All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXXIII

[robkelk]

...

One thing I've been thinking about was trying to kill Category:Index Index which is generally useless except for keeping pages off uncategorized reports.  We have Template:Main, which could easily add a category.  But it would make more sense to do some organization, like "Work tabs" or "Creator tags" or something like that for each page type (please help me name this), otherwise we end up with a slightly more complicated Index Index.  We could do this from Template:Main, right?  We have the technology.

So I think I would go about this with Bucket, again.  There's no easy way to check the categories of another page from Lua, though maybe DPL could do it.  Just save the name of the template used on the main page, and we can look it up with a cheap indexed query.  But then, if we have this... all of those subpages with the wrong template on them I indicated before... I could make them just work?

Anything that frees up an editor to do things other than grunt work is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

[robkelk]

I see something new on my Talk page.

User talk:Robkelk
Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Latest comment: Wednesday at 22:02:00 by Doug in topic Request to enable $wgVisualEditorEnableWikitext

And then there's the whole "Structured Discussions" formatting of the content.

Thanks, Labster!

[GethN7]

...

One thing I've been thinking about was trying to kill Category:Index Index which is generally useless except for keeping pages off uncategorized reports.  We have Template:Main, which could easily add a category.  But it would make more sense to do some organization, like "Work tabs" or "Creator tags" or something like that for each page type (please help me name this), otherwise we end up with a slightly more complicated Index Index.  We could do this from Template:Main, right?  We have the technology.

So I think I would go about this with Bucket, again.  There's no easy way to check the categories of another page from Lua, though maybe DPL could do it.  Just save the name of the template used on the main page, and we can look it up with a cheap indexed query.  But then, if we have this... all of those subpages with the wrong template on them I indicated before... I could make them just work?

Anything that frees up an editor to do things other than grunt work is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

It is useful, but if we can skip the middleman, I agree, so much the better we don't need to do that grunt work.

[Bob Schroeck]

So I was going over an edit to Barbie (film) just now and I realized that I couldn't find a way to access the very problematic review that it got two years ago. Does the new work template not include reviews any more?

EDIT: And now I can't even find the review; it doesn't show up in searches. Reviews apparently were Flow topics; did we lose access to all the reviews when they were converted to ordinary talk pages?

[MilkmanConspiracy]

This review?

[robkelk]

Yeah, that one.

With the Review pages in their own namespace, they wouldn't show up in the "All Pages" lists of their respective works.

Somebody (not me!) has a project: Go through everything in the reviews namespace, make sure that the pages actually are reviews, and assuming they are reviews move them to be subpages of the respective work pages. (The current name format "Reviews:FOO" needs to be changed to "FOO/Reviews".)

[robkelk]

Looking at the Trope Workshop. Newhart Phonecall is listed there because it has the {{tropestub}} header. That trope has a very-short description and 11 examples (including a work that I wrote). I think we can get away with the low number of examples. Does anybody have a few minutes to flesh out the description?

[Bob Schroeck]

This review?

Ah, yes. I had forgotten about the Reviews namespace. Thank you!

And Rob is right, we need to get those all out and into subpages. Brent came up with a template for reviews a couple-few years back that I liked, but I couldn't figure out at the time a way to automate getting them out of Flow with the tools that I had available. Now that they were all converted to "talk"-style pages when Flow was discarded, maybe it's finally doable.

[Labster]

Can you tell me more about the work tabs and creator tabs idea?

In favor of icons, mainly because many wikis follow the naming format of "FranchiseName Wiki", and when you have two or more wikis that use that exact format, or barely distinguishable names, it makes a parenthesis required. It's still probably good for accessibility to use parentheses in such cases, but the icons help identify at a glance.

I did another pass and made sure to add alternate wikis where missing from my earlier additions. Sometimes the best wiki is on fandom, and sometimes it’s hosted elsewhere.

In any case, I really like this feature.

Really the "tabs" idea was that I can't come up with a good name for a tracking category.  We have lots of categories that are essentially just what most websites would call a tag (or a hashtag).  These keep the sorts of things like the main pages and its subpages, and sometimes other related works or tropes.  What are these things called?  The sort of categories where {{main}} is the only content?

If someone can answer that question for me, I can get to work removing Index Index and putting something at least marginally useful there.

(Also we use {{main}} very differently than Wikipedia does.)

So I was going over an edit to Barbie (film) just now and I realized that I couldn't find a way to access the very problematic review that it got two years ago. Does the new work template not include reviews any more?

Yeah, sorry I did that and forgot to tell people.  Reviews will show when they are subpages now, and things in the Reviews namespace are orphaned.  Special:AllPages shows you all 30.  The template I made to display them is Template:Review.  There are probably so few of them that it's not even worth trying to make a bot to deal with the formatting.  It probably is worth putting a comment on the boilerplate of "copy-paste this thing into a new review".  Also I think we can use InputBox to maybe preload the template into a new review?

Finally: I turned on Visual Editor in most of the Talk namespaces, so that Discussion Tools would work.  I looked back at our policy discussion, and the end result was: turn of VE in main, but leave it on in the Talk namespaces so that the discussion software would still work.  Replacing Flow (Structured Discussions) with Discussion Tools, I'm saying that I'm still following the original proposal.  (Also there should now be reply buttons on talk pages, which work unless the formatting has a serious Lint error)

[Labster]

I was manually converting a few of the old review pages (ours, not TVT's) and I'm having trouble making the effort to convert HLIAA14YOG reviews.  Except maybe the review of The Boys, which is honestly so wrong its funny.  Like, the argument starts with Jeff Bezos is a liberal, and then proceeds eventually to: "The death of individualism is a key feature of leftists after all."  Lol what?  The guys that say your kid can be whatever made-up gender they wants to be want to destroy individualism?

The rest of his (and I'm certain it's a male) reviews can go bye-bye.  It's not so much poison pen as hydrogen sulfide pen, you know?

I don't see that we have any policy page on reviews, which we may want to make, and link on {{review header}}.  I think basic guidelines should be:
1. Before reviewing, view the work, or a significant chunk thereof (maybe at least half extant at time of writing?)
2. Ideological axes make for poor writing (I keep seeing this in professional reviews of The Odyssey now -- like how does being filmed in Western Sahara make it a bad film?)
3. Bad reviews are harder to write than good reviews, no matter how much fun the poison pen feels.  If you dislike something, you need to give examples in the story, not just talk about how the writer or director sucks.
4. Tropes you dislike are not bad, you just dislike them.  Predictability might be bad, but people are still making movies from 3000 year old stories, so grade of execution matters.
5. Well-written reviews should find both flaws and features.  In the worst media you can usually find something you like, and even in the best things there is probably something that could have been a little better.

[Bob Schroeck]

In the wake of his reviews, we did end up setting an actual rule, which can be the basis of the policy page -- and probably should have gotten one, along with the few other rules we had to set up because of entitled assholes. Anyway, it was proposed and discussed here. The final version approved was:

The purpose of a review is to provide literary criticism, not to rant. When writing reviews of works strong opinions are fine, but they should avoid naked hatred and be rendered in a civil and dispassionate manner. For this rule, "naked hatred" includes, but is not limited to:

1. Overly negative language (the exception is if the work has clear and demonstrable moments of transphobia, homophobia, racism, ableism or sexism that is supported by the text and normalized).
   
2. Name-calling that is abusive, slanderous, or excessive.
   
3. Not using moments in the work to back up your statements.
   
4. Any negativity that does not directly criticize points in the work but exists for the sake of attacking the work.
   
5. Using the review to attack – or praise – someone or something that was not involved in the work.
   

Violations of the rule will be handled on a case-by-case basis, depending on the severity of the violation. In general, a formal warning on the first instance, a temporary ban on the second (and maybe third) instance, followed by a permanent ban for a contributor who cannot keep his reviews from dripping with hatred and vitriol. However, the wiki staff reserves the right to make more dramatic responses in more extreme cases, such as an October 2024 review which stepped right up to the line of libel and spat in the face of the creator on the other side.

Reviews which violate this rule are also subject to deletion at the discretion of the wiki staff.

MilkmanConspiracy added some useful expansions/clarifications of what was acceptable, which I've slightly rephrased:

So long as it is done in a dispassionate manner, it is acceptable to reference other works of the creator of that specific work, outside sources of information, and/or rival works as a point of comparison or to establish repeating themes, issues, or well executed points that relate to the work being reviewed.

Potential examples, using Alan Smithee as an example name.

1. Director Alan Smithee again leans into theme of X, as he has done in the original and the prequel.
   
2. Following rival series Y, this game has added support for crafting mechanics, a popular design choice for games released in that console generation. A lack of N feature hinders the experience, and is a feature I hope they patch in following the example set by the rival series Y.
   
3. In an interview linked here, Director Alan Smithee explains that this artistic choice was done out of respect for their deeply held personal conviction of Z, which gives that moment in the movie greater attention to detail then other scenes, increasing its impact.
   
4. According to this report linked here, ''Example Work'' was riddled with executive meddling, and one can see potential influence from this in example decision which detracts from the work.
   

Anti-Examples (Would not fit):

1. Hack "Director" Alan Smithee resorted to this trope yet again in his movie, yet again proof of his utter incompetence as an artist.
   
2. This game is just a clone of X, because the developers clearly don’t have an original thought in their heads. Rival game Y is better in every conceivable way, and it’s so clear I don’t have to explain why.
   
3. I just couldn’t enjoy the work knowing that director Alan Smithee is a believer in Z. (Where Z isn’t an exemption listed in point 1.)
   
4. Director Alan Smithee is artistically bankrupt and a fraud for allowing executives to call the shots and do ____.
   

Some of the other comments/clarifications/discussion might be useful on the policy page as well.

In any case, since the rule allows us to delete reviews that we feel violate it, deleting Horny's diatribes is perfectly justified.

[Labster]

Oh, I didn't need that rule to delete it, Global Conduct Policy is plenty strong enough. They trigger the insults, trolling, and defamation clauses. They're also not really reviews, you know? They're an attempt to enforce political ideology by attacking people who counter it. And I just delete negative value content. I don't know how one could make a rule out of that, but it should be one.

Like most of the world these days, we've run headlong into "paradox of tolerance" territory. In order to be tolerant, this stuff must be intolerable.

[robkelk]

Like most of the world these days, we've run headlong into "paradox of tolerance" territory. In order to be tolerant, this stuff must be intolerable.

That's hardly new.

I was trained to be tolerant of everything except intolerance.
—U Thant, View from the UN (1978)

So, yeah. What do we do?

Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
—Jesus, The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12, NKJV)

If they claim to be living by "Christian values", then they should have no issues with being called the same things that they call other people. Unfortunately, most of the people who claim to be Christian nowadays do not actually follow the teachings of Christ. We have to go secular here.

Take It Elsewhere.
—SJGames forums policy on off-topic posts (at least during the 1990s and 2000s)

Tolerance does not require complicity. Those posters' desire to exercise their freedom of expression does not create a requirement for us to lose our freedom of assembly... which includes freedom to not assemble. We can tolerate at a distance.

[GethN7]

Like most of the world these days, we've run headlong into "paradox of tolerance" territory.  In order to be tolerant, this stuff must be intolerable.

That's hardly new.

I was trained to be tolerant of everything except intolerance.
—U Thant, View from the UN (1978)

So, yeah. What do we do?

Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
—Jesus, The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12, NKJV)

If they claim to be living by "Christian values", then they should have no issues with being called the same things that they call other people. Unfortunately, most of the people who claim to be Christian nowadays do not actually follow the teachings of Christ. We have to go secular here.

Take It Elsewhere.
—SJGames forums policy on off-topic posts (at least during the 1990s and 2000s)

Tolerance does not require complicity. Those posters' desire to exercise their freedom of expression does not create a requirement for us to lose our freedom of assembly... which includes freedom to not assemble. We can tolerate at a distance.

Can't disagree with any of the above. If you can't express an opinion without being an abrasive, ad hominem spewing sewer of a person (as regards your public discourse), then said sewer needs to find waters other than ours to putrefy and grow fetid.

I also agree with the policy on reviews and approve it without objection.