How to Fix A Trope

So, you've discovered a trope that has the worst name on the wiki. Or maybe it's a pale copy of another trope and needs to be merged. Or it could be two tropes cleverly masquerading as one, and it needs to be split in twain. Or the description and examples have developed all the symptoms of schizophrenia over the long years of hundreds of editors leaving their fingerprints on it.

Whatever the case, you've come to the right place to do it. Now here's what you need to do to get started:

Create a forum thread in the Trope Repair forum

• Be sure to fill in the name—in CamelCase—in the appropriate field and include the action you're proposing in the thread title. For example, if you want to rename This Troper, the thread title should be "Rename" and the text in page name field should be "ThisTroper".
• Give your reasons you think the action should happen in your first post, as reasonably as possible.
  • If applicable, include data. If you're making a case that the trope is being frequently misused, do a survey of all or a sampling of places where it is wicked and/or examples on the page and show what percent are misused. Be sure to survey at least 50 wicks to get a good sample size if it is unreasonable to check every wick.
• If you're proposing actions, include how you think that these actions will improve the current page and/or wiki as a whole. This applies to anyone involved on any side of the discussion.
• If you're suggesting a rename, do some initial brainstorming on possible new names or say you don't know what the new name should be.
• Keeping an updated, neutral summary of the debate in the first post for the benefit of those just joining the debate is recommended but not required.

Create an appropriate Crowner or ask a mod to make and hook it, if it's needed.

• Not all Trope Repair questions require a Single Proposition Crowner.
• For Page Action, Alternative Names, and Image Pickin Crowners, it's best to wait until there are several options, to give all of them an equal chance.
• Putting a summary of the pros and cons from the debate for each option in the crowner is strongly encouraged when applicable.
• Crowners should run until they stabilize. There is no set minimum number of days that a crowner must be open or maximum number of days that it can be open. Once the voting has stabilized (this may mean that no new votes are coming in, or that one option has an insurmountable lead), give it another couple of days to be sure. Last minute objections may come in.
• Note that a majority is not always a consensus. Consensus is required for a significant change to a trope. It's not simply "how many" votes; it's "what proportion" of the votes cast that matters. 5 votes out of 6 indicates a consensus. 49 votes out of 95 does not, even though it's a majority. In general, Renames should have at least 65 to 70% of the votes in favor to go through.

Single Proposition Crowners:

• Single Proposition crowners are just that: one single question that can be responded to with a Yes (Up)/No(Down) vote, such as "Rename This Trope?" "Split This Trope?" or "Merge This Trope and That Trope?".
  • The Single Proposition Crowner template can be reached from here
  • Link to the crowner and ask a mod to hook the crowner to the discussion. Doing this puts the crowner at the bottom of every page of the thread.
  • Put a summary of the debate, ideally in the form of pros and cons, on the single proposition. Trying to tip the crowner the way you want it to go by leaving off or misrepresenting the reasons the other side presents is frowned on.

Page Action Crowners:

• Page Action Crowners are used when there is more than one option being considered, for example
  1. Split This Trope into Trope A and Trope B
  2. Cut This Trope
  3. Leave This Trope alone, it's fine.
  4. Redefine This Trope to make it narrower in scope.

Alternative Titles Crowners:

• Alternative Names Crowners are used to choose a new name for a trope that is being renamed, or to pick the name for one part of a trope that is being split.
  • Please note: "Keep the old name" or any variant is not to be put on an Alternative Names Crowner. The Alternative Names Crowner is to gauge the support alternative names have, not to lobby to keep the old one.

Image Pickin Crowner:

• Image Pickin Crowners Image Pickin crowners are used to choose a new page image for a wiki page.
• Link to each image that has been proposed with a source or brief description; do not put the image itself in the crowner.

Check the wicks and fix any that are wrong.

• This is especially critical in the case of a split or when the old name was provably leading to misuse. It is also critical any time a significant amount of the wicks would be wrong in some way.

If you renamed, merged, or split the page, rename, merge, or split all the associated pages, such as character sheets, wild mass guessing, it just bugs me, and discussion pages.

Discussion pages can be moved or merged by a moderator. Before cutlisting the old page, flag it to have its discussion moved. After the discussion is attached to the new page, cutlist the old page like normal.

In cases of mergers and splits, discussion pages cannot be redirected or moved directly; copy and paste them to the new name. Make sure you get the "archived discussion" and the YKTTW link if they exist.

Put a note describing the change on the Renamed Tropes page.

Let a mod know that the change is completed so that the crowners and forum thread can be locked.

General Tips And Rules

• Be civil. It's a just a trope, if things aren't going your way or people don't see your POV, it's not the end of the world. This goes for everyone. Not only does this make the wiki a more pleasant place, but being a jackass significantly lowers the odds of things going your way.
• Don't make a YKTTW about it, that space is for the discussion of new tropes.
• If your thread or proposed action does not garner many replies, suggestions, or a clear consensus, take a step back, a deep breath and... do nothing. (For now, at least) Better to err on the side of caution and re-create the thread in a few months (or bump the original) and get a solid consensus before doing any potentially controversial changes. Edit Wars have started over less.

Please feel free to suggest changes to this, this is based both on existing "policy" and things I think will make things easier. So there's probably room for improvement.

Making Crowners

Single Proposition Crowner: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/SingleProposition/[Insert Title Here]

Alternative Titles Crowner: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/AlternativeTitles/[Insert Title Here]

Page Action Crowner https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/PageAction/[Insert Title Here]

Image Pickin Crowner https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/ImagePickin/[Insert Title Here]

Renaming a Trope

• Open Old Trope Name page. Open "View Source"; copy the whole thing.
• In a second window or tab, go to https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewTropeName after replacing "New Trope Name" with the new name.
• Like the page says, click "Edit Page". Paste in all the text from the Old Trope Name editor screen. Update page text as needed to reflect new name. Save!
• Go back to the first window and go to the "Discussion" page. You'll need to copy each entry separately, or grab the page source and clean out all the extra coding. On the "Archived Discussion" pages, you can grab the whole block in one piece. Make sure you get the link to the YKTTW if it's there. Go back to the New Trope Name page and click on "discuss". Paste in the discussion from the old page. Save!
• Go back to the Old Trope Name page and do the same thing for any associated pages: copy the contents, take them to the proper associated page for New Trope Name, paste, and save. Copying the source code means you don't have to manually enter the mark-up to preserve links and wicks.
• Go back to Old Trope Name and replace all the text with the single line of mark-up [[redirect:NewTropeName]] (again, replace "New Trope Name" with the new trope name). Save!
• Add entries for the name change at both the forum topic and the Renamed Tropes page.
• Clean up or correct any bad wicks, especially if the old name was being badly misused.

Other Useful Tools

• "Related to" tool https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/relatedsearch.php?term=Main/[Insert Title Here] - Use this to find all wicks to the trope page and check for misuse.

edited 9th Dec '16 11:39:10 AM by SeptimusHeap

Guidelines updated: moderators can now move (though not copy or merge) discussion pages. New text is bolded in the section on moving subpages.

Can I make a suggestion here? I hope so.

If you're proposing new names or redirects, please Wiki Word them. It's much easier to build a crowner when all the suggestions are Red Link than having to go through and read each entry.

Just for the sake of clarification:

What are those little clock icons that sometimes appear on Repair Shop threads with a date attached?

What is their presence supposed to mean?

It means that the thread stalled and it will be locked with no further action if the time on the clock passes without the thread showing some sort of progress.

You may want to point "Renaming a trope" at How To Move A Page, or the thread version.

You could consider including a couple of basic definitions for newbies? For example, I don't know what a crowner is. From context I'm guessing it's another word for poll, but I don't know if it has some special properties that require a different name. I also don't know how I would go about "cleaning up or correcting the wiks".

(I appreciate these things may be answered elsewhere and I just haven't stumbled across them yet, and you may not wish to go into those side issues on here; just a thought that it might be helpful to fellow newbies who don't want to accidentally make a mess!)

edited 19th Oct '11 3:24:06 AM by Atalan

It's called a crowner for legacy reasons. Essentially, Eddie has better things to do than go in and change the name, so we're likely to have "crowner" as the name for our polls for quite a while.

Suggest linking How To Move A Page somewhere if we've got a newbie who wants to help.

Should this be moved back to TRS?

EDIT: Nevermind. Forgot it was more general.

edited 15th Feb '12 2:24:28 PM by DragonQuestZ

What if you find a page that has been mysteriously "cleared"? I went to the page for Fanfic Agony in Pink and it was totally blank? Is my comp messing up or did the page get deleted?

It was deleted under the new policy change.

Is it possible to list reasons to make a TRS thread? Or would that need its own one?

No, I am not just talking about renames, so When To Rename A Trope doesn't fit