Ask The Tropers

It's definitely a subject that should be written in as neutral a way as possible, as to not outright bash these people for their political stance, but it's absolutely not something that should be kept hidden behind an ROCEJ pothole.

Geez, the article is also pretty badly written. Not obviously bad, but the very first trope is Adult Fear being about giant spider that target children... and while I removed it, I notice that the troper who launch the page, K Jsixteen, added several preemtive commented-out examples.

Thing doesn't look good to me.

There's also a lot of Zero-Context Examples of the "X is this" variety.

Wasn't it recently decided that any potholes to ROCEJ along the lines of "that's all we have to say about that" should go away anyway?

Yes. Also, is this demonstrable fact or just idle speculation/conspiracy theorizing?

Well, I were there but wasn't part of the drama. This is what SCP Wiki said about the incident (don't known if RPC have their version or not). We have the incident mentioned in Trivia.SCP Foundation (look up "Pride Month", said author is one of the founders mentioned in RPC article).

Now I admit to never really dig up RPC's side of story (take a look at their wiki twice, it come off as SCP with Serial Numbers Filed Off to me and thus never go back) or even pay much attention to it at all. Fact is that their wiki started shortly after the incident, by people who're upset about it, creating the similar content.

Given the prevalence of ZCEs and the suspiciously preemptive potholing, is it paranoid of me to suspect KJsixteen is probably someone actually involved with this site? If so, it seems like that could be an issue.

I believe that TV Tropes should NOT try to be neutral on the subject of LGBT rights. It's not a political issue, it's a basic human decency issue, and frankly, the wiki (and pretty much any other community) would be better off if every anti-gay user left.

I don't know if it's fair to claim everyone against the Pride Month logo change is a huge homophobe. IIRC people were upset because it broke the "immersion" of the SCP wiki being treated as if it were real.

EDIT: Also, some LGBT users felt they were being "othered", and I believe the site administration responded rather belligerently to critics.

I'm not a huge SCP fan, so I don't know much about the drama other than what's been mentioned here; I was talking more about how I feel our general policy should be.

Disliking the pride month logo is one thing, and I don't think that alone makes one a homophobe or a bad person. But if someone feels so strongly about it that they create a whole website in response, I think that says a lot about their view on LGBT rights.

Describing (for analogy) rape allegations against Bill Cosby on one of his work pages is inappropriate, even if they are factual about the creator. I've moved the Spiritual Predecessor information into the trope list, and removed the ROCEJ information from it. If someone who is willing to do the research wants to add when/how the group decided to fork away as a trivia item, it might be acceptable. I don't see a need to discuss it in the description of what happens in the work.

Yeah, just describing the fact that RPC is made of some ex-SCP writers and community members is fine. Nothing more, nothing less. On that note, some RPC articles are blatant mockeries of SCP "political correctness", so caution's advised with some of the entries as well.

My point was not that the wiki should take a neutral stance on these issues, but that if we absolutely must discuss politics on the wiki itself, in unrelated places, we just need to stick to the facts, and not attack people.

^ That's a difficult needle to thread sometimes, though. For example, if the "facts" about a person are unflattering, I've seen some call it "attacking" said person for pointing out said fact without any moralizing language. You and I have had disagreements about that, in fact.

In short, I'm all for policy that prevents ROCEJ from being sinkholed, but we need to be careful that it doesn't become a shield for false equivalency.

I think a fair litmus test for something like this is: how much does it affect the work, which is ostensibly the thing we're here to talk about?

My understanding from a little bit of Googling is that, while some (not all) of the people behind RPC may very well be certified scumbags, they haven't made a habit of filling the wiki itself with hate speech or anything.

I don't know that the fact that SCP is more likely to have a rainbow logo for Pride Month in the future than RPC is so significant that it deserves an above-the-line mention, so I think simply deleting it (as crazysamaritan has done) is a perfectly reasonable solution.

If there are trope examples, Audience Reactions, etc. that require knowledge of the reason for the split for context, then a brief explanation of the situation in the example text might be called for. I think the Spiritual Successor entry that crazysamaritan wrote stands just fine without it though.

I have a question about this specific wiki/website.

Is this thing an example of a sort of Roleplay or Alternate Reality Game, where the wiki/website is being considered its own fictional universe full of "real" people? How close is the line between real and fiction drawn?

I ask because if we can have a trope like Good Is Not Nice on that page referring to the wiki/website itself, then it seems laughably foolish NOT to mention the reason the website was split from the original was to disavow open celebration of LGBT Pride. We're either troping the website or the fictional story within the website, but the page seemingly wants both to be the same thing.

For reference, the text of the entry in question:

• Good Is Not Nice: The RPC Authority is interested in protecting the world and further benefit the public, and while many anomalies can be contained with mundane and harmless methods, most of them require questionable or even disturbing methods.

My understanding— and anyone who is more knowledgeable, please correct me if I have this wrong— is that "The RPC Authority" is the name of both the wiki itself, and the name of the fictional organization that it chronicles.

In this context, I would interpret the above entry to be referring to the fictional organization, not the wiki. After all, the real-life editors of the wiki can't exactly "contain" fictional anomalies.

In order to prevent confusion, we could consider adopting a convention to distinguish the two by, for example, always referring to the work as "the RPC Authority Wiki" and the fictional organization as "the RPC Authority organization." That would require significant effort by someone more invested in the work than I am, however.

(Tangent: the grammar in that entry is atrocious and could stand correcting.)

^ ^^ Yes, that's correct. Both RPC and SCP are all "in-character", their respective wikis are meant to be as if you were visiting the actual databases of the organizations (bar a few metawiki pages etc). It's a fairly common thing among many creepypasta sites where the stories are chronicled and talked about like they are real and not acknowledged as fictional stories.

Ah, that fix the ROCEJ misuse. I added the page on watchlist, mostly because overall style make me worry.