Ask The Tropers

I haven't seen any pages which had that chronological trope ordering, and frankly I don't think that's allowed.

A chronological look at the evolution of a trope is more suited for the Analysis tab. Trope lists should definitely stay as alphabetical, it's far easier and convenient for adding examples than a needless revamp.

^ Agreed. I know from experience that listing literary works by publication date can require more research than simply going in alphabetical order.

"the history and formation of the trope" is not what trope pages are for. Analysis/ maybe.

I started thinking about this after trying to piece together the history of Courtly Love.

The Trope Namer for Courtly Love is the paper "Études sur les romans de la table ronde: Lancelot du Lac" by Gaston Paris, a 1883 treaties on the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere in Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. That's the Trope Codifier—or at least the Trope Namer thought it was. Most of what we now associate with Courtly Love can be seen there: Lady and Knight; a married woman and an unmarried man; she's his social superior; his exaltation and idealization of her; pining; a quest fueled by his desire to serve her.

The trope page for Courtly Love lists, as the defining feature of the trope, this chaste, unconsummated thing. That's not part of Paris's original definition; Lancelot and Guinevere do have sex in The Knight of the Cart. Even today, some other write-ups on Courtly Love (such as The Other Wiki and academic papers on JSTOR) don't consider that a key feature.

That unconsummated thing seems to trace back to Petrarch's Laura sonnets, which are a second Trope Codifier.

That's interesting, but it's also the sort of thing that would go best on an analysis page.

Listing trope examples chronologically would make perfect sense. The main problem with chronological sorting is that it is infinitely more work to research the year of publication for every example than to simply sort alphabetically by work title. Hence chronological sorting is impractical.

If our definition of Courtly Love is too narrowly focused on unconsummated love, then the description should be amended to make clear non-consummation is not a requirement.

Changing a fundamental part of the trope definition would have to be done through TRS, and only when there's a definite problem (proved via wick check).

At any rate, every other trope has examples listed alphabetically, carving out exceptions based on idiosyncratic reasoning is just needlessly complicating things for no real gain.

Yeah, nothing that big on this website can be done "without making it a big thing," it's already a big thing. Who gets to determine for which tropes "it makes sense," for starters?

Or look at it from the point of view of the reader. Does it give you any insight to know that this trope that occurred in an otherwise forgettable movie from 1972 also occurred in another forgettable movie from 1974?

If you put it in Analysis/ or wherever, it should probably focus on a few key examples, like the originator, the codifier, and the introducer to a particular medium. Beyond that, it doesn't really help to know if this one example occurred slightly later or slightly earlier than another, in my opinion...

For the longest time of this wiki's existence, examples within media folders weren't sorted at all. The prescribed procedure was "add new examples at the bottom" and that was it.

Eventually some tropers started sorting examples alphabetically, and over time it became a convention. Pages that were created earlier and have never been sorted remain unsorted, though. Hence it's not fact that "every other trope has examples listed alphabetically". There is, up to today, no strict rule to sort example lists alphabetically. The relevant section on How to Write an Example only requests editors to follow the sorting pattern that is already used on the page:

The Analysis/ namespace does not list trope examples, so there is no sorting in Analysis/.

Are you trying to say that it's okay to rearrange examples into new categories? Because how things were done in the long long ago really doesn't have much bearing on how things are done now.

I'm pretty sure they're pointing out that "every other trope has examples listed alphabetically" is false. There are several pages which don't even sort by media category first. A new trope draft in TLP may be inclined to use different sorting systems, such as In-Universe vs Out-of-Universe to start with.

(On a personal level, I feel dizzy, as when I was new to this site and saw people referring to "chronological sorting", I thought this query is what they meant, and I've been here so long that when I saw this query, I thought it was advocating to go back to "add the newest example at the bottom of the category". *shudder* Pages with that sorting are still the norm, rather than the exception.)

The reason I posted here is that I don't like it when a query that challenges an existing custom of the wiki is only replied to with "that's not how we do it, therefore you cannot do it another way". That's not a true answer to the question. OP obviously knew that we don't sort chronologically; hence why they filed this query in the first place.

"We sort alphabetically" or "we don't sort chronologically" are observations, they're not explanations. The reason we sort alphabetically rather than chronologically (if we sort) is that the former is easy to maintain, and the second is impossible to maintain. There's really nothing else that makes alphabetical sorting a superior sorting principle.

Per How to Create a Work Page, "trope examples should be in a bulleted list, alphabetically". Per How to Alphabetize Things, "works pages and most indexes are supposed to contain lists of tropes or work titles in alphabetical order".

^ OP's query was explicitly about how to sort examples on trope pages.

TLP Guidelines asks to put examples for new tropes in alphabetical order as well. We also have a mod-currated project to keep everything alphabetical.

Since I was told there's apparently nothing official yet, dismiss my two posts.

Every custom and convention that exists on the wiki was at some time decided upon, explicitly or implicitly, whether by tropers, mods, or admins. Unlike natural laws, they exist for reasons and can, in principle, be changed, revised, modified, or fine-tuned.

So when a troper makes a suggestion to revise an existing custom and also says why they would like to revise it, what they are asking you is to consider the potential benefits (or drawbacks) of that revision. "It's not how it's currently done" is not doing that. Administrivia pages get modified frequently, and, as you can see, they are not a hundred percent consistent either.

OP's query showed they engage with the wiki critically. That is a good thing. Tropers shouldn't be made to feel bad about thinking about changing stuff.

Perhaps this is better suited to a Wiki Talk thread, we should lock this up since nobody is making any headway here.

Yeah, before we make any claims about changing/updating policy one way or another a wiki talk thread would be useful. This conversation has run its course and it starting to get unnecessarily heated.

Agree this part needs a separate conversation.