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Moved it to Self-Demonstrating and locked the Main article.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Yet another argument for the abolishment of self demonstrating articles for characters.
Let's see, it's not particularly well written, there's nothing there that couldn't be done on a character sheet, and there is no redeeming value in having yet another character page written that way.
This whole self demonstrating fad has gotten old, the novelty has worn off and they aren't fun anymore, just an excuse for fanboys to make new ones to join the "cool" crowd. I say burn with fire.
Nothing wrong with people having fun as long as they keep it off the main articles and within reasonable bounds.
Edited by Fighteer "It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Where do we draw a line between harmless fun and littering the wiki with poorly written stubs? Someone could make a bunch of pages in Just for Fun consisting of "POOOP! lol" and claim they are just having fun, but it doesn't seem like pages like that would be allowed to stick around.
I think that would be rated as vandalism; making pure nonsense/filth pages gets shot down very quickly. Pages have to have substance, even if it's American cheese rather then Swiss or Muenster.
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. -Terry Pratchett
That does not look "poorly written" to me, honestly.
Edited by SeptimusHeap "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
It doesn't? First off, whoever wrote the article didn't even bother capitalizing any of the first person I's. If that were some sort of verbal tic for a character, that'd make perfect sense for a Self-Demonstrating article, but it's not. Which brings me to my second point:
The article is not even self-demonstrating. Doc Scratch speaks with proper grammar without any bizarre verbal tics. His only identifying feature is that he types in all-white font, which can't even be recreated on TV Tropes. Nothing about that article actually "demonstrates" Doc Scratch's speaking style, and there's no way to really remedy that without doing some fancy code shenanigans to make colored font work.
Basically, it's not a self-demonstrating page. It's just his character page copied, pasted, and edited to be in first person. What's to stop people from just making individual pages for any other character they feel like and calling them "self demonstrating" or "just for fun" ?
Edited by SpitefulFox
Truthfully I think a line needs to be drawn on what should and shouldn't be made into a Self-Demonstrating article. Well written they're good, but the more that comes up the more misuse we're going to have like this situation, where people just take a character, copy all the tropes on the character page then write them in first person, or just don't work as an article because of one reason or another (like if someone goes and makes a Self-Demonstrating Slender Man page, since he doesn't speak at all it would make it impossible to do an accurate one, and if it's not accurate then it's not very self demonstrating).
I am not overly familiar with the details of the character, so I don't know whether it's an accurare description of their talking behaviour.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Some thought needs to be put into a SD article, or it's a waste of everyone's time. That said, let's not get overly complainy. There's nothing inherently wrong with them.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Well, then why don't the people complaining about it not accurate at all maybe edit them so they are?
@Spiteful Fox: For Just for Fun, a good rule of thumb is, "Are enough people interested and/or amused enough to work the Wiki Magic on it?" — basically the same one we apply to most other pages. "Pooop lol" would likely not be fleshed out.
It's the same sort of litmus test that says your fanfic has a place, but that book report you wrote in fourth grade probably doesn't unless it went memetic all over the internet somehow.
Edited by DracMonster
@Ekono Mai: First off, why should the burden of fixing an article be on anyone other than the person who made the article in the first place? Can I just go around making "poop lol" articles and tell the complainers to quit complaining and edit them so that they're actually funny?
Second of all, I've already said why I don't think the Doc Scratch article is salvageable. There's nothing to self-demonstrate about the character.
Anyways, I'm not trying to draw a target on Self-Demonstrating character pages as a whole. I just feel this particular one has no reason to stay around. Is there a particular process I'm supposed to go through to get a consensus on that or is ATT the right place?
Edited by SpitefulFox
"Can I just go around making "poop lol" articles and tell the complainers to quit complaining and edit them so that they're actually funny?"
Yes, because I totally made that article, and totally because this is on the same level of vandalism.
That said, Doc Scratch would need custom formatting to make it work.
To be honest, I don't know what the problem is supposed to be here. Every self-demonstrating article I've ever encountered - character page or otherwise - has struck me as painfully stupid, but obviously someone would have had fun with it. As long as the rest of the wiki isn't being affected (which is part of the definition of Just for Fun), I honestly don't why there's a need to do anything.
The problem is that it's a poorly written article that utterly fails to be self-demonstrating to the character in question, thus defeating the entire purpose of it being a self-demonstrating article to begin with. We need to do something about it for the same reason we have a Complete Monster cleanup thread. Allow misuse to stay and other tropers start to pick up the bad habits.
But Complete Monster is actually a trope, albeit a subjective one. It's at least somewhat on-mission. A self-demonstrating article, on the other hand, is not relevant to the site at all. So why does anyone care if it fails to live up to its purpose?
^ probably for the same reason people cared and removed Troper Tales.
though then again, that one was a Weirdness Magnet. while Self-Demonstrating is mostly pointless fun.
though pointless or not a Self-Demonstrating Article should live up to it's name or be deleted on the grounds of being a poorly written duplicate to an existing writeup.
also, started checking out some selfies, they don't even list characterization tropes. so yeah, i agree with those who want to ax the page. someone more dedicated will probably make a better page in the future either way.
Edited by ShanghaiSlave Is dast der Zerstorer? Odar die Schopfer?
Troper Tales was hurting the rest of the site, though, by encouraging creepiness and certain types of poor writing (such as using "This Troper") that weren't just found in it. A dumb self-demonstrating page - which, again, is pretty much a redundant phrase to me - even if it is poorly-written, does not involve the sort of poor writing that is likely to be used elsewhere on the wiki.
It seems to me Doc Scratch isn't self-demonstrating at all. It's just written in first person.
Rhymes with "Protracted."
What's the point of Doc Scratch ? I'm pretty sure that page used to be in Self-Demonstrating and it was just as terrible then as it is now. Why should some random character get their own page in the Main namespace that doesn't even bother demonstrating their verbal quirk?
Doc Scratch is known for typing in unreadable white font and being very polite, bordering on condescending. That page is just a bunch of character tropes poorly written in first person.
Just doesn't seem to me like a page that should exist, but I don't think "I think this page is dumb" is a valid reason to cutlist something.
Edited by SpitefulFox