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

Bringing this in from the ATT: We discussed this a few days ago in our offsite mod chat, and generally agreed that it might be possible to bring back Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption given the nature of those two shows, with example cleanup as needed.

Long Runner and Theme Tune are not narrative tropes and thus cannot qualify a work for tropability.

Around the Horn, Pardon the Interruption, Sportscenter, Inside the NBA, etc., are all about the framing and conveying of a narrative of sports news to viewers, no different from other talk shows or news shows with host personalities that have been deemed acceptable. Sports talk shows are not the sports themselves, any more than Top Gear is a car.

Edited by wanderlustwarrior on Feb 12th 2024 at 3:08:07 AM

Which goes back to previous points. We cannot trope the sport they cover. We cannot trope the presenters as fictional characters unless they're playing a part.

Around the Horn has panel game elements. That's tropeable. Match Of The Day, not so much.

We can trope:

And commentary on sport itself is not "commentary on other works".

It'd be easier to argue if someone who knows these shows makes a sandbox with tropes that would be allowed.

Yeah, part of the issue is that many of these pages attract bad examples for real-life situations.

How is it not?

Because the sports games themselves don't qualify as works?

Yeah, it's not so much that they can't be troped properly as that people seem unable to draw appropriate distinctions between tropes about the presentation and production, vs. tropes about the things being discussed.

Sporting events are "things that happen in real life". They are not narrative works any more than wars, car crashes, shootings, elections, marriages, cooking, or any other real-life thing. Real life does not have tropes. Period.

Thus, any media that discusses them is considered "documentary" and has specific rules for how tropes may be used.

Edit: Addressing the OP, if someone wants to start a Sports Tropes wiki, they are welcome to do so as long as they don't copy any of our content.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 12th 2024 at 5:13:30 AM

Yeah I think someone creating a sandbox for us to engage with what the pages actually look like would help. I hear we used to have sports pages, maybe someone could pull from an archive somewhere?

As far as real life not having tropes, I do think there's a lot of grey area, and sports is one of them. Sports essentially exist as collaborativly generated narratives for public broadcast, I think writing it off as a black and white issue is a bit reductive. If sports didn't have narrative, people wouldn't be tuning in. You could argue there's elements of that in a lot of real life stuff, but it's particularly prominent in sports in a way I don't think it's fundamentally different from, say, improv.

Still, that doesn't mean hosting them is a good or tenable idea.

Edited by IronAnimation on Feb 12th 2024 at 4:25:28 AM

No. You are fundamentally misunderstanding the point. The players of a sport are not "creating a narrative". They are playing a sport. This is not something we will debate or negotiate over.

Narrative is something human beings add to events after the fact.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 12th 2024 at 10:07:30 AM

Alright, I'm tapping out.

So are we just spiking all non-fictional content? If not, what makes documentaries or news programs different from a live sports telecast, for the purpose of troping?

As already explained, it's not a black and white situation. If a work has intentional creative writing elements, it's tropable. If a page can't get sufficient amount of valid tropes, it gets deleted. Non-Fiction normally contains zero fictional elements, but if someone shows a specific documentary/broadcast has enough non-real material, the page can be kept.

I think we should use Useful Notes.

For sports? We already do, indexed Sports.

But it's in the Main/ namespace. Can we change that to Useful Notes/ then?

It's in Main/ because it's an index.

(the page's pagetype needs a talk elsewhere)

Edited by Amonimus on Feb 15th 2024 at 10:17:46 PM

I think documentaries in general can largely be kept, since no matter how accurate to the events there's always artistic license through choices made with editing, footage, music and so on. Films and shows under Speculative Documentary are also a no-brainer to keep, given the inherently speculative nature of the genre.

Yes, we've established that documentary works can have their own tropes distinct from the real events they are discussing or portraying. However, if it is not clear that such a work is applying its own narrative slant to people and events, they should not be troped.

As a hypothetical example, let's say that "Sports Talk Show" describes an American football player as being extremely heavy and commanding the field. That is not license to use the Large and in Charge trope.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 16th 2024 at 9:57:33 AM

I still don't get how Monday Night Football and SportsCenter can be cut while Hockey Night in Canada and Wide World of Sports are left up. It all seems very capricious, IMO.

Edited by noncanadianguy on Mar 5th 2024 at 9:33:30 AM

Nobody's submitted Hockey Night In Canada to the cut list yet, but it was discussed on the previous page and looks like we might not keep it.

Ditto for Wide World Of Sports.

EDIT: Ignore.

Edited by Mrph1 on Mar 7th 2024 at 6:48:44 PM