Ask The Tropers

The first thing I suggest is to look in the sidebar at the Tools and Tips headers. They both have several items listed under them that are essential reading for any new troper, and studying them will save you a lot of headache down the road.

As to creating new pages, there's two ways you can do it. One way is to bring up an existing page and change the namespace and title in the URL. For instance, if I wanted to make a page for an anime titled Tsundere Dating Hazards, I'd go to an existing page, such as Man-Eating Plant, and in the address bar at the top of the browser, I'd change the URL: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManEatingPlant

to https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/TsundereDatingHazards

and hit Enter. This creates a page saying "This page doesn't exist; do you want to create it?" You then click the Edit button over that message, and it creates the blank slate page that you can then edit.

The other way is to do an edit on a blank page. Going back to Man-Eating Plant, I'd click to edit it, and somewhere on the page I'd insert Anime.TsundereDatingHazards, then click the Preview button at the bottom of the page. That opens up a preview of the page in a new tab, and you'll see that the text I added is in red, indicating a non-existing page. Click the red text, and it gives you the same prompt to create a new page as the other method. You then just close Man-Eating Plant's tab in your browser, or click Cancel at the bottom of the page; either way, the edit you made isn't saved.

Hopefully this helps!

We had the very same query yesterday. You can check it out for more tips.

We seriously need a "Create New Page" button.

Seconding the above. I have a few works I want to trope myself, but it is a pain to do so.

^ How so? I understand that it's a pain for newbies or people who have no basics in web or coding... but I think it's explained well on Administrivia. Getting the link or creating the blank page to edit is fairly easy.

A good way to do it (if you're afraid of creating the url as desribed above in Willbyr's post) is to do the follwing. Go to our sandbox thread — nothing can be messed up there. Write the name of the work as Wiki Word in CamelCase with Namespace.

Hypothetical example. There is a movie called Alice and Bob Take Manhattan that doesn't have a page. You want to trope it and create the page from scratch, so you type Film/AliceAndBobTakeManhattan and make a post. It creates a red link, like this one: Alice And Bob Take Manhattan. Then you just click the link and it takes you to the correct empty page. It specifically says the page doesn't exist, but if you hit the edit button, you can start writing content in the text editor.

^ I don't understand how you can type out the entire process and not see how convoluted it is.

The current method is 5 steps. A button is 1 step.

We've had to cut and lock several bad pages because some people just don't get it.

^ Nah, it's two steps once you get the hang of it. If there was a button, it would still require typing the namespace and the work title.

But I think there is a wish list for this sort of request. You can post there. :-)

^ Already did (Primis, not me).

That said, the current page-creating process does kinda make people learn the ropes of the site and how things like titles and namespaces actually work.

^ This was my thought, too. A one-button process would lead to even more heaps of badly-done pages by new tropers who haven't learned those basic things, in my opinion.