Have a question about how the TVTropes wiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Tropers is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help.
It's not for everything, though. For a list of all the resources for your questions, click here. You can also go to this Directory thread
for ongoing cleanup projects.
Have you read Welcome to TV Tropes? It gives an overview of navigation, policies, links to how-to pages, etc. Main/Administrivia has a comprehensive list of how-to and policy pages. If you're looking for something specific and can't seem to find it, Ask The Tropers may be your best bet.
Not sure about the special banners, but every page has a "Discusion" button at the top, near the edit and history button; these pages usually get used to discuss contested examples. Much of the behind-the-scenes stuff (splits and merges, renames, quote and image changes, etc.) goes on in the forums, if you're interested.
In order:
- Applying banners is something that is done by moderators. It involves discussion in the forum and is not something regular tropers have to worry about.
- Starting discussions can be done by the "add a new topic" button in discussion pages, at their bottom. Starting forum discussions is done by the "Create a new conversation" button at the forum page bottom - assuming that the thread does not already exist.
- Finding discussions your participated in can be done through the "Search posts by troper" or here
for wiki discussions.
You appear to know your way around quite a bit, it seems to me though.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I have no idea where to put this. This site's design is confusing as hell — I've no idea how to apply any of the various banners (like YMMV), actually start discussions, find discussions I've participated in, or do literally /anything/ other than 'add text to a page'. A help section, a 'contact us' page, /anything/ would be nice to actually explain how the hell this site works. It's /great/ as a site to read — but new editors seem to have no readily-available resources to aid them. If I'm wrong, please link me to the information, or email it to me, PM it, however the hell you say things to insure people /actually/ read them.
If 'the community' is supposed to be the repository for this information, well, that's a problem in and of itself.
EDIT: Yes, I realize there's a 'help' sidebar. It's the reason I know as little as I already know.
Edited by ManekIridius