All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part VII

[TvT Rivals]

OK, @Tv Trivals then: did you know you can edit your account name in forum settings?

Been there, done that. Good thing it worked - sometimes yuku's software can be a problem. Just look at your profile, under "My communities": "Drunkard's Walk" has a backslash that shouldn't be there.

I'm not "into" CSS, but I either read or code CSS almost every day of my life. Left to my own devices I tend to create "programmer interfaces".

Great! So, do you like CSS Zen Garden? Maybe we can revive the idea of using different CSS for different media/genres/whatever. - Of course, you'll be credited for it, on our "Special Thanks" page (linked from every wiki page), and on paper as well, if you wish to. Least we can do.

Do you like having money? Do you dislike having money taken from you? If so, you may want to consult a lawyer or change the logo.

We will change the logo (very probably, and we have an idea too), but we'll also check out alternatives.

Can you ensure that censorship will be limited enough so as not to infringe academic freedom?

Since our wiki is built upon a real DB, we can rate all the pages, whether they are good clean family fun or hentai guro. Tropers can use their settings to decide which pages they want to see. If you don't want to see the real bad stuff, you'll get a 404 when you go there by mistake. Oh, and people will have to make an account before they can read up about bad stuff. Good enough?

Does the business model ensure the privacy of users, or is it going to be blasting advertising at people?

We will use at least some advertising (more for lurkers, less for active tropers). This wiki was a lot of work (understatement), we'd like to get something back from it. But we definitely don't want to sell user data. Also, we consider making a deal with tropers: No ads for some money per year.

Furthermore, as said: Many pages still lack images, laconics and quotes. If you use the space where an image should be for a well-visible ad, maybe the people will be motivated to replace the ad by some fitting image ASAP. But if you put those pages on an index, tropers still won't do anything.

Can you create a moderation culture based on rules, not on how offensive it is to moderators?

Rules are fine, as long as the ruleslawyering doesn't start. We are still working on writing them down, but we have a concept outlined.

Can we work towards making this a content creation wiki, not a content classification wiki?

We'd definitely like to make it the former, with a bit of the latter. The question is of course, how? Other wikis also started with good intentions and turned sour later. PPR wasn't helpful in that regard either.

OK, for the questions part:

Is your code open source? Can I look at your repo? Every part of the ATT infrastructure is OSS.

Open Source is great, but in our special case, there's a problem: Our software is highly specialized - it's great for a troping wiki, but not for much else. The only ones who could put it to use are us - and the TV Tropes crew. Just the folks we don't want to schlep for free for. You understand our problem?

Is this an entirely new wiki software, or have you hacked it on to something else? Are you parsing wikicode or are you doing a WSIWYG editor?

1. It's entirely new. Only the LAMP stack is old, so to speak. 2. It's done with a parser for a kind of BBCode, as you can see on the new screenshots. WYSIWYG would be too much, but then again, Wikipedia is also struggling with their WYSIWYG editor.

Is this a class page-model wiki, or are you doing more of an trope/example model like what TVT was talking about, where trope/example would be added to both pages at the same time via aggregation of examples?

The latter. This allows us to sort example list (and other lists too), or pick one single example from the DB, if you know the combination of the trope and the work (or some other page). And much more.

Can you tell us anything about your team or yourself?

As said, we are a bunch of tropers (or ex-tropers) from North America and Europe. We've been there for years, but later, the wiki lost its fun. We were willing to help the leaders, but whenever we approached them, the result wasn't pretty. Then we learned that you had made the site rip, and downloaded it. And since we have experience with internet security, databases, scripts, wikibots and webdesign, we thought we could do this. And now we're close to launch.

I also want to say that you are giving me ideas. Lots of ideas.

Sounds good. Can you tell us more about them? PMs are OK too. If you want to keep them, that's also fine, you never know whether some lawyer will turn this into a lawsuit because you mentioned your idea in a public space.

PS: Check your message box.