Systematic Removal of Redlinks

On the Transformation Comic page, someone's going around systematically changing all the redlinked works that don't have pages to non-links. (See 7th Oct changes here.

This is a Bad Thing, right? My understanding is that we actually, as a matter of policy, encourage this type of red link as a prompt to people saying, effectively, "This work doesn't have a page - maybe you could create one for it?"

Just want to make sure I didn't miss a memo or something before I go trying to undo this sort of thing.

edited 8th Oct '10 3:46:09 AM by suedenim

That was how I understood it, certainly.

^

Not everyone holds to that, but I certainly do. Undo it.

Hmm, OK....

This same anonymous person started doing something else weird on the same page, which I don't even understand the technicalities of.

Not sabotage apparently, just some anonymous editor applying their own highly idiosyncratic standards, not shared by anyone else on TV Tropes that I can tell, to the page.

Um... Help?

I cleaned it up as best I could, and banned the offending IP until he gets known and talks to us.

Thanks!

I would like it if we could come up with some guidelines on how redlinks should be treated, since this question has come up several times before.

If it's obviously a typo, change it. That's one.

The troper in question PM'ed me. He was trying to fix an indexing issue where the first bluelink on the line would be included in the index, even if the first link is a redlink. That was supposed to have been fixed ages ago.

non links get the "This page hasn't been created yet" point across just as well and have the added bonus of allowing users to know when said page has been made if they're looking at the history.

I disagree with that. A non-link doesn't tell me whether the page exists or not. It just tells me that whoever added that line didn't link it —they may not have known how, they may not have bothered, they may not have known whether there was a page or not, there may be no page. A redlink says "This page doesn't exist."

I personally think that we are making two mistakes in handling works pages: by killing redlinks we're removing the most reliable way of letting it be known "this page needs to be made", and by cutting works stubs we're preventing wiki magic. Wiki magic is all about the cumulative knowledge of a number of people. By cutting stubs, we're saying "you must have a great deal of information before you are even allowed to start."

Also, if there are already redlinks we don't have to go around linking each example in the event that a page is finally made. This is particularly important for works with common one-word titles, since their examples cannot easily be found with the search function.

If a work ought to have a page but doesn't, it should be listed on List Of Shows That Need Summary and trope pages should use red links to refer to it. That way, when someone creates a page for the work, they can use the "related to" feature to help build a list of tropes it uses.

The real problem with redlinks comes when there are redlinks of multiple plausible forms for the page name (either because of namespaces or because the work itself has multiple names), the eventual page creator doesn't think to redirect from them all, and you get duplicate versions of a page that need merging.

This is a lot rarer than redlinks working properly, so maybe it's an acceptable price to pay; on the other hand, it takes actual thought to clean up, whereas changing unlinked names into linked ones is pretty much a purely mechanical process.

The other problem is that red links are created much more often than works articles. When a work is not prominent I would expect that leaving it unlinked is more appropriate.

edited 14th Oct '10 4:51:14 AM by Camacan

Actually, the biggest problem I've seen is people assuming that something is obscure so they don't bother to try to link it at all. This leaves us with lots of pages that could be linked, but aren't. This is a far bigger problem than a few spare red links for which the only issue is asthetics.

Also, don't assume something's so obscure that nobody will ever write it up. I'm planning to write up Jill Trent, Science Sleuth, a minor backup comic book feature from the '40s that's about as obscure as it gets... simply because I can - and if I can, I figure I might as well do....

^^^ When someone finally does make an article for the work, though, if the page is redlinked they will automatically have wicks for it on the Related To page. If it is unlinked, they may never find what trope pages it's listed on, especially if the title is short.

^^^ I do quite a bit of editing and I find that happens in practice a lot less than I expected. I do find show titles which could be linked but aren't. But I find them much less often than redlinks where the chance of them going blue is probably too low. I think on balance the idea that redlinks are always useful is probably not correct on this basis.

I not sure that people really do look at redlinks and decide to write articles: writing a proper article is a big job, not a spur of the moment kind of thing. Finding out if someone has started a page on the topic or done the whole job is a fairly small part of the whole business. You can use search for that.

Perhaps this take from The Other Wiki has the balance about right?

edited 14th Oct '10 5:31:11 AM by Camacan

^ Writing an article for a redlinked work title may not be "spur of the moment" (or at least not if you don't want some shit-tacular mess of suckiness), but they do still let people who are interested in filling those particular holes that there is a hole to fill. Not to self-promote or anything like that, but several ptitle redirects and a couple of works pages exist because I did see them redlinked, and went about fixing that oversight.

And as was noted above, redlinks are hardly going to RUIN TVTROPES FOREVER.

I also make it a point to add red links to the List Of Shows That Need Summary, where several tropers have then written pages for them. If I hadn't seen the red link, I would have not known to add many of such pages.