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REGENDarySumanai said:
I've always had an issue with this. There is indeed such a thing as notability. Make a checklist and check it off if you see ANY of these with a page on TVTropes.
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The problem is one you have identified with any crowd sourced wiki on a scale as massive as a wiki about all types of media.

It's all well and good to cover all sorts of media, but if you want to be more welcoming of content than Wikipedia, you are forced to lower the bar for entry as a notable topic.

Unfortunately, that then means you are at the mercy of the crowd as to what they give a real shit about.

I believe the results speak for themselves, and I will even lump my own fork into that, because while we have different standards, our bar for entry is also just as low by design, which is unavoidable but regrettable for the ill you have addressed.
 
Ok, that is reasonable for an IMDb style wiki, but what's the point in a catalogue of tropes if the examples aren't actually illustrative of good (or bad) use?

Some pervs fetishist fanfiction isn't advancing anyone's knowledge of the tropes mentioned.

So now you have a list of shit facts people know about media. Cool, but it's useless. Same thing for (insert media here)

Tangential example: you can know every detail of Shakespeare's works, but it's not very useful unless there's something beyond regurgitation. Why did he use the magical crone trope in McBeth? What's an example of the trope being subverted effectively?

Tl;Dr - Strunk and White are still heroes because they did way more than.just list style elements.
 
gobbogobb said:
Ok, that is reasonable for an IMDb style wiki, but what's the point in a catalogue of tropes if the examples aren't actually illustrative of good (or bad) use?

Some pervs fetishist fanfiction isn't advancing anyone's knowledge of the tropes mentioned.

So now you have a list of shit facts people know about media. Cool, but it's useless. Same thing for (insert media here)

Tangential example: you can know every detail of Shakespeare's works, but it's not very useful unless there's something beyond regurgitation. Why did he use the magical crone trope in McBeth? What's an example of the trope being subverted effectively?

Tl;Dr - Strunk and White are still heroes because they did way more than.just list style elements.
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I've posted this link before, but I believe my colleague Brent expresses your concerns and agrees with you better than I can do so myself.

Troping Considered Harmful

My wiki sucks. Actually, it isn't just All The Tropes ; TV Tropes sucks too. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm open to cr...
blog.brentlaabs.com blog.brentlaabs.com
 
I read that a while back, and it was probably on the back of my mind when posting.

Again, if you want a super inclusive list of things wiki, that's okay.

It just seems like if you want any utility, someone has to play traffic cop to the content.
I want to offer real lit crit, not just a bunch of fucking lists. But I want there to be lists too.
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Call me elitist but real lit crit probably doesn't work on commissioned fetishfic (because no one who can do lit crit is gonna admit to reading it)

Maybe bifurcation is the answer. ATTpro for serious deconstruction and ATTclassic for lists of whatever.
 
gobbogobb said:
I read that a while back, and it was probably on the back of my mind when posting.

Again, if you want a super inclusive list of things wiki, that's okay.

It just seems like if you want any utility, someone has to play traffic cop to the content.

Call me elitist but real lit crit probably doesn't work on commissioned fetishfic (because no one who can do lit crit is gonna admit to reading it)

Maybe bifurcation is the answer. ATTpro for serious deconstruction and ATTclassic for lists of whatever.
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I know TVTropes has a review section for media pages, but no one fucking uses it and it's left to rot because of it. I can't say much about ATT because that Geth's baby and the fact that I don't really use it (or TVTropes for that matter). I definitely agree that literature criticism won't work on someone's fetish fan-fiction. After all, it's design to indulge in the author's pet fetish and not for any seriousness. Though the fact that Gor exists just throws that all out the window, despite the fact that Gor is a tire fire of fetishism that was officially published.
 
gobbogobb said:
I read that a while back, and it was probably on the back of my mind when posting.

Again, if you want a super inclusive list of things wiki, that's okay.

It just seems like if you want any utility, someone has to play traffic cop to the content.

Call me elitist but real lit crit probably doesn't work on commissioned fetishfic (because no one who can do lit crit is gonna admit to reading it)

Maybe bifurcation is the answer. ATTpro for serious deconstruction and ATTclassic for lists of whatever.
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I'm not entirely sure that would be feasible, but to the extent possible, we HAVE tried to expand our collection of pages on actual literature, and my brainchild is the source subpages, or where people can store copies of works in the public domain or under permissible licenses, and that's something TV Tropes doesn't offer.

Call me crazy, but if I don't have to visit Project Gutenberg to read classical lit and can do so from the same site I read about the tropes said classical lit I read use, I believe that would encourage more legitimate literary scholarship.

Given the fact many of us who founded ATT (and many of the disaffected tropers we attracted) have the same laments TV Tropes has become a pit of lowest common denominator knob slobbering over crap tier fanfic instead being useful for actual literary discussion, said idea has gone over well, but I'm open to other suggestions.

I do, however, have to devil's advocate the crap tier fanfics for one reason, one I believe more valid than TV Tropes.

Said sperging in below spoiler:

On TV Tropes, they merely have a page on some hideous porn fic right next to a page about Oliver Twist. ATT has a page on both, but we also let you read Dickens' work on the same site, which allows for further analysis of the tropes the work uses without ever having to visit another site. Hell, we could (though no one has actually done this yet) host a crap tier fanfic on a source page under a permissible license, and in doing so still encourage the usage of brains by having the trope analysis and the reading done in the same location, and by hosting both in the same location someone who cares to do actual trope research could then see just how shoddily it uses the tropes and update the trope pages for analyzing the work accordingly for the benefit of others.

Another side benefit of doing this sort of thing makes it easier to refer to shoutouts and quotes from actual classical source media instead of having to reference an offsite resource, which (we hope) will encourage someone who came for a page about some anime that references Moby Dick to get interested in Melville's actual story and get interested in that too.

Funnily enough, it turns out TV Tropes shot themselves in the foot when they switch to CC BY NC SA as well. Used to be, under CC BY SA rules, they could reference all other sorts of libre license sites and other materials legally, CC BY NC SA has pretty much undercut them from doing this, meaning their ability to store works under permissible licenses is greatly limited to what the NC clause allows, whereas CC BY SA is far more permissible.
 
my brainchild is the source subpages, or where people can store copies of works in the public domain or under permissible licenses, and that's something TV Tropes doesn't offer.
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That's great. I might even go so far as to require it if a user wants fanfic listed. Maybe even with page/paragraph citations to its tropes. You could probably even work something out with publishers for the site owners to excerpt works for exemplars. Letting the users do it is a legal nightmare.

I'm also not very tolerant regarding fanfiction, so I'm certainly biased.
 
REGENDarySumanai said:
I know TVTropes has a review section for media pages, but no one fucking uses it and it's left to rot because of it. I can't say much about ATT because that Geth's baby and the fact that I don't really use it (or TVTropes for that matter). I definitely agree that literature criticism won't work on someone's fetish fan-fiction. After all, it's design to indulge in the author's pet fetish and not for any seriousness. Though the fact that Gor exists just throws that all out the window, despite the fact that Gor is a tire fire of fetishism that was officially published.
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I argue Gor has a place in literary history (at least for genre fiction/the SFF fandom) since it spawned a bizarre fandom of fetishists (all fat fucks) who try and live their lives in re-enactment of the novels (the Goreans, who have a thread here). That's a lot more than you can say about almost any other fanfic, maybe barring the shit that spawned 50 Shades of Grey. It's utter trash, but it has a legacy. Your average fetish-fic on the other hand is little more than disposable fap material and will be forgotten about by basically everyone unless it becomes a meme like 177013.

GethN7 said:
Call me crazy, but if I don't have to visit Project Gutenberg to read classical lit and can do so from the same site I read about the tropes said classical lit I read use, I believe that would encourage more legitimate literary scholarship.
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Very :optimistic: :optimistic: :optimistic: , but that is a great idea, even if it can't help the pages for the works of Shakespeare combined surpass the size of the trope page for My Little Pony.
 
See that's where I would go iron fisted dictator and delete 90% of the entries for MLP, or if I were in a good mood, give the entire show a containment zone separate from the main site.

Justification: this is not a MLP trivia page, wiki, or blog.
 
gobbogobb said:
See that's where I would go iron fisted dictator and delete 90% of the entries for MLP, or if I were in a good mood, give the entire show a containment zone separate from the main site.

Justification: this is not a MLP trivia page, wiki, or blog.
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Well, we forked long before that series of pages became an even bigger wiki tumor than it already was, and the version we have is a tad unwieldy and could use some moderate pruning in places, but compared to the infected mass on TV Tropes, it's manageable.

One of the things I've noticed many of our usual clientele (on Miraheze, Wikia still gets a lot of the more autistic TVT runoff, one reason it's something of a containment vessel IMO) left TV Tropes because they were tired of such idiocy and have a much wider degree of taste. Kinda helps most of our regular users have done actual serious writing (beyond fanfic level stuff) and/or have degrees and jobs in doing so.
 
gobbogobb said:
See that's where I would go iron fisted dictator and delete 90% of the entries for MLP, or if I were in a good mood, give the entire show a containment zone separate from the main site.

Justification: this is not a MLP trivia page, wiki, or blog.
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MLP is at least an actual thing that exists. There's actually a corresponding media franchise, and it would be recognized by some sizable chunk of the population. Where you get into the real bad shit is fanfics and other nonsense, which doesn't contribute anything to culture outside of an extremely insular niche of extremely autistic people.

I'd say fanfics should be banned entirely or with limitations only for ones that are somehow incredibly significant. The problem is autists think whatever thing they're obsessed with is always incredibly significant.
 
AnOminous said:
MLP is at least an actual thing that exists. There's actually a corresponding media franchise, and it would be recognized by some sizable chunk of the population. Where you get into the real bad shit is fanfics and other nonsense, which doesn't contribute anything to culture outside of an extremely insular niche of extremely autistic people.

I'd say fanfics should be banned entirely or with limitations only for ones that are somehow incredibly significant. The problem is autists think whatever thing they're obsessed with is always incredibly significant.
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I can say we at ATT do prune out fanfic pages we can't find sources for, are unpublished works in disguise, or are just writing with one hand far more vigorously, and being a discerning critic of fanfics myself, I will personally burn to the ground anything that does not fit the manual of style some asshole dropped like a turd on the porch especially.

TV Tropes had a bad habit of allowing people to whore their fan work and being very, very lazy about enforcing rules on "entry pimping", allowing them to become the biggest repository of fanwank bullshit in no time flat, and I understand that hasn't improved very much.
 
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