Eh... that's sort of impossible to calculate, though.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI actually worry we are too beholden to the raw wick count, and think that this disadvantages newer tropes — they don't grow at the same rate as the tropes of legend
. What benefit does this give besides an update for the sake of an update? (vs. cutting a whole bunch of rare-ish tropes with 30 wicks for the sake of cutting them)
Well, to copy and paste something I wrote elsewhere (originally in the meta thread on Yack Fest, so the part about taking discussion to Wiki Talk is left over from that, and I just don't currently feel like rewording it):
Basically, I feel that maybe it would be worth grouping Advertising Tropes with Forgotten Tropes as a category for which a low wick count isn't a big deal.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 28th 2023 at 9:59:54 AM
I got a rock for Halloween.And our definition of Starvation ties into the Pages Needing Wicks list, which isn't a list of tropes to cut, but ones that need scrutiny.
A higher limit means that we have reason to look at some tropes further, that may / probably warrant it, so we can have a "cleaner", better, site?
Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576I'm of the opinion that once a trope meets the minimum requirements to be a trope, we shouldn't really care too much about wick count. Advertising Tropes has been mentioned as an example of tropes that have a low wick count despite there being plenty of examples because few advertisements have a work page. This can also happen to tropes that apply to web content. There's also Forgotten Tropes where the wick count is pretty low because the trope has fallen out of fashion.
Edited by SharkToast on Mar 28th 2023 at 7:41:17 AM
Sometimes regional tropes are underrepresented not by works, but by work pages. I've seen Gaucho cited as an example of that phenomenon, with it being a common stereotype in South America, and simply not having many wicks because most users on this site come from English-speaking countries and thus haven't made too many pages for works the trope appears in (it's not starving, but it doesn't have as many wicks as tropes that commonly appear in English-language media).
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 28th 2023 at 10:06:38 AM
I got a rock for Halloween.The disadvantage that newer tropes have is definitely something to account for. Across the board they're more likely to be missing from pages they should be on simply because people aren't aware they exist, and that can seriously decrease the wick count.
Meanwhile, popular tropes are inflated by misuse and overuse. The biggest ones are the most likely to be shoehorned everywhere.
Personally, I've never really put much stock in the numbers. They don't necessarily mean a trope is healthy or tropeworthy.
Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 28th 2023 at 11:13:04 AM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallYeah. Hitting the minimum means it’s already worth documenting and everything past that is fluff. The problem with periodically raising the minimum is that it assumes all tropes grow at roughly the same rate, which is just false. We shouldn’t punish a trope for being niche if it is otherwise well-documented.
Also… TRS backlogs be backlogging
To play a bit of devil's advocate (and as Wick's namesake), the problem with tropes with few references is that once it's out of the Launch Pad, people might not be aware of it when they encounter an example of it in the wild. The more wicks you have burning, the more people are attracted to them to add their own candles, if that makes sense. In other words, the healthier a trope already is the more likely it is to become more healthy. Worst case, someone creates a duplicate trope that may or may not be caught in the Launch Pad (and even if it is that may be ignored and launched anyway).
Also, my impression is that it's rare for Not Thriving threads not to have other issues - failure to distinguish from other tropes, being poorly defined, not meeting modern-day standards for tropes, rampant ZCEs, just plain lack of tropeworthiness - that make it difficult for them to ever grow, or that make it a bad idea for them to grow. Even when we do cut a page I think the idea should be less "welp, we gave it a chance and it didn't work, guess we don't need it" and more "this isn't working, let's give it a fresh start in TLP at some point down the line".
That being said, I'm not sure I support hiking the healthiness thresholds; if we do adjust them it should be to align them with multiples of 5 so they aren't quite as tied to a specific moment in the wiki's history.
Edited by MorganWick on Mar 29th 2023 at 5:35:56 AM
I should probably clarify that I was never in favor of increasing the maximum wick count for what counts as starving, and I think that's a bad idea. (For one thing, the current threshold hasn't even been in place for that long.) I was proposing we make some categories exempt from the Not Thriving label, similarly to what we already do for Forgotten Tropes (or at least that's the de facto policy for Forgotten Tropes).
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 29th 2023 at 3:03:13 AM
I got a rock for Halloween.I agree that we do not need to raise the minimum wick count. It already enforces a quality standard and probably doesn't need to increase for a very long time, while still keeping things decently open for new tropes.
However, we could make some exceptions to the wick count thing, if we want to raise a specific, more niche category. Advertising Tropes is likely one of them.
Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)If I'm not mistaken, Piterpicher made the P-Scale by using a mathematical formula to determine the wick counts instead of deciding wick counts manually on the spot, so I feel like the wick counts being seemingly arbitrary instead of being round numbers is just nitpicking because the only way the P-Scale could have been guaranteed to be based on multiples of five while still being derived from a formula is if Piterpicher had made some manual adjustments after working with the formula.
In addition to me being against raising the threshold for what counts as starving, I'm against adjusting the threshold simply because some think the numbers aren't aesthetically pleasing, because that strikes me as even more pointless because it's less based on discussing or changing how the site works/should work and more on how numbers work in general.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 30th 2023 at 7:30:45 AM
I got a rock for Halloween.The point of having numbers based on a formula is that they then update over time. If the formula isn't being used for regular updates (and it seems the feeling is that this would unnecessarily penalise both newer tropes and less popular ones that don't create new examples so often), then might as well round out the edges.
Round them out in which direction? I would think lowering the numbers would make more sense if people think raising the minimum amount needed to be considered healthy is a bad idea (which is what I personally think, and seems to be an opinion shared by others in this thread).
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 30th 2023 at 3:18:46 AM
I got a rock for Halloween.

The ranges listed on Wick were established via percentage
of Article Count, and now we have 50% more articles than before.
Should we update the ranges to account for the growth? Or something else?
Some people were concerned about Advertising Tropes due to the low number of such works we have information on, and to handle that, I propose that such medium-specific tropes use the number of the articles of that medium for calculation, instead of the total article count.
Edited by Malady on Mar 28th 2023 at 5:28:56 AM
Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576