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.

History: Crowners (Part IV)

Some time after the Trope Renames forum had gotten used to the idea of crowners, the notions behind them were put up for debate. The crowners, you may recall, were never intended to be used to solve abstract arguments about page maintenance. The ability to tally up votes and thus determine an actual number of support behind certain proposals was helpful, but many flaws arose in the system due to its relatively simple design. Among other things, new crowners were created largely by modifying the web addresses of existing crowners to make a new page. Most new users, accustomed to creating new pages via Wiki Words, needed this aspect explained to them.

That wasn't the only issue. It was also incredibly difficult trying to explain to people that the validity of one crowner can be presupposed on the success of a separate crowner. Say there is a proposition to rename Jonas Quinn and also a list of titles to replace it with. We can say that the title will only be replaced if the proposition to rename the trope itself passes, but for whatever reason people were not able to understand this. The existence of "nay" votes may have impacted the matter, particularly since the highlighted crowner result was always the difference between "yea" and "nay" votes, with the individual tabulation listed separately.

These issues were solved by trisecting the crowners into specialized parts- first, the Single Proposition crowner. The only difference between this and the others tech-wise is that only one proposition is permitted on this crowner. Typically this would be something like "rename this trope". Positive votes indicate a majority wishes for rename, while negative votes indicate that a rename is not generally supported. Alternative Title crowners are intended to be used if consensus for a rename has already been established. These list multiple alternate names for the trope. Because the existence of this crowner assumes that a rename has been approved, options like "keep as is" were expressly forbidden. Page Action crowners were to be used regarding pretty much any other kind of page action- at this time the forum was still called Trope Renames, so these were not used quite so often.

When I try to think back on the rationales used for these changes I have some trouble figuring out what they were. One aspect of the crowner process that was strongly objected to was an option that just said "leave as is". It was deemed that such a choice was redundant, since voting nay on the proposition "rename this trope" pretty much meant the same thing. But the fact that people kept adding these options really said more about the way the system was perceived than anything else- people didn't understand their choices, so they would make one that said, quite unambiguously that major page action on this trope was not wanted.

From there it would seem the problems with crowners really had more to do with social issues than it did with technology. Even with a positive vote staring them right in the face, many people were simply unwilling to engage in any kind of action for fear of seeming belligerent and ignoring the opinion of a large part of the wiki. Additionally, we never could find much evidence that any of the people voting were actually paying any attention to the debate short of flat-out demanding to know who had voted within the confines of a forum thread. In an ideal world, people would vote on the crowners after consulting the forum thread and deciding what to do based on the existing argument. Oftentimes, in forum threads where there was no articulated there was still a strong "nay" vote. This, at times, seemed incredulous, particularly when the pages affected were mundane ones no one had heard of before.

As a result of all this, while the trisection clarified many of the confusing phrasings of the crowner, the fix did not do much to help explain to forum users why certain votes ended up the way they did. As a result, arguing over what the results meant and whether interpretation of them really warranted page action proved to be a lasting tradition of the Trope Renames forum, and that was the real legacy of the crowner explanation originally brought to the forum.

Even though using the crowners in this manner had originally been my idea, their mixed results in the Trope Renames process caused me to slowly distrust them as mere numbers which failed to establish the full weight of the situation. Ironically, I still pushed for more crowner use and created plenty of them throughout this time period. Flawed though the crowners were, they did better at explaining community sentiment than an empty forum thread. Barring extreme cases, I wasn't terribly certain whether my viewpoint was correct either unless I had those anonymous votes backing me up.

History: Crowners (Part III)

YKTTW works fairly well as a system for the creation of new tropes- this is why the crowner innovations in YKTTW ultimately failed. What it did not work well for was the process of changing existing tropes. Rename proposals in these early times were contentious affairs with battle lines drawn between those wishing to fix improper names and those objecting to attempts the wiki's overly "fun" nature. This is where I had the idea to put in crowners.

It may seem hard to imagine this, what with my being unpersonned and all, but at least in the YKTTW period I was very self-conscious about affecting major page changes. The idea that someone would be mad at me for changing a page was very off-putting. I was not the only one on the wiki to feel this way- high-profile rename proposals were seldom followed through on because it was one thing to vigorously argue for a rename. It was quite another to say "your opinion doesn't matter. My argument is better and we're changing the trope title".

I made a move to fight against this gridlock by introducing crowners in any rename proposal which I wanted to affect but where it was ambiguous how many people supported the change and how many did not. The crowners had a much easier time gaining activity with rename proposals than they did with new trope proposals because rename proposals were quickly becoming a popular bone of contention on the wiki. Plenty of users simply ran a ctrl+f search for "rename" to see what the latest effort was on any given trip to YKTTW. These individuals required little convincing to vote on the articles under review- the attraction of the rename proposals was watching people debate over the merits of individual titles. Voting over who had the better argument was really the next logical step.

If this sounds a little like bullying, in truth, it was- no matter how we dressed it up, we were using votes to tell people their opinion didn't matter. It wasn't pretty, but it was clear to everyone that crowners were last-ditch emergency stop-gap measures only to be used in topics where no one from either side of the debate had the guts to either launch or disregard the YKTTW proposal. Incidentally, part of the reason why YKTTW was the original go-to source for renames (and not much other page action) was because new titles could be launched through the YKTTW software.

One important thing I need to note about all this is that while crowners were pervasive at this time, this was mostly thanks to me. Literally, in the sense that I was the troper who posted most of the crowners as there really were not as many rename proposals floating as people tend to assume. Many people did not post crowners because they did not know how. I'm no computer whiz myself, but I was able to figure out that, provided you have a link to an old crowner, you can modify the web address to have the system create a new crowner- in much the same way you can use direct web addresses to make new pages. This was not common knowledge to wiki-goers, and this has not changed as trope repair processes evolved.

The idea behind crowners, though, the basic principle that enough votes mean action can be pushed through, this did stick around because a crowner's very existence implied that if enough votes were collected, the crowner was proof that the collective wiki supported action. This was a bit of an absurd idea in reality, as most of the crowners used to prove this "consensus" had a dozen, maybe a couple of dozen votes on them at most. Of course, most successful crowners concerned relatively obscure pages with titles few genuinely wanted to defend, so the relatively low bar was acceptable. Because rename proposals were made in YKTTW, there was an unspoken assumption that changing the title on a page that is not well-known really only needed as much effort as was required to launch the original page in the first place.

Note that at this point there was nothing formal about crowner use- they only held legitimacy if the active posters chose to believe it (which was most, but not all, of the time). These ideas were formalized with the creation of the centralized Trope Renaming forum. It was at this point that the crowners, and major page action itself, began to undergo a significant transition.

History: Crowners (Part II)

The second purpose of the crowners was unrelated to the first. It came about thanks to a suggestion about voting.

One of the aspects about page creation and maintenance that frustrated many in the early days and still frustrates many today is that when a course of action is identified, even a very obvious one with no disagreement, there will be a lot of hesitancy insofar as actually enacting the new page. I first saw this not in trope repair (which did not exist at these earliest junctures), but in YKTTW.

As has been mentioned, the idea of centralized trope repair came about initially because of poorly named tropes. Early efforts to deal with this problem were primarily concerned with engaging tropers on the YKTTW level. One such idea that I had was to determine names for tropes based on popular vote. Since I was unaware of the crowner system at this time, votes were tallied manually with semi-regular posts in the proposal about which names were leading. This did not end particularly well- the names that resulted from this process were good, but the process itself was exhausting and overbearing because it required constant monitoring of the proposal in question.

Sometimes even today people attempt this same solution to deal with YKTTW gridlock and personal uncertainty about whether a title's ready to launch- mainly because most tropers are unaware of crowners now just as I was then. They always end up coming to the same conclusion that I did. As far as YKTTW goes, it's just much easier to make a gut decision about which title to go with based on the statements that have been made so far. It's not perfect, but it's pretty functional, especially when the title is proposed by a different person than the one who came up with the idea.

But this is in the present. At the time, I thought the voting idea worked, and in an effort to get more varied responses, I tried posting alternate names for YKTTW proposals on the Trope Talk forum and tallying votes there. The results weren't really much different than what was written in YKTTW, but during one of these topics another troper (it may have been an admin- I really don't remember) made note of the existing crowner software, an automated system the wiki was already using that could count votes all by itself. I was very glad to learn of this technology, as it removed the manual aspect of having to tally votes, making it much easier to figure out which titles were popular.

Ultimately, the idea of deciding new trope names by vote still didn't catch on, because even with automated voting there was no way to guarantee that people would actually vote- a problem that persists to this day. I still use crowners in YKTTW if I'm genuinely uncertain which is the best title for a trope, but these are very rare events for very unique situations. Most of the time, it's not a matter of counting votes, but trying to get a feel for which trope name just feels right. Strictly speaking crowner votes in every YKTTW proposal could probably get better results, but it's just too much work. Voting can be fun, but only when used in conjunction with fun activities like trying to select the best episode of a series- which you may recall is what the crowners were originally intended for.

YKTTW didn't really need crowners- it turned out in the end that there were better fixes available. The crowners returned later in the early renaming disputes, and to a large extent have remained there for the simple reason that obvious fixes in the realm of Trope Repair are more difficult to come by. I was also responsible for their introduction into that dispute- but its results were far more lasting than these early forays.

History: Crowners (Part I)

The Crowners were the first particularly elaborate technical alteration made to TV Tropes for purposes not relating directly to wiki maintenance. They were created with a simple purpose in mind- to quantify the trope Crowning Moment of Awesome.

Crowning Moment of Awesome by its original definition was theoretically supposed to refer to an individual series moment which summed up everything that made the show great. Hence the use of the word "crowning". However, it soon ran afoul of the wiki's hive-mind interpretation. People at large who saw the entry and how it was used on the wiki did not think about the grammar of the phrase, and how technically any individual series could only ever have one "crowning moment". They simply thought "oh, this must be a trope that means 'something really cool happened'". Unfortunately, "something cool that happened" isn't really a trope. It's completely subjective based on personal experience. Pretty much anything could be that trope depending on your perspective.

The denizens of TV Tropes were not particularly interested in this constructionist interpretation of trope meaning- they latched on to the new idea of the Crowning Moment. Other crowning tropes were proposed and added to the wiki, and the label pretty much became a predicate that meant "something which inspires great emotion".

In an effort to solve this problem without angering the entire wiki, the crowners were proposed. The crowners are simple voting software. The idea behind them was pretty simple- rather than have multiple, nonsensical Crowning Moments of Whatever, everyone simply votes on the one they like the most, and that is the Crowning Moment.

It was a reasonable enough idea, but it failed in multiple ways to measure up to reality. Most tropers had no idea the crowners existed after implementation- few used them compared to the number of wiki readers at large, and while this was going on, examples continued to be added to pages which were by definition incorrect because a series can only have one "crowning" moment of anything. What it got right down to was that people didn't come to TV Tropes to vote about what their favorite scenes in a show were- they wanted to write about them. The admins eventually had no choice but to give up in this matter entirely, closing the original crowners and creating a new namespace on the wiki specifically devoted to cataloging the subjective content the wiki proper so badly wanted to write down. At this point the inaccurate term "crowning" was removed from the names, so at least it was technically accurate.

In retrospect the whole thing was really a missed opportunity. The Crowning Moment pages were just an excuse for many users to write about their favorite moments in a series. The thing is, tropes are quite literally everywhere. Had we tried encouraging tropers to instead build YKTTW proposals out of examples that they wished to make Crowning Moment entries for, the whole enterprise could have gone in a much more constructive direction.

That, of course, is being a bit unfair on the past. This idea was floated back when the very idea of semi-centralized Trope Repair was quite primitive and people still didn't have much idea how things worked on the wiki pragmatically. I personally failed to see the importance of these issues at all at the time. I only know what happened at all because I went back and studied the discussions back when the crowners ended up becoming relevant for very different reasons. In part, my general apathy toward this issue is why I'm unsure of the exact dates in which these events occurred. I played a very direct part in the other major usage of the crowners, so my exact reflections and interest on their original purpose don't weigh quite so well on my memory as their second one.