Useful Notes. They are harmless on other kinds of UN, but have been harmful for political stuff.

I'm not sure why we need to do an "all or nothing" as the only option with UN, as that seems silly.

I'd support all or nothing for the reasons I've already argued, but I'm also the type of person who thinks laconics should only be for tropes and that everything else is pointless, so... take it with a grain of salt, I suppose. I certainly won't be mad if some UN pages keep their laconics, even if I'm still unconvinced that those specific pages even belong in UN.

Point being though, it's not really a "we". There's still very much an argument to be had on both sides.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 21st 2022 at 12:27:03 PM

Agreeing to disagree on the harmlessness. I've already stated my opposition to laconics writ large as why.

Technically all of the options are all or nothing by default given the wording of the crowner. The suggestion to split the Useful Notes option in two would be to allow us to have an option for a partial vote within the same crowner.

If not that, then if the Useful Notes option in particular gets more down votes than up votes, I guess it would be possible for us to just run a second crowner for it, this time focusing on a conditional ban determined on a case by case basis

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 21st 2022 at 12:34:28 PM

Then Administrivia pages need to reenforce the idea better that the reading the main page is also a good idea.

I would be against the idea of splitting the UN pages into those that allow laconics and those that don't. It's just needlessly adding complexity as we decide which topics are game and which aren't, then the decision over which UN pages fit into which categories.

Video game console pages also double as indices for their libraries, so a move to VideoGame/ might be warranted.

But off-topic tbh. Like I said, the usefulness of Laconics for UN is so marginal that I don't think keeping them around is necessary if they're causing harm.

Edited by Karxrida on Dec 21st 2022 at 10:34:34 AM

Do you have any proof that they're causing harm?

x4 What do you mean by this? Administrivia pages need to tell people that they should read main pages more???

I don't think that's necessary or rather, that's the entire point of putting them in the "Main" namespace. The namespace is telling you that this page should be the primary source of informaiton regarding a trope.

Even for those not in the main namespace, I don't think it makes sense / is extradorindarily redundant to tell people "the primary page should be the primary source of information". If you wanted to know more about the French Revolution, and we have a page that describes that entire event vs a page to summarize, do we really have to tell people to rely more on the more detailed version than the 1 sentence summary?

and if we do feel the need because a given laconic overly summarizes to the point of misleading/obscuring, I feel like that's a point against having the laconic, more than anything else.

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 21st 2022 at 2:34:37 PM

I was not discussing Laconics for Useful Notes pages and instead I was discussing Laconics for trope pages, if that's what you're getting at; the post I was responding to was more so about the latter.

Aside adding a line to Square Peg, Round Trope about laconics to not be used to determine if an example fits the trope, we can't reasonably make an Administrivia rule asking tropers to read, which is a problem in the forums, the queries, EB, notifiers, etc.