To-do list:

• Consensus was to retool The Team into an exampleless supertrope for the broad act of grouping characters together to accomplish something. Rewrite the description if necessary, and move examples that fit a subtrope (listed on The Index Team) accordingly. Cleanup is being tracked at Sandbox.The Team Wick Cleanup.

Original post:

The Team is a trope about a group of people with varying roles who are working towards a specific goal. The description of this trope has a heavy emphasis on the roles people have within teams, and it shows in the examples; most of the on-page ones are written in the supertrope-subtrope style, which is bad indenting. Many examples, both on-and-off page, often fail to explain enough about the team's composition, roles, or purpose.

If this sounds familiar, it's because Five-Man Band was sent to TRS for the exact same reasons. In fact, it's possible that some of The Team's issues are related to that thread. Officially Five-Man Band is being cleaned up by getting examples rewritten into single-bullet examples, but the wick check shows that some of them are being moved to The Team without any formatting changes.

50 wicks were checked to see if the style of formatting has any correlation with whether the example has enough context. Context in this case is an example describing the names and roles of people in a group. Note was also made of any wicks that were changed wholesale from Five-Man Band. Due to the multiple analyses performed, the wick check results are in the following folder:

Contrary to my expectations beforehand, the wick check suggests that four out of five examples written in single-bullet form lack sufficient context, as opposed to the 50/50 chance that an example in supertrope-subtrope formatting is a ZCE. While this means the supertrope-subtrope formatting isn't as bad for the trope as initially thought, it's still improper formatting. Additionally, usage of the trope is fairly evenly split between single-bullet (30%), supertrope-subtrope (32%), and inline (34%) wicks, the last of which tend to come up whenever the concept of a team someone's on is mentioned.

The biggest issue that came up is the disproportionate amount of ZCEs. Two-thirds of the solo example list wicks lacked sufficient context, whether it was because examples just had a character name and a listed role with no elaboration, never actually mentioned a team was involved, or was just "a team exists". I think there are two factors at play behind the ZCE problem:

• The description's fixation on roles in the team and the on-page examples' supertrope-subtrope formatting makes people think a subtrope and a character name are sufficient context.
• People not reading said description combined with the excessive number of potholes to any mention of "the team" results in them missing that describing what people do for the team is also important.

As a side note, 8 of the 50 wicks were originally Five-Man Band wicks that received no changes from their original form when the wick was swapped. This corroborates concerns that have been raised about wick cleaning in general not being done properly; discussion about this aspect of the wick check that's unrelated to the trope can be taken to the "On improper TRS cleanup" thread.

As for potential fixes, I think rewriting the description to focus less on specific archetypes and more on either overall team composition or the goals a team has would go a long way to encouraging single-bullet formatting and proper context, while making it more distinct from its subtropes. Rewriting the on-page examples to use single-bullet formatting would also help reduce poorly-formated examples. Alternately, in the event that we just can't make it work, we could redirect this trope about teams in general to The Index Team, an index about various types of teams.

What do you all think?

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 13th 2024 at 4:50:26 AM

Paging ~Vandagyre to the thread. Anyway, I agree with rewriting to focus less on the archetypes and more on the team composition, since that was done with Five-Man Band.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 7th 2023 at 5:05:28 AM

It doesn't focus on archetypes anyway? Not sure how to make it more about the dynamics, but the supertrope/subtrope composition needs cleaned up.

And the cycle continues...

I'm not really sure what to do here. I think any focus on "team dynamic" will either be too specific or continue to attract misuse unless we can find the sweet spot. But broadening it to just be "a team" is chairs-y.

How about merging with or redirecting to The Index Team if we can't find the right way to define it?

Edited by badtothebaritone on May 7th 2023 at 5:27:30 AM

Now that I think of it, I think I'll change my vote to redirecting to The Index Team due to the clarity issues combined with the issues with ZCEs and bad formatting (particularly because of how small the amount of examples with proper context and formatting is).

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 7th 2023 at 5:46:29 AM

i agree with redirecting to The Index Team (still hoping indices can get an icon to stop people from mistakenly linking to them as tropes to give examples of).

The importance and relevance of the team as a trope is in the specific goals the team is set up to accomplish and the roles that are required for the team to meet those goals that creators replicate again and again. including both of those things would just be a separate trope in its own right that and not including those things would get you non-tropeworthy examples like "[X] is a soccer team, swim team, etc" that aren't tropeworthy.

Edited by amathieu13 on May 7th 2023 at 7:30:47 AM

Redirect

I agree with the goal thing but the "specific roles" has to be handled with care — we know how much people like to shoehorn characters into team roles because they simply can't get it out of their heads that every group of characters has to fit under one of the ensemble tropes somehow.

I guess redirecting it works though Amathieu alluded to, people might just continue to use it anyway because indices aren't obvious. I'm not always in favor of the full burn method but if there's no way to salvage this trope as-is then I guess we have to.

for redirect

Yeah, there's a part of me that would almost rather a disambig because at least disambigs are now noticeable due to the green link color, but any disambig we have would basically just be The Index Team anyways.

Cutting would be the other option that avoids the whole "people will still use this anyways" situation", but I just don't see it being feasible with 25k inbounds. Plus, The Team does sound like it should be a redirect to The Index Team, at least to me.

I mean, I'd like if there was a less drastic method but like I said, I really don't know if there's any way to spin this trope without causing some other problems down the line. Splitting off ideas in the TLP may be all we can do.

I had considered disambiguation as well but came to the same conclusion.

On a side note, has the index icon request been fully fleshed out yet?

TBH, I'm not sure what this trope is supposed to be beyond "a bunch of characters work as a team". Wasn't this page created solely to save examples from Five-Man Band misuses where the team members don't fit the rigid archetype (which is no longer a criteria for the FMB anyway) and/or have more than five members?

Edited by Adept on May 8th 2023 at 8:17:48 PM

Redirect.

Was it? I wouldn't be shocked. Kinda makes the fact that people are now dumping FMB examples into it a little ironic and sad.

Yeah, according to this old TLP for The Team, it was specifically created to be a form of Five-Man Band that didn't have strict rules. Since FMB has been redefined to cover what The Team was originally created, it doesn't serve a purpose beyond being a bigger form of Five-Man Band.

As for the index icon thing, that's something for Query Wishlist so that should be taken there (link index colors have been shot down because there was disagreement so not sure about icons)

As for a course of action, I guess redirecting to The Index Team is the best option.

Edited by MacronNotes on May 7th 2023 at 9:45:22 AM

Yeah, according to this old TLP for The Team, it was specifically created to be a form of Five-Man Band that didn't have strict rules. Since FMB has been redefined to cover what The Team was originally created, it doesn't serve a purpose beyond being a bigger form of Five-Man Band.

OK, in that case, I stand by my vote to redirect to The Index Team. It's clear that the changes made to Five-Man Band two years ago rendered The Team unnecessary and redundant.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 8th 2023 at 1:36:10 PM

That's been done. And since this is now redundant, redirecting is absolutely the way to go.

I'd wish this was a narrative trope about contrasting teams (roles, personality, rpg classes), but we want people to stop using specific tropes for second bullets.

I'm voting to redirect to the team index, BTW.

So near as I can tell from the descriptions, what Five-Man Band has been redefined as is essentially "The Team, but with exactly five members"? But having exactly five members isn't actually a requirement to be listed as an example?

If these two pages really are now redundant, I'd rather have disambig'd Five-Man Band and merged it into The Team rather than the other way around, unless having five members actually is important to FMB. If we end up keeping FMB but not The Team, but the number of members isn't important, it seems like we're just keeping the page that's more historically important to the wiki. But that would probably mean a new usage check and reopening the FMB discussion and I don't know that anyone wants that.

The number is important bc this is how it shows up in media. Yes there are teams of four or six members but five is mostly the standard.

I prefer redirecting The Team to FMB since FMB is already what The Team is supposed to be.

Yes, having five members is still a requirement for FMB. In fact it's one of the only strict requirements that trope still has. Any example that has less or more is misuse and gets cut or moved. We kept it that way because 5 seems to be a sweet spot for team dynamics, allowing for various structures without getting too complicated.

I'd rather we not include FMB at all, personally. It's been trouble enough for us without adding a muddling redirect on top of it.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 8th 2023 at 2:02:21 PM

Merging Five-Man Band with The Team was an option when the former was brought to TRS two years ago, and it was downvoted in favor of altering the definition. When it comes to reopening discussion on Five-Man Band, we need a better reason than one person's preferred outcome for a previous thread not being the one the thread chose.

And yeah, as previously said, having five members is important. That's why it's called Five-Man Band. "Examples" that include more or less than five members were always misuse both before and after the definition was changed.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 8th 2023 at 1:18:31 PM