Ask The Tropers

As long as a work page has at least three tropes (that are not ZCE) it's not a stub.

Anyway, I'm not sure why you want to merge those pages. What's wrong with keeping them as separate pages?

While it's not a stub, it still isn't ideal for a work to have such a short trope list (hence why we have the Works Needing Tropes page).

I think 4, 6, and 7 have enough tropes that a merge isn't necessary (though something needs to be done about Post Mortem's character page; it's literally just one line linking to Still Life's character page). The sequels also seem to have different settings/characters from the original, which puts me off a merge even more. 1 and 3 are super stubby and I'd personally merge them into one page. The others... I could give-or-take.

I agree that Splinter Cell shouldn't have been split.

I think it should stay how it is.

1-3 seem like possible candidates, but 4-7 should definitely stay how they are imo

All right, there has been no activity on this for a while, so I can assume we have a consensus. It seems like there's overall support for merging the first 3, and opposition to merging the rest. I have contacted the tropers responsible for splitting Splinter Cell & creating those Outbreak stubs to give them a chance to make their case before they'll be merged back.

In the meantime, I have added a couple more examples of what I consider possible merge candidates, just to maintain consistent discussion on this subject.

I was planning to add more tropes on them this week. 'Guess I'll do it now.

I think there's multiple advantages with having each Splinter Cell title on its own page. The box art, less bloated franchise page etc.

Sequels have presumably different stories that aren't just rearranging tropes from the previous entry...

And so, would have unique tropes...

^ It's a common problem for certain franchises/series. Tropers are so used to everything being crammed on one page unless the page forces a "page too long" warning or a certain entry actually becomes well known to warrant being split from the series/franchise page.

There are some exceptions like franchise pages like Super Sentai/Power Rangers, but they aren't the norm though. The most common reason against splits outside "page too long" messages is "There will be duplicated info." Heck with the Power Rangers/Super Sentai pages, every single entry has general franchise tropes above the actual series tropes for that entry only.

It's just going to take time for the culture to change and people actually want to split out these crammed series/franchise pages before they get hit with the "page too long" warnings. As long as each new entry in a series/franchise has enough material to stand on their own, then splitting would be fine even if each entry doesn't have the exact same number of tropes and inbounds.

Concur with Khugol, Malady, and Ngamer 01, that the splitting by entry should be fine.

^^^ "Sequels have presumably different stories that aren't just rearranging tropes from the previous entry...And so, would have unique tropes... "

Do you even play video games? /s I mean, there is a reason why Mission-Pack Sequel is a page on here: it's precisely because a lot of game sequels, especially those that are gameplay-focused, do in fact just "rearrange tropes". I think everyone concurs that the first three cases in particular are very much an instance of this.

^^ Well, here is the thing, though: what exactly constitutes "crammed" and "enough material to stand on their own" as far any objective metrics (be it trope count, word count or whatever) are concerned? I called this ATT in a large part because I wanted to establish that.

And I think you are ignoring an important case for merging: people are much more likely to see a small and not very popular/outright obscure series' tropes (which is what we are talking about in nearly all the aforementioned cases) when they are on one medium-sized page, then they are to bother clicking through multiple short and unsatisfying pages.

Not only that, but the key reason I mention overlap is that if we are to ever take the goal of crosswicking seriously, then it is much more practically done when there's one work page to list as an example on a trope page instead of going "Trope X (wick) occurs in work Y like this. It then occurs in sequel Y.1 (wick) almost exactly like in Y, and Y.2 (wick) barely subverts this." In some cases, we could end up with all-blue entries.

In all, a serious case for merging happens at least as often as a case for splitting: even the founder was a self-described "lumper" after all. I believe a more-or-less objective metric to determine merging vs. splitting is necessary at this point.

I also agree that those should be split.

^^ - So, all Video Game series get their own series pages, and individual entries in the series, are split off when they hit... maybe 13 unique tropes, to reference Wick health, and the entry page would be folded back into the series, if a sequel invalidates the uniqueness of its tropes.

How about that?

And the trope minimum doesn't shift like Wick health levels, because a work being eligible for new tropes is rare?

... Maybe 10, just for a nice round number.

I side with it being split too.

Any page that is not a stub (i.e. has at least 3 tropes) can and should stay on its own. I see no reason to merge pages just because they belong to the same series and have less than [some-artifically-chosen-number] tropes. This also avoids the issue of spoilers - if someone has palyed only the first two games in a trilogy and wants to read only about them, but the page is for all three games, it becomes difficult to avoid spoilers.

Also in a way, keeping everything on one page violates the There Is No Such Thing as Notability rule TV Tropes has (I think).

By keeping everything from a series to one page says all of those entries aren't notable enough to get pages of their own.

^^ By the same logic, any number you name is abritrary, even 3: the only thing special about it is that it is convenient for lazy tropers.

Moreover, 3 tropes IS exactly a stub what is. Anything below that is basically delete on sight if it is an unreleased work, and even the released works with 0-2 tropes are hanging around largely due to mods' leniency. Works Needing Tropes has 10 tropes as the threshold after which the work no longer belongs on that index, and I believe that's the absolute lower bound (especially given all the new tropes that have been launched over the past few years), and one that is way too lenient to decide merging vs. splitting.

Again, with many cases of what I am talking about, spoilers are hardly even a thing: we are talking the literal Mission-Pack Sequel material (actually check out those first few examples), where story may not even exist. In most other cases, only a few words in the description would need to be covered with a tag.

I am far from the first person who needs to be lectured about notability here, having personally created dozens of pages for increasingly obscure works, but since this rule is invoked, here is one of its core statements in black and white:

We want to be fun, interesting and a cool place to sink hours of time.'

If so, I think it's common sense that pages of a certain size and quality are more interesting than others. There might be pages that are too long, but those are where it's going into hundreds of tropes. As it is, the actual majority of pages (as opposed to the majority of most visited pages) still suffer from being too short to retain casual reader's interest, rather than too long. It's not just the tropes either: many pages have awful one/two sentence descriptions as is, and more splits will only magnify the problem.

It's been proven that people do not as a rule want to click around too much, and presenting a tiny page with a limited amount of information about a work the average reader already didn't care about, and then telling them they could click on a couple more sequel pages to do the same is a pretty reliable way of killing interest.

A couple of numbers for context:

1) Video Games in particular are one of the most numerous page categories already, with 12629 articles as now. Adding potentially several thousand more to that through mere splits is a highly questionable decision: in particular, it'll contribute to overloading indexes (potentially having every video game-related index split into two or more due to "too long" warnings is not where we want to go), and make them less useful in general: there was a relatively recent ATT complaining that all the indexes for Dishonored were taken up by its sequels, for instance. Now imagine that happening with half the Flash games out there, for instance.

2) This might be a seasonal thing, but the general number of visits and/or engagement over here has been going down the past few months. Making page navigation more frustrating and making the works people in general do not care about (or else they would have had more tropes by now already) is the last thing you would want to do in these circumstances.

TLDR; From my extensive editing experience (I can make more edits in a month than some tropers have made in 5 years), I would say 30-50 tropes should be the sweet spot for a work page, and we should contemplate a split only when the combined count is double that.

I'll admit, I've had the same problem when expanding the page for The Cry of Mann, which has a sequel series, Call Of Warr. Warr and Mann take place in the same universe, but feature completely different characters in a completely different situation, with the single exception of one character shared by both works.

I could've split the page, but since Call of Warr was already lumped in when I got there, I just kept them lumped. I'm still not sure if that was the best call or not.

From Administrivia.How To Create A Works Page:

• There should be a minimum of three tropes listed... [snip]

The way I understand that part is that three is the minimum number of tropes that should be on a work page - anything less and the page can (and likely will) be cut as a stub. So no, "3" is not an arbitrary number, it's the official minimum. Obviously, more than that is better, with at least 10 recommended.

Anyway, I think this is getting too long for ATT. I suggest making a forum thread and having a real discussion about whether or not pages with a small number of tropes should be merged if they belong to the same series of games/books/whatever.

FYI (Shilling more precise info): 9996 Literatures are works.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/page_type_per_namespace.php?page=l

...

Compared to 10794 Video Games as works.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/page_type_per_namespace.php?page=v

I made all the Outbreak TV Tropes pages. They only have that many tropes per page because I haven't actually played any of them. If anyone out there has played the Outbreak games, please add all the tropes that apply.