Should sports be a separate area on this wiki? Or a separate wiki of its own?

What prompted me to ask this: I noticed that pages for Monday Night Football SportsCenter were deleted because they were nonfictional.

Which brings up another question: should there be any real-life sports on this wiki at all? (Pro wrestling doesn't count because of its scripted nature, and can stay as is.) Or if so, should it be moved into a separate "Sports" namespace, possibly with separate rules from non-sports areas?

Highly Questionable, Jim Rome is Burning, Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn, and SportsNation are also among the series that were cut for being nonfictional. They were all listed on an index titled ESPN Series. I was the one that cutlisted them all, including the index.

Edited by JHD0919 on Jan 29th 2024 at 10:03:48 AM

Bumping for feedback

We do trope Non-Fiction, as long as it has tropes. If sports have tropes, we can have pages for them.

I assume OP is asking for a new Namespace, because suggesting a separate wiki because the suggestion doesn't fit with the current one would be very disrespectful.

I'm gonna be blunt: we should NOT be troping Non-Fiction.

Feel free to make a designated discussion about that.

Thing is, it's already been decided elsewhere that sports are generally not tropeworthy, wrestling aside.

You can make an argument that game mechanics and rules tropes apply to sports, e.g. Obvious Rule Patches like basketball's shot clock. But overall they're very much Useful Notes fodder, not "works".

My point was that they are similar to Tabletop Games like Checkers, but with Useful Notes ex. American Football, I don't have an issue them remaining that way.

Edited by Amonimus on Feb 2nd 2024 at 10:22:54 PM

Useful Notes are different. I think we're talking more about trope page examples and stuff, not simply telling people about the sport. UN pages aren't tropes to begin with.

I know and which is what I've said I'm fine them as UN with no tropes. But I'm also not against giving a sport a work page if it do meet the standards of a work page, due to being "a game but on grass".

It really is more about examples like "the Superbowl in the year 1981 contained these tropes", i.e, troping player actions as if they're narrative events.

I think it's fine to trope the game mechanics of sports, similar to the way we'd trope something like Chess or Checkers. For example, baseball has a Tiebreaker Round (extra innings), an Obvious Rule Patch (the infield fly rule), and leans heavily on the Rule of Three in its rules (three strikes, three outs, etc). However, I agree that people playing real baseball games isn't tropeworthy, much the same that someone playing Mario games on a Twitch stream isn't tropeworthy.

That, no. We don't trope specific player actions in other games, so we shouldn't trope specific matches.

Edited by Amonimus on Feb 2nd 2024 at 10:47:18 PM

Sports teams also utilize tropes in design (many mascots rely on stereotypes), and choreography can tell narratives.

I am, in theory, not opposed to a Sport/ namespace, but given the wiki’s poor history of troping sporting game outcomes like they’re intentional narratives, I am fairly satisfied with the current status quo of legitimate examples being scuttled across useful notes pages and real life sections.

We already trope video games and tabletop games that have no narrative elements. If Pong has gameplay tropes, I don't see why Tennis couldn't. Troping the rules and mechanics is fine.

We should however avoid troping real people and events. IE: applying character tropes to people or plot tropes to real events.

That's a no. But you could trope the half-game show the same way one might trope a concert.

Edited by Ghilz on Feb 3rd 2024 at 10:44:55 AM

The reason that professional sports were relegated to Useful Notes was that people insisted on troping them as if they had narratives. No amount of cleanup was able to fix the problem.

Yes, there is some creative intent around the marketing and presentation of many sports, but that's not enough to qualify for tropability. They are real people doing real things in real time. It's no different from any other real-life event: any examples are almost entirely audience reactions and we cannot trope real people as characters in a fictional work.

We don't trope politicians, we don't trope historical events, and we don't trope sports. Period. That is not negotiable.

Note that things like Professional Wrestling, while involving athleticism to some extent, are in fact scripted and thus count as narrative media. The wrestler personas are fictional characters.

Game Shows and Reality Shows occupy a sort of middle ground where the people involved and the things happening are real, but there is some amount of narrative involved in the presentation and framing. Contestants on these shows should not be troped as fictional characters.

Fictional or fictionalized media focused on sports are obviously fully tropable. Sports marketing and related media may be tropable in the Advertising category.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 3rd 2024 at 2:11:24 PM

I think that can be copied here with corresponding note at Notability, Verifiability, Tropability.

Do Board Games have a narrative?

The act of playing a game, be it tabletop, board, video, or otherwise, can have a narrative that we trope as a Let's Play, Actual Play, or Roleplay, and we've established the guidelines for this already. There must be sufficient creative content that is distinct from the game itself and from its players.

The game itself may or may not. Checkers or chess may have interesting historical context (and thus go in Useful Notes) but there is no "story" told within the rules. Other games do have built-in narrative and characterization, and those are fine to trope.

As with all such products, the marketing may be tropable under Advertising.

Edit: There is no new policy statement needed here. Our stance on sports has been documented for years.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 3rd 2024 at 2:26:24 PM

I'm not referring to acts of playing or marketing. TabletopGame.Checkers for example has no narrative, but it does have tropes for gameplay. Is it fine?

"Our stance on sports has been documented for years."

Can you cite it for reference? If it's documented I'd have liked to it when the topic started.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Chess and Checkers do have TTG articles. I guess those are fine, although the one for checkers is so bare bones as to almost be a stub, and I find some of the trope examples to be questionable at best. No Plot? No Problem! is dubious, as are But Thou Must!, Large and in Charge, etc.

These are perfect examples of tropers seeking out spurious meaning in order to be seen doing something: i.e., filling out an examples list.

Edit: The general guidelines are at What Goes Where on the Wiki. I would have to search around to find where we decided to eliminate all trope examples for professional sports.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 3rd 2024 at 2:37:29 PM

If we're cutting sports programs from the wiki, Hockey Night in Canada probably needs to go in the bin as well for consistency's sake.

Looking at Hockey Night In Canada:

• Some examples are troping sports results
• Many examples are troping the presenters as if they were characters

So I'm not convinced we have much we can keep. Long Runner and Theme Tune, yes, but that applied to things like The Shipping Forecast too, and we didn't deem it sufficient to keep the page.

It would need a 3rd

Even if we technically lift it out of stub territory, if all we're talking about is the credits, how long it's been running etc... I don't personally think that follows the spirit of the guidelines.