All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXXIII

[GethN7]

As to the laconic change, I'm all in favor of the solution that causes the least technical hassles to implement. That said, I don't think it's wise to throw out the laconic pages. One, it's a basic fallback in case the new schema has problems or doesn't show up under certain browsing conditions. Second, like other subpages, they are useful for SEO. I'm all for integrating the laconics into the main pages, wonderful idea, but I'd prefer a fallback plan as mentioned as well.

[robkelk]

... they are useful for SEO. ...

Perhaps I don't understand what SEO is supposed to be, but I don't see why we'd care. We don't run ads.

[Labster]

... they are useful for SEO. ...

Perhaps I don't understand what SEO is supposed to be, but I don't see why we'd care. We don't run ads.

I guess I disagree with both of you?

First, the Laconic pages are not good for SEO, they're a type of page called "thin content" which means that they're garbage and no search engine will link to them.  

Next, search engine optimization is important because we want people to actually use the thing we've worked on. Honestly I've gotten discouraged so many times because I've put in a lot of work on what a niche and more or less out of date site, but I guess that's fine.  Actually, let me quote a post from back on Yuku, which is 14 years old tomorrow.  I think about this one quite a lot.

I suppose it really depends on what kind of crowd you're going for. If this is just going to be a Tropeflower for itinerant Pilgrims fleeing King Edward's tyrannical trope-censorship in the New World of Tropes, then keeping the old, more idiosyncratic names is fine. But if you want to draw in newbies and folks that haven't done this before, more inclusive methods will definitely help. This doesn't mean killing the old trope titles. One of the things I really liked about TV Tropes' system was the fact you could have multiple URL titles go to the same page. A lot of variations on one Trope can link to the main page, and a simple "This trope is also occasionally referred to as a 'Takahashi Couple', due to said prolific manga writer's tendency to make nearly all romantic couples in her works according to this archetype" both acknowledges the original (and explains it for anyone who runs into an older edit that has the original term) while still not making the base article particularly obfuscating to non-longstanding tropers.

Which is the superior option really depends on the wiki's basic policy and aims, however.

For a long time, we've felt like the Tropeflower to me.  Or rather, I'm essentially an absentee at this point, so I guess I should say y'all feel like the Tropeflower Pilgrims.  Extension:Moderation contributes a lot of this feeling, but then I do virtually zero moderation so I don't really have much right to complain.  TikTok doesn't have a page.  Neither does Heated Rivalry which is the current fandom crack epidemic.  If no one finds ATT, it's just this irrelevant outside outpost.  I wanted to be a peer competitor, not this, but I never put in the energy to do that.

I'm not going to fix it.  I've aged out of troping, and I'd rather write original stuff with my creative time than go through and autistically categorize shows I watch.  (I'm sure I'm autistically writing fanfic too btw.)  I still like contributing technically, and I have ideas that I've had for a long time, but didn't really have the skill/tools to implement until now.  This is one of the ideas.

Basically, I accept the argument in the quote above, and I think that short definitions of all of the tropes should be very discoverable, because even with normal-ish names, a certain amount of jargon exists.  An elevator pitch is standard jargon, but if you don't know the term, does it sound like a short sales attempt or a rising key change in a song?  The closest we have is the Laconic pages, and honestly, as they are currently they're negative value to the wiki.  Undiscoverable, full of embedded jargon references, and a sink on SEO.  We do not need a way to get back to this point.

The grand scheme is to make short definitions available three ways: on the top of trope pages, via the Popups, and in category pages.  The first is automatic with SHORTDESC, and we can restyle it as we want.  Popups is just messing with the JS from extension Popups and deploying it as a gadget -- there's pretty much nothing on the backend that matters -- but this will only apply desktop users which is a minority.  The third means writing a new extension, likely along the lines of CategoryTree.  Because as much fun as jargon is, I honestly think that no one should be visiting the wiki and have no idea what it's talking about.