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It depends on whether the work is a documentary or a biopic. A documentary uses real footage and interviews. A biopic/dramatization uses actors to recreate scenes based on real events.
A documentary is treated as Real Life for purposes of troping, even if it contains a narrative structure (as most do). We can use tropes to describe the narrative choices and technical decisions made by the people who created the work, but we may not use tropes to describe the people and events depicted.
A biopic/dramatization is a fictionalized version and is eligible for the full suite of tropes as long as these are about the characters and events as depicted in the work, not the RL people or events referenced by it.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Netflix's Fyre is a documentary as you define it. Would the footage and other elements from the marketing campaign (of The Fyre Festival) also be tropeqble?
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Hmm. I think that gets a little meta. A marketing campaign broadly falls under Advertising and is certainly tropable as such. However, a documentary is a distinct work, and the tropes on its article should be about the documentary, not the topic being documented, regardless of whether that topic is itself a tropable work.
As the whole thing generated a large amount of controversy, the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment starts to rear its ugly head even if we didn't have a strict policy about troping RL people and events.
Edited by Fighteer "It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Documentaries usually have been treated as works, with some gradation depending on how close to reality they are.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
The page we have for Fyre includes troping events that are not brought up in the documentary, and also some tropes that are generally NRLEP (e.g. Chronic Villainy) being applied to real people. It seems like a gray area to me, and I don't want to unilaterally make a bunch of changes.
As documentary pages generally blur the lines between troping the documentary and troping RL people/events, should we make an active effort to clean them up or just make short-term efforts for specific problematic pages?
Edited by WaterBlap