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.
I've never actually been a fan of the "You'd expect/Instead" format personally, but I don't know what the site's official policy is about it and/or how it came to be. I'm pretty sure it's not mandatory though, at least not on the specific work YMMV pages. The format is there for the people who want to use it and it can act as a good guideline, but (as far as I know) it's also fine for entries to simply not have it. I've seen plenty of entries that both do and don't use the format.
Edited by StardustSoldierAt some point, for some amount of time, the main What An Idiot page stated that it was mandatory.
I don't recall how long ago that was, or if it was ever actually required (I have, on occasion, encountered "official policies" that on closer inspection turned out to be unilateral decisions by single tropers who weren't even mods), or why it was removed if it was legitimate.
Suddenly I'm... still rotating Fallen London in my mind even though I've stopped actively playing it.I don't remember when the rule was mandatory. I remember adding an example myself just to be on the safe side since when I added the example every example was in that format. Some examples don't have that format and I don't see the rules on the page stating specifically that it had to be done that way.
The format pre-dates 2010, so we're looking at reasoning that was probably lost due to The Great Crash. You can bring it up Projects if you'd like, but, personally, I don't see harm in having a format.

I've often seen What An Idiot examples formatted in this way:
Is this format mandatory? All the examples on the What An Idiot subpages use it, but those on a work's YMMV page don't always do so. Should such examples be deleted or made to fit the format? Should the format be mentioned on the What An Idiot page itself (it's not there currently)?