Series pages are easiest to define in comparison to works pages. A works page details a work of fiction or non-fiction, giving a description as to what the work is all about, and a listing of tropes that the work use. A series page, by contrast, broadly deals with every single work of fiction under a specific moniker. So, as an example, the Star Wars page is about all the various Star Wars works of fiction and what those have in common with each other. Someone looking for information on the original Star Wars movie has to go the page A New Hope.
In terms of quality control, series pages became relevant mainly in that, as time went on, it was never entirely clear what was supposed to be a series page and what wasn't. There is no Series namespace- generally speaking the Main namespace is always supposed to be the Series namespace, but this rule is not particularly well-known. This was especially true with pages created before namespaces broadly appeared. Take the Star Wars page, which originally referred to all six of the movies writ-large, which sounds ridiculous today but made a great deal more sense when the wiki was a much smaller place. When this problem was brought to Trope Repair Shop's attention, the issue was acknowledged, even supported- but no one did anything. Eventually one annoyed troper just split the page into pieces personally with less-than-fantastic descriptions, but it was better than doing nothing at all.
This entire issue with series pages is a decidedly non-sexy one. While Trope Repair Shop could get into conniptions over the "true" meaning and popularity of a trope title, series and works page were just statements of facts. There was no meaningful philosophical wrangling over what a person expected when they clicked on the Star Wars Wiki Word, mainly because Star Wars is an actually discrete, definable thing. Subjective opinions, the lifeblood of Trope Repair Shop, simply don't factor into this fact.
Now, while series pages weren't an especially popular subject, longer pages that were not clearly works or series pages still represented a major problem- the descriptions were often confusing, and the example listings excessively long. When I left the forums, they were an obvious problem to fix. One of the first tasks I went about was reorganizing the indexes for Marvel and DC comics to better differentiate between pages referring to a specific superhero versus pages referring to a comic book story that shares its name with a superhero. The Joker, for example, refers to the character, and not the obscure 1970's comic series featuring the character. Technically characters aren't supposed to have their own pages, but as forum discussion over this topic had mainly centered around the unusual nature of story structure in American comics and what this meant in terms of wiki policy, I decided this was a weird enough case that an exception ought to be made or else the specifics would just be rambled over definitely.
More straightforward issues of these clarifications arose in simpler pages. The Pokemon page was the main monstrosity badly needing to be dealt with. The page had grown to be unbearably long and peppered with random plot snippets from four generations of games in the series. When casual tropers expressed concern over what to do about these problems, I suggested expanding the floatbox so that there were pages for individual games in the series as well as the spin-offs. This was agreed to after brief discussion. While this problem had seemed insurmountable in the discussion page, once links to individual game pages were there, Wiki Magic slowly but surely worked to move traffic, and I along with some others managed to move all the individual game examples to their individual games instead of being on the series page.
I'd like to apologize at this point if this explanation is a little tedious and complicated- series pages are a difficult problem to describe abstractly. I often found that trying to explain what I was doing to people was a great deal more difficult than just performing technical page rewrities and splits myself whilst leaving a note stating "here's a page for this specific game in this series that tragically has no useful information on it. If only there was a fan of this game here to help us write it!". The series pages accumulated too much text mainly because there wasn't any other place to put it. In giving fans more pages to write on, I found that they were often more than happy to start branching out their efforts even though they would never get the idea to do this themselves. I once averted a massive crisis with the Starcraft page simply by turning Starcraft II into a stub instead of a redirect. Almost immediately Starcraft fans started started separating their (often spoilery) material into the appropriate page instead of lumping details of both games in the same alphabetical listing.
There was one problem I ran into- by not always explaining what I was doing some individuals started seeing malicious motives in my actions. One user got mad at me for arbitrarily deleting information from the Fallout page when I was actually moving it to the Fallout 3 page (Fallout now being a page for the series in general, not the individual games). Experiences like this taught me to better mind the edit reason box- even if something was difficult to explain, I felt I owed it to people to at least make an effort. If worse came to worse, I could always let the Wiki Magic vindicate me- tropers seldom edit pages that they find to be poorly written.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
History: Vetinari Paradox
While I no longer participated in the forums, I did on occasion rename a trope. The rationale for this in my mind was fairly obvious- consensus was the real decider as to whether page action needed to be undertaken. Trope Repair Shop was just an obvious place where consensus could be gathered. When I spotted consensus for action that no one else was willing to undertake, I felt no compunction about simply performing this action myself.
In the case of Vetinari Paradox, this consensus was established in an old Trope Repair Shop thread. Vetinari is a character from the Discworld series. He's evil, I think (I've never actually read any of it), but any attempts to remove him from his position of authority end up failing because he's apparently the only person in the entire city competent enough to run things. See, it's a paradox, sort of, in that Discworld can't live with him or can't live without him.
You may have noticed I had to struggle a bit there to try and work the word "paradox" in there. This was another one of those metaphor titles that was really obvious in YKTTW but which were extremely non-intuitive when the title came into usage on the common wiki. Given the relative obscurity of the Vetinari character, this trope probably should have been renamed completely. But like so many other discussions, the relevance of Vetinari as a "TV Tropes icon" was endlessly debated. Headway was only made when the compromise suggestion was offered of Vetinari Job Security. This was not a fantastic title, since it still elevated Vetinari as the trope's true exemplar, but at the very least, the trope actually describes job security. It doesn't really describe a paradox.
Even though I had participated in this forum thread, I did not enact the final rename. And so, like so many renames before and after, Vetinari Paradox languished in obscurity. My memory was refreshed when, during my time in the discussion pages, another troper called my attention to the title- the forum thread itself had long since been purged, but the crowner strongly showing a rename to Vetinari Job Security as the preferred outcome remained. I saw no reason for an inaccurate title to continue to be an inaccurate title given the established consensus, so I changed the main title and changed half of the redirects.
Some time after this happened, there was a ruckus in Trope Repair Shop over the name being changed without appropriate consensus being made. The name was reverted back to Vetinari Paradox not, as near as I can tell, because anyone actually liked the old title, but because action had been undertaken without undergoing a consensus process. After a new extended discussion and a new crowner which both yielded the exact same result, the same outcome occurred. Vetinari Job Security was the preferred new title, and no one was completely sure whether a rename really ought to be performed, in spite of the obvious crowner results. The decision for action was finally made when one troper noted that since half of the links were already Vetinari Job Security Wiki Words, that facilitated an easy change, and so the trope was renamed, again.
Something I must emphasize about all this is that I had no idea any of the above paragraph happened until some months later when I happened upon this discussion in a new context. A moderator shook an angry fist at whatever anonymous troper performed this action and stated that such moves were not appropriate. It's a chastisement that would have made sense except that in both the page history and in the discussion page, I'd left fairly clear notes detailing my rationale, and both were signed by my wiki handle. I'd had no idea this incident occurred at all, and would not have ever been aware it was an incident at all if I hadn't later randomly stumbled into the newer thread.
At the time all of this going on, I was oblivious, but particularly in retrospect, this affair established a fact that I could never have ascertained if I had stayed in Trope Repair Shop. For all the notifications lying around, it was incredibly easy for a user to make a major edit without ever having any idea that Trope Repair Shop exists. This, admittedly, is a fairly obvious point- at least for someone not used to posting in the forums. Now that I was no longer posting in the forums, many conventions that I had taken for granted I increasingly saw as just not being relevant.
In the case of Vetinari Paradox, this consensus was established in an old Trope Repair Shop thread. Vetinari is a character from the Discworld series. He's evil, I think (I've never actually read any of it), but any attempts to remove him from his position of authority end up failing because he's apparently the only person in the entire city competent enough to run things. See, it's a paradox, sort of, in that Discworld can't live with him or can't live without him.
You may have noticed I had to struggle a bit there to try and work the word "paradox" in there. This was another one of those metaphor titles that was really obvious in YKTTW but which were extremely non-intuitive when the title came into usage on the common wiki. Given the relative obscurity of the Vetinari character, this trope probably should have been renamed completely. But like so many other discussions, the relevance of Vetinari as a "TV Tropes icon" was endlessly debated. Headway was only made when the compromise suggestion was offered of Vetinari Job Security. This was not a fantastic title, since it still elevated Vetinari as the trope's true exemplar, but at the very least, the trope actually describes job security. It doesn't really describe a paradox.
Even though I had participated in this forum thread, I did not enact the final rename. And so, like so many renames before and after, Vetinari Paradox languished in obscurity. My memory was refreshed when, during my time in the discussion pages, another troper called my attention to the title- the forum thread itself had long since been purged, but the crowner strongly showing a rename to Vetinari Job Security as the preferred outcome remained. I saw no reason for an inaccurate title to continue to be an inaccurate title given the established consensus, so I changed the main title and changed half of the redirects.
Some time after this happened, there was a ruckus in Trope Repair Shop over the name being changed without appropriate consensus being made. The name was reverted back to Vetinari Paradox not, as near as I can tell, because anyone actually liked the old title, but because action had been undertaken without undergoing a consensus process. After a new extended discussion and a new crowner which both yielded the exact same result, the same outcome occurred. Vetinari Job Security was the preferred new title, and no one was completely sure whether a rename really ought to be performed, in spite of the obvious crowner results. The decision for action was finally made when one troper noted that since half of the links were already Vetinari Job Security Wiki Words, that facilitated an easy change, and so the trope was renamed, again.
Something I must emphasize about all this is that I had no idea any of the above paragraph happened until some months later when I happened upon this discussion in a new context. A moderator shook an angry fist at whatever anonymous troper performed this action and stated that such moves were not appropriate. It's a chastisement that would have made sense except that in both the page history and in the discussion page, I'd left fairly clear notes detailing my rationale, and both were signed by my wiki handle. I'd had no idea this incident occurred at all, and would not have ever been aware it was an incident at all if I hadn't later randomly stumbled into the newer thread.
At the time all of this going on, I was oblivious, but particularly in retrospect, this affair established a fact that I could never have ascertained if I had stayed in Trope Repair Shop. For all the notifications lying around, it was incredibly easy for a user to make a major edit without ever having any idea that Trope Repair Shop exists. This, admittedly, is a fairly obvious point- at least for someone not used to posting in the forums. Now that I was no longer posting in the forums, many conventions that I had taken for granted I increasingly saw as just not being relevant.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Faction: The Casual Troper
The title for this post is a bit of a misnomer- casual tropers aren't really so much a unified faction so much as they are tropers without factions. And I don't mean this as in "they reject the idea of factions". Rather, they lack the very comprehension that factions or issues similar to them exist in the wiki at all. They take the wiki's opening message of "buttload more informal" quite literally, and as a result interact in the wiki environment largely based on their own random whims.
Casual tropers were by far the ones I interacted with the most in the discussion pages. They posed specific questions about specific pages and then went back into their random browsing. Casual tropers don't monitor individual pages, at least not on any regular basis. They usually read timely responses made to the questions they pose, but seldom have follow-ups, though they do occasionally offer a word of thanks.
The term "casual troper" is one that I made up- oddly enough, though, when I was still in the forums they were still quite the topical troublemakers in spite of not having a name. They were the ones blamed for the proliferation of poor page images, Natter and unsavory Wiki Words such as I Am Not Making This Up, This Troper, or any of the multiple tropes which were often Wiki Worded in spite of the fact that no one had any idea what they meant. In all fairness, they really were responsible for all of these things, but whereas in the forums they were seen as a malicious element ruining the wiki's operating principles, when I actually discussed issues with them, I realized that they were simply ignorant.
Now, while ignorance is certainly a bad thing, it's not malicious. Some of the casual tropers were hostile when I tried to answer their questions, others conciliatory. But all of them pretty much accepted and understood the explanations I gave for why such-and-such page action was performed, or why edits they made were changed. Not all of them agreed with the explanation I gave, but if they undid my edits they always provided a reasonable counter-argument. Provided I saw the last part, I was willing to accept that I was wrong and that the other person's actions were justified. I was still wary of Trope Repair Shop at this point, and had no interest in getting into an Edit War.
As I explained the nuances of wiki quality control to individuals, the sheer difference between what I was doing in the discussion pages versus what I did in Trope Repair Shop became all the more obvious. I had become increasingly disenchanted with Trope Repair Shop when I initially suggested doing away with it entirely. I was sick of all the mental plotting. Even before I was directly insulted I'd felt a sense of unease as to whether my proposals were really being treated seriously. I had gotten used to assuming in many cases that a compromise solution would have to be necessary, regardless of the actual merits of the rename under discussion, even before it was discussed at all, because it seemed like most Trope Repair Shop conversations were verbal battles necessitating strategy and planning. One popular anti-rename strategy was to not respond to rename proposals, but rather ignore it and hope they fall off the first page of Trope Repair Shop posts, completely forgotten. Basically, demoralize the complainer into giving up.
Such thinking was unheard of in the discussion pages. There, provided a person gives an explanation of what they're doing, they can basically do whatever they want unless someone verbally disagrees with them. There's an understanding among casual tropers that since anyone can edit the wiki, it stands to reason that any bad edits can be fairly easily reversed. There's not really a point to discussion unless there is a disagreement caused by ignorance, or if there's an outright Edit War. In the latter case moderators were expected to intervene, though I only saw this happen once, and only because I asked a moderator to intervene myself.
There was also a much subtler difference. A casual troper is much more likely to interact brusquely, and far less likely to be offended. This change in interaction fascinated me, as the Trope Repair Shop environment was the exact opposite. So far as I could tell, casual tropers had difficulty holding grudges because they knew they were unlikely to meet the same people in the future. Insults basically indicated a failure to communicate- the recipient was either not adequately explaining what they were doing or not adequately paying attention to others' opinions. It wasn't really anything personal- when negative comments were directed toward me I took it in stride. If I truly was wrong, I could easily apologize. This was not an easy thing to do in Trope Repair Shop, where everyone was assumed to be acting in good faith.
Casual tropers were by far the ones I interacted with the most in the discussion pages. They posed specific questions about specific pages and then went back into their random browsing. Casual tropers don't monitor individual pages, at least not on any regular basis. They usually read timely responses made to the questions they pose, but seldom have follow-ups, though they do occasionally offer a word of thanks.
The term "casual troper" is one that I made up- oddly enough, though, when I was still in the forums they were still quite the topical troublemakers in spite of not having a name. They were the ones blamed for the proliferation of poor page images, Natter and unsavory Wiki Words such as I Am Not Making This Up, This Troper, or any of the multiple tropes which were often Wiki Worded in spite of the fact that no one had any idea what they meant. In all fairness, they really were responsible for all of these things, but whereas in the forums they were seen as a malicious element ruining the wiki's operating principles, when I actually discussed issues with them, I realized that they were simply ignorant.
Now, while ignorance is certainly a bad thing, it's not malicious. Some of the casual tropers were hostile when I tried to answer their questions, others conciliatory. But all of them pretty much accepted and understood the explanations I gave for why such-and-such page action was performed, or why edits they made were changed. Not all of them agreed with the explanation I gave, but if they undid my edits they always provided a reasonable counter-argument. Provided I saw the last part, I was willing to accept that I was wrong and that the other person's actions were justified. I was still wary of Trope Repair Shop at this point, and had no interest in getting into an Edit War.
As I explained the nuances of wiki quality control to individuals, the sheer difference between what I was doing in the discussion pages versus what I did in Trope Repair Shop became all the more obvious. I had become increasingly disenchanted with Trope Repair Shop when I initially suggested doing away with it entirely. I was sick of all the mental plotting. Even before I was directly insulted I'd felt a sense of unease as to whether my proposals were really being treated seriously. I had gotten used to assuming in many cases that a compromise solution would have to be necessary, regardless of the actual merits of the rename under discussion, even before it was discussed at all, because it seemed like most Trope Repair Shop conversations were verbal battles necessitating strategy and planning. One popular anti-rename strategy was to not respond to rename proposals, but rather ignore it and hope they fall off the first page of Trope Repair Shop posts, completely forgotten. Basically, demoralize the complainer into giving up.
Such thinking was unheard of in the discussion pages. There, provided a person gives an explanation of what they're doing, they can basically do whatever they want unless someone verbally disagrees with them. There's an understanding among casual tropers that since anyone can edit the wiki, it stands to reason that any bad edits can be fairly easily reversed. There's not really a point to discussion unless there is a disagreement caused by ignorance, or if there's an outright Edit War. In the latter case moderators were expected to intervene, though I only saw this happen once, and only because I asked a moderator to intervene myself.
There was also a much subtler difference. A casual troper is much more likely to interact brusquely, and far less likely to be offended. This change in interaction fascinated me, as the Trope Repair Shop environment was the exact opposite. So far as I could tell, casual tropers had difficulty holding grudges because they knew they were unlikely to meet the same people in the future. Insults basically indicated a failure to communicate- the recipient was either not adequately explaining what they were doing or not adequately paying attention to others' opinions. It wasn't really anything personal- when negative comments were directed toward me I took it in stride. If I truly was wrong, I could easily apologize. This was not an easy thing to do in Trope Repair Shop, where everyone was assumed to be acting in good faith.
Monday, May 9, 2011
History: Crowners (Part V)
Inexplicable crowner results were a constant part of Trope Repair Shop- as has been noted, votes would often be completely at odds with the tone of the actual discussion. In Wiki Talk discussion, many culprits were suggested for this state of affairs- the one we settled on were individuals who frequented the crowner activity tab. Crowner activity tabs have no links the forum threads that usually precede discussion, so it made sense. When I left the forums I assumed, because of this conclusion, that crowners posted in the discussion pages would also receive decent volume. In actuality, crowners on the discussion pages seldom yielded more than three votes, including my own. Data gathered from these crowners was so inconsequential as to be practically useless, particularly compared to the yields I could expect from crowners in Trope Repair Shop.
Puzzled by this turn of events, later on I tried using crowners in the YKTTW context. I never did this of my own volition- only when I saw a proposal where some tropers were saying that the proposal was really pretty similar to an existing page, but this existing page had some obvious, major flaw that likely led to the creation of a duplicate proposal. Crowners posted in this context easily gained over a dozen votes- nothing outstanding, but since nearly all of them were positive it was enough for major page action.
The typical YKTTW proposal has more traffic than the typical discussion page, mainly because YKTTW proposals are ephemeral with short, high bursts of activity while discussion pages exist pretty much forever- YKTTW is regularly checked by some regular users. I'm not sure anyone has ever bothered to check the recent discussion list for places to post except for me. Going by this numbers game, I realized that the true culprit of bizarre crowner votes was laid straight at the feet of Trope Repair Shop.
Trope Repair Shop only has about two dozen regular contributors at a time- the reason why many suspected that crowner results were off was because particularly contentious debates would yield several times that amount of total votes. On one occasion a crowner managed to amass six votes in about ninety seconds- far faster than usual. This so surprised me that I demanded the voters identify themselves. When all did so, I wrote the event off, but I realize now that I failed to perceive something very significant- these individuals probably would not have identified themselves had I not asked them to. They had no interest in participating in the discussion. They were only there to watch. Trope Repair Shop had lurkers.
For a forum this isn't much of a revelation- most forums have lurkers of some type. The problem was that Trope Repair Shop wasn't supposed to be a forum. It existed for the explicit purpose of discussing opinions and putting the results of these discussions into action. However, because all known tropers have an equal ability to vote in the crowners, lurkers possess the benefit of being able to help decide wiki policy without ever actually having to test or justify their opinions. This is why crowners can have such erratic results- if lurkers, particularly lurkers belonging to a specific faction get involved in voting, they can affect wiki policy by simply dismissing any opinion they see they don't like without having to actually justify their argument.
Objectively, of course, there's nothing so terrible about this. Mainly it underscores a colossal misperception forumites have about Trope Repair Shop- that anyone who participates must, by necessity, be informed. Whenever we discussed the poor crowner results it was always assumed that some force outside of Trope Repair Shop was messing with them. We had to- to think otherwise would mean accepting that Trope Repair Shop could be inherently flawed in some very unsettling ways.
Interestingly, there was one class of crowner that featured impressive, recurring and consistent vote tallies completely outside of the forums. These were the original crowners- the ones meant to vote on "what was the best episode of Batman", or some other series. This behavior persisted even after the old crowner system had apparently been supplanted entirely by the "Crowning" icons that appeared on the top of every page. How or why these original crowners were able to continue acquiring votes in spite of their obsolescence is something I never figured out- mainly because I never really looked into it. How people have fun on the wiki in their own way was not an issue that particularly interested me unless it somehow affected the quality of the content. It only even seems relevant now because of the way it illustrates the opinions of those individuals on the wiki who I came to know as the casual tropers.
Puzzled by this turn of events, later on I tried using crowners in the YKTTW context. I never did this of my own volition- only when I saw a proposal where some tropers were saying that the proposal was really pretty similar to an existing page, but this existing page had some obvious, major flaw that likely led to the creation of a duplicate proposal. Crowners posted in this context easily gained over a dozen votes- nothing outstanding, but since nearly all of them were positive it was enough for major page action.
The typical YKTTW proposal has more traffic than the typical discussion page, mainly because YKTTW proposals are ephemeral with short, high bursts of activity while discussion pages exist pretty much forever- YKTTW is regularly checked by some regular users. I'm not sure anyone has ever bothered to check the recent discussion list for places to post except for me. Going by this numbers game, I realized that the true culprit of bizarre crowner votes was laid straight at the feet of Trope Repair Shop.
Trope Repair Shop only has about two dozen regular contributors at a time- the reason why many suspected that crowner results were off was because particularly contentious debates would yield several times that amount of total votes. On one occasion a crowner managed to amass six votes in about ninety seconds- far faster than usual. This so surprised me that I demanded the voters identify themselves. When all did so, I wrote the event off, but I realize now that I failed to perceive something very significant- these individuals probably would not have identified themselves had I not asked them to. They had no interest in participating in the discussion. They were only there to watch. Trope Repair Shop had lurkers.
For a forum this isn't much of a revelation- most forums have lurkers of some type. The problem was that Trope Repair Shop wasn't supposed to be a forum. It existed for the explicit purpose of discussing opinions and putting the results of these discussions into action. However, because all known tropers have an equal ability to vote in the crowners, lurkers possess the benefit of being able to help decide wiki policy without ever actually having to test or justify their opinions. This is why crowners can have such erratic results- if lurkers, particularly lurkers belonging to a specific faction get involved in voting, they can affect wiki policy by simply dismissing any opinion they see they don't like without having to actually justify their argument.
Objectively, of course, there's nothing so terrible about this. Mainly it underscores a colossal misperception forumites have about Trope Repair Shop- that anyone who participates must, by necessity, be informed. Whenever we discussed the poor crowner results it was always assumed that some force outside of Trope Repair Shop was messing with them. We had to- to think otherwise would mean accepting that Trope Repair Shop could be inherently flawed in some very unsettling ways.
Interestingly, there was one class of crowner that featured impressive, recurring and consistent vote tallies completely outside of the forums. These were the original crowners- the ones meant to vote on "what was the best episode of Batman", or some other series. This behavior persisted even after the old crowner system had apparently been supplanted entirely by the "Crowning" icons that appeared on the top of every page. How or why these original crowners were able to continue acquiring votes in spite of their obsolescence is something I never figured out- mainly because I never really looked into it. How people have fun on the wiki in their own way was not an issue that particularly interested me unless it somehow affected the quality of the content. It only even seems relevant now because of the way it illustrates the opinions of those individuals on the wiki who I came to know as the casual tropers.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Culture: The Discussion Pages
The discussion pages are a very conservative place. Even though the forums had changed radically in between the creation of the Trope Rename forum and my departure, I could detect no significant difference in the culture between when I shifted toward YKTTW in mid-2008 and when I left the forums altogether in April of 2010. This was not a good thing. When I first left the discussion pages it was mainly because there wasn't all that much to do there. Discussion page posts are often random comments made in the dark with only the vague hope that someone might come along and clarify an unclear point.
Oddly, even though the appearance of a "someone" was a rare occurrence, we actually had a word for such people- mentors. An admin at one point explicitly outlined mentoring as an extremely valuable role to take on the wiki in that it instructs inexperienced users as to the nuances of wiki protocol. This position was made all the more valuable by the wiki's determination to not write down anything that could be considered a "rule". Given everything that I had done in crafting wiki policy and enforcing rename action, I figured that I qualified as a mentor by this point.
This was a bit of an odd state of affairs considering that I also doubted my judgment entirely because of the difficulties being experienced by Trope Repair Shop. For this reason I decided not to take initiative in any page actions. Now that I knew a tool existed that would track recent discussion page activity, I simply looked at the tool and reacted to whatever issues other people raised. My reasoning was that even if my rationales were dubious, discussion page tropers did not go to the forums so whatever issues they raised were probably born out of concern for content, not procedure. With this my main task became resolving and acting upon these comments in the dark.
One common posting was the declarative statement to the effect that an example be added to the page, removed from the page, or that the description or some other such object be modified to be brought in line with certain facts. These I decided to leave alone, not because they were bad suggestions, but because the entire point of having a wiki is that you can edit it without permission. I ended up creating a new Wiki Word, You Could Always Edit It Yourself, with a description amounting to "the whole point of the wiki is that you can edit the page yourself. Stop asking for permission and just do it". This wasn't a wholly original idea- YKTTW for some time had the Wiki Word Just Launch It Already which was attached to YKTTW proposals where an individual was equivocating on launching a new trope instead of, well, just launching it already. The idea was mainly to save time, since it was easier to Wiki Word a general message than it was to come up with different explanations for each situation.
The strangest thing about all of this was that renames, the controversial lifeblood of the wiki I had known for the last couple of years, were seldom if ever mentioned or lobbied for in the discussion pages. When tropers wanted significant page changes, they were usually complaining about a vagary in the description. They often didn't really care what the resolution was or who enacted it. They just saw a page that was in some manner poorly written or difficult to read and wanted to read a well-written, easy to read one instead. This was especially obvious when I started out in the discussion pages. Even though no one had any idea who I was, I was commonly thanked for helping to deal with various issues and explaining my reasoning in a discussion reply, encouraging anyone who wanted to to modify my changes if they were somehow deficient.
Even though my discussion page work wasn't as spectacular and obvious as what I did when I was primarily pushing renames and major page action, I felt like I got a lot more done. Even minor issues could sometimes be time-consuming- oftentimes when someone asked a question about "what does such-and-such trope mean in this context?" I had to think it over and review the page before I could come to a satisfactory answer and make a rewrite. But even extreme cases were greatly dwarfed by the mental energy required in Trope Repair Shop, where discussions were abstract, theoretical, and seldom went anywhere. For this reason my work in the discussion pages is also more difficult to remember, even though I would often make several significant page edits of various degree in a single discussion ticker trawl whereas Trope Repair Shop visits had a much lower rate of tangible action.
It was also fairly early on that I started getting my first taste of how different the discussion pages were from the forums. You Could Always Edit It Yourself was merged with a very old administrative page, Repair Dont Respond a week or so after I first created it. This action annoyed me, since Repair Dont Respond concerned Natter in the main page whereas You Could Always Edit It Yourself was a direct statement I made to specific tropers. It didn't really bother me that much, though, since I came to learn that casual tropers commonly linked certain Wiki Words without ever actually reading the page they were linking to.
Oddly, even though the appearance of a "someone" was a rare occurrence, we actually had a word for such people- mentors. An admin at one point explicitly outlined mentoring as an extremely valuable role to take on the wiki in that it instructs inexperienced users as to the nuances of wiki protocol. This position was made all the more valuable by the wiki's determination to not write down anything that could be considered a "rule". Given everything that I had done in crafting wiki policy and enforcing rename action, I figured that I qualified as a mentor by this point.
This was a bit of an odd state of affairs considering that I also doubted my judgment entirely because of the difficulties being experienced by Trope Repair Shop. For this reason I decided not to take initiative in any page actions. Now that I knew a tool existed that would track recent discussion page activity, I simply looked at the tool and reacted to whatever issues other people raised. My reasoning was that even if my rationales were dubious, discussion page tropers did not go to the forums so whatever issues they raised were probably born out of concern for content, not procedure. With this my main task became resolving and acting upon these comments in the dark.
One common posting was the declarative statement to the effect that an example be added to the page, removed from the page, or that the description or some other such object be modified to be brought in line with certain facts. These I decided to leave alone, not because they were bad suggestions, but because the entire point of having a wiki is that you can edit it without permission. I ended up creating a new Wiki Word, You Could Always Edit It Yourself, with a description amounting to "the whole point of the wiki is that you can edit the page yourself. Stop asking for permission and just do it". This wasn't a wholly original idea- YKTTW for some time had the Wiki Word Just Launch It Already which was attached to YKTTW proposals where an individual was equivocating on launching a new trope instead of, well, just launching it already. The idea was mainly to save time, since it was easier to Wiki Word a general message than it was to come up with different explanations for each situation.
The strangest thing about all of this was that renames, the controversial lifeblood of the wiki I had known for the last couple of years, were seldom if ever mentioned or lobbied for in the discussion pages. When tropers wanted significant page changes, they were usually complaining about a vagary in the description. They often didn't really care what the resolution was or who enacted it. They just saw a page that was in some manner poorly written or difficult to read and wanted to read a well-written, easy to read one instead. This was especially obvious when I started out in the discussion pages. Even though no one had any idea who I was, I was commonly thanked for helping to deal with various issues and explaining my reasoning in a discussion reply, encouraging anyone who wanted to to modify my changes if they were somehow deficient.
Even though my discussion page work wasn't as spectacular and obvious as what I did when I was primarily pushing renames and major page action, I felt like I got a lot more done. Even minor issues could sometimes be time-consuming- oftentimes when someone asked a question about "what does such-and-such trope mean in this context?" I had to think it over and review the page before I could come to a satisfactory answer and make a rewrite. But even extreme cases were greatly dwarfed by the mental energy required in Trope Repair Shop, where discussions were abstract, theoretical, and seldom went anywhere. For this reason my work in the discussion pages is also more difficult to remember, even though I would often make several significant page edits of various degree in a single discussion ticker trawl whereas Trope Repair Shop visits had a much lower rate of tangible action.
It was also fairly early on that I started getting my first taste of how different the discussion pages were from the forums. You Could Always Edit It Yourself was merged with a very old administrative page, Repair Dont Respond a week or so after I first created it. This action annoyed me, since Repair Dont Respond concerned Natter in the main page whereas You Could Always Edit It Yourself was a direct statement I made to specific tropers. It didn't really bother me that much, though, since I came to learn that casual tropers commonly linked certain Wiki Words without ever actually reading the page they were linking to.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Terminology: Notability
When I left Trope Repair Shop, I had to put out of my mind any preconceptions I had about the way TV Tropes worked based on the opinions of that forum community. This meant having to mentally reconstruct the wiki's foundations from the ground up. The first and most important abstract concept I thought of in these terms was notability. One of TV Tropes' central defining axims is There Is No Such Thing As Notability. This means that any example can be added to any page so long as it is an example of the trope described. It sounds simple enough abstractly, but such broad terminology often resulted in conflict. After all, what grounds were there to remove any example since every example has an inherent right of notability?
I received the answer to this question in my first attempted major page action- that of Notable Webcomics. Notable Webcomics at this time was simply a large page consisting of every possible webcomic that anyone who happened by thought was notable. As I'd had no experience with major page action, I thought this whole page was suspect. It seemed to me the height of silliness to have a whole page dedicated to webcomics that some people somewhere happened to like. I wished to get rid of a fair amount of them, as this page was so preposterously long that no sensible person could finish it in one sitting, let alone retain knowledge of its multitude of information.
A moderator explained to me the basics of notability. Unless someone was so unabashed as to promote their own webcomic on the Notable Webcomics page, there wasn't really any problem with any of the individual examples. However, simply because an example has a place on a page does not mean that the page must stay in its current form. Because most of the examples were written by random individuals from across the Internet, the writing overall was not very good. Additionally, as the page was very long to read, it would make sense to split it into multiple sections thus making the whole thing more readable.
The above was just my takeaway. I doubt the moderator worded it exactly like that, but this was my interpretation. So, determined and with a clear sense of direction, I got to work on the page. I defined multiple sub-categories of webcomics (Slice of Life, Fantasy, Gaming, etc.), and got to work separating each individual example into one of those many groups. Since I was reading every example out of habit anyway, I also edited them. Overly long examples I made shorter. Unclear examples which I could improve I improved. Examples which were overly generic and not particularly informative I simply deleted. I was unsure as to whether I was doing the whole editing thing correctly, but decided if I messed up someone else could fix my mistakes.
A day or so after I finished up all the work I received some evaluation. The moderator congratulated me on doing a very good job fixing the page. For my efforts I was awarded with a Made Of Win nomination. Anyone can be nominated for a Made Of Win for almost any reason by anyone, provided it's for something well-done. The fact that I had been nominated by a moderator wasn't so important to me as the fact that I had been nominated by someone- indeed, it was only later that I discovered that the individual in question was a moderator at all. I just figured this was a more experienced troper trying to be helpful. It made me feel good about the work I did and made me feel closer to the community, nebulously as I understood it at the time.
The appeal I saw in this experience was how it defined notability for me. It is important, but not unbending. The true priority of the wiki lay not in the recitation of rules, but in the creation and maintenance of pages in such a way that people want to read them, and can read them in such a way so as to learn something. The principle of notability was used, not because any example had a "right" to be there, but because understanding tropes requires a broad detailing of their use in media from all possible genres. Examples are to be judged by the value of their content- not the source of it.
There was also another element of appeal. If not for that moderator being helpful to me, I would not have been motivated to get more involved with wiki maintenance. With this understanding, I adopted a simple credo to work through the discussion pages. If anyone has a question about anything relating to a page, I ought to answer it as nicely and as helpfully as I can. It made me want to get involved, so it stood to reason that it might encourage others as well. Besides, the notification efforts had already failed- it wasn't like I could do much worse.
I received the answer to this question in my first attempted major page action- that of Notable Webcomics. Notable Webcomics at this time was simply a large page consisting of every possible webcomic that anyone who happened by thought was notable. As I'd had no experience with major page action, I thought this whole page was suspect. It seemed to me the height of silliness to have a whole page dedicated to webcomics that some people somewhere happened to like. I wished to get rid of a fair amount of them, as this page was so preposterously long that no sensible person could finish it in one sitting, let alone retain knowledge of its multitude of information.
A moderator explained to me the basics of notability. Unless someone was so unabashed as to promote their own webcomic on the Notable Webcomics page, there wasn't really any problem with any of the individual examples. However, simply because an example has a place on a page does not mean that the page must stay in its current form. Because most of the examples were written by random individuals from across the Internet, the writing overall was not very good. Additionally, as the page was very long to read, it would make sense to split it into multiple sections thus making the whole thing more readable.
The above was just my takeaway. I doubt the moderator worded it exactly like that, but this was my interpretation. So, determined and with a clear sense of direction, I got to work on the page. I defined multiple sub-categories of webcomics (Slice of Life, Fantasy, Gaming, etc.), and got to work separating each individual example into one of those many groups. Since I was reading every example out of habit anyway, I also edited them. Overly long examples I made shorter. Unclear examples which I could improve I improved. Examples which were overly generic and not particularly informative I simply deleted. I was unsure as to whether I was doing the whole editing thing correctly, but decided if I messed up someone else could fix my mistakes.
A day or so after I finished up all the work I received some evaluation. The moderator congratulated me on doing a very good job fixing the page. For my efforts I was awarded with a Made Of Win nomination. Anyone can be nominated for a Made Of Win for almost any reason by anyone, provided it's for something well-done. The fact that I had been nominated by a moderator wasn't so important to me as the fact that I had been nominated by someone- indeed, it was only later that I discovered that the individual in question was a moderator at all. I just figured this was a more experienced troper trying to be helpful. It made me feel good about the work I did and made me feel closer to the community, nebulously as I understood it at the time.
The appeal I saw in this experience was how it defined notability for me. It is important, but not unbending. The true priority of the wiki lay not in the recitation of rules, but in the creation and maintenance of pages in such a way that people want to read them, and can read them in such a way so as to learn something. The principle of notability was used, not because any example had a "right" to be there, but because understanding tropes requires a broad detailing of their use in media from all possible genres. Examples are to be judged by the value of their content- not the source of it.
There was also another element of appeal. If not for that moderator being helpful to me, I would not have been motivated to get more involved with wiki maintenance. With this understanding, I adopted a simple credo to work through the discussion pages. If anyone has a question about anything relating to a page, I ought to answer it as nicely and as helpfully as I can. It made me want to get involved, so it stood to reason that it might encourage others as well. Besides, the notification efforts had already failed- it wasn't like I could do much worse.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
History: Departure from the Forums
In the last discussion I participated in on improving issues regarding participation and validity in Trope Repair Shop discussions, I suggested that we might consider doing away with Trope Repair Shop altogether. I considered that since we knew people were unwilling to pay mind to the Trope Repair Shop notifications, it was possible that they would be more amenable to "this page has active discussion" tags and a list of the most recent discussion page posts. That sentiment seems prescient in retrospect, but at the time I was merely suggesting a radical solution in the hopes that someone would counter with a compromise. I had realized by this time that this was the easiest way to gather consensus, mainly because tropers felt less attacked by compromise. Someone who is compromising cannot, by simple logic, be attempting to unilaterally ruin the wiki. It's fitting, then, that a complete failure of this strategy on my part was what ultimately induced me to leave.
A trope exists by the name of Orcus On His Throne. I'd tell you what this trope is about, but I'm not sure myself. The metaphor is pretty simple. Orcus is a Dungeons and Dragons characters who's always sitting on his throne. What I saw as the implied meaning of this metaphor was "evil guy is super-powerful but never actually does anything". The description, however, was very confusing, as the last part of it detailed all sorts of important plot-related things that Orcus could be doing while not sitting on his throne, making the definition seem to be "evil guy is super-powerful but never gets around to just stomping on the much weaker heroes".
Anti-rename sentiment was much crystallized at this time, so I was doubtful that I could actually get a rename on this issue. My long-term plan was to let the discussion stew long enough that users would admit that they weren't sure what the trope was referring to. Then as a "compromise", I would offer to rewrite the trope's description so that it at least made sense with the implied metaphor. Orcus On His Throne is an esoteric name that really ought to be renamed, but I figured a coherent description was better than nothing at all.
The plan backfired, more because of the tone of my post than the actual strategy. I had gotten used to discussing page changes with a cut master in a semi-antagonistic manner. But it turned out that this individual saw my posts in a much more menacing light than I had intended. When I offered the compromise, something (I can't recall what, exactly) caused the cut master to fly off the handle, and basically start listing every single part of me that was despicable and abhorrent. I'm making it sound more noble than it really was- the cut master was acting like a petty child, and was quickly rebuked and thumped by another moderator.
When I think about this in the context of a forum, the moderator's reaction makes sense. The cut master was violating the basic forum rule of "don't be a jack ass". But that was the problem. Trope Repair Shop was not really a forum. It was supposed to serve as the impetus to useful action in helping the wiki. There weren't that many of us, and this cut master was one of the few users who I interacted with regularly. I could no longer tell for sure whether our disagreements were because the cut master legitimately disagreed with my interpretation or was only opposing my viewpoint out of some irrationally powerful hatred. But the moderator, in thumping all of the offending material completely and forbidding future discussion of the matter, had essentially stated that this incident had never happened and expected everyone to act accordingly.
This wasn't something I could accept. It wasn't that I was mad at the cut master- I was really more upset at the moderator. If negative opinions like this existed, regardless of who or what they were directed against, I felt we had to be able to air them openly instead of simply bottling them up indefinitely. The thumping did little to address the underlying problems that prompted the outburst- which may have been the point, since such a discussion could open up uncomfortable facts about the way various factions within Trope Repair Shop saw each other.
When I suggested replacing Trope Repair Shop with a tool that would allow users to view recent discussion page posts, an admin pointed me to the new edits section of the wiki where such capabilities already existed, admitting concern that a long-standing contributor such as myself was unaware of this tool. My experience with Orcus On His Throne made me realize that I could no longer be sure that any action arising from Trope Repair Shop was valid, even those derived from my own proposals. I announced in the Orcus On His Throne thread that for the time being I would leave the forums, to see if a less hostile work environment existed elsewhere on the wiki. This announcement, unsurprisingly, was also thumped.
A trope exists by the name of Orcus On His Throne. I'd tell you what this trope is about, but I'm not sure myself. The metaphor is pretty simple. Orcus is a Dungeons and Dragons characters who's always sitting on his throne. What I saw as the implied meaning of this metaphor was "evil guy is super-powerful but never actually does anything". The description, however, was very confusing, as the last part of it detailed all sorts of important plot-related things that Orcus could be doing while not sitting on his throne, making the definition seem to be "evil guy is super-powerful but never gets around to just stomping on the much weaker heroes".
Anti-rename sentiment was much crystallized at this time, so I was doubtful that I could actually get a rename on this issue. My long-term plan was to let the discussion stew long enough that users would admit that they weren't sure what the trope was referring to. Then as a "compromise", I would offer to rewrite the trope's description so that it at least made sense with the implied metaphor. Orcus On His Throne is an esoteric name that really ought to be renamed, but I figured a coherent description was better than nothing at all.
The plan backfired, more because of the tone of my post than the actual strategy. I had gotten used to discussing page changes with a cut master in a semi-antagonistic manner. But it turned out that this individual saw my posts in a much more menacing light than I had intended. When I offered the compromise, something (I can't recall what, exactly) caused the cut master to fly off the handle, and basically start listing every single part of me that was despicable and abhorrent. I'm making it sound more noble than it really was- the cut master was acting like a petty child, and was quickly rebuked and thumped by another moderator.
When I think about this in the context of a forum, the moderator's reaction makes sense. The cut master was violating the basic forum rule of "don't be a jack ass". But that was the problem. Trope Repair Shop was not really a forum. It was supposed to serve as the impetus to useful action in helping the wiki. There weren't that many of us, and this cut master was one of the few users who I interacted with regularly. I could no longer tell for sure whether our disagreements were because the cut master legitimately disagreed with my interpretation or was only opposing my viewpoint out of some irrationally powerful hatred. But the moderator, in thumping all of the offending material completely and forbidding future discussion of the matter, had essentially stated that this incident had never happened and expected everyone to act accordingly.
This wasn't something I could accept. It wasn't that I was mad at the cut master- I was really more upset at the moderator. If negative opinions like this existed, regardless of who or what they were directed against, I felt we had to be able to air them openly instead of simply bottling them up indefinitely. The thumping did little to address the underlying problems that prompted the outburst- which may have been the point, since such a discussion could open up uncomfortable facts about the way various factions within Trope Repair Shop saw each other.
When I suggested replacing Trope Repair Shop with a tool that would allow users to view recent discussion page posts, an admin pointed me to the new edits section of the wiki where such capabilities already existed, admitting concern that a long-standing contributor such as myself was unaware of this tool. My experience with Orcus On His Throne made me realize that I could no longer be sure that any action arising from Trope Repair Shop was valid, even those derived from my own proposals. I announced in the Orcus On His Throne thread that for the time being I would leave the forums, to see if a less hostile work environment existed elsewhere on the wiki. This announcement, unsurprisingly, was also thumped.
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