Roleplay Namespace Cleanup and Maintenance

My usual process with these sort of things is to go on a cleaning spree and see if there's anything salvageable left, but since we're currently unsure what to even do with these pages, I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

But it's bad though. Real bad.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

What would be the process for codifying Fighteer's criteria for whether a roleplay is "intended for publication" and thus tropable into a rule that we can act on? It's a big change in policy; is it something we can do with a crowner?

Because let's get real, we're not "unsure": we all know what we want to do with pages like this, which is cut them on sight.

Edited by HighCrate on Jul 16th 2019 at 5:14:21 AM

Podcast.DNDND was just created by a new troper, ~acendead. It looks to me like a roleplay done via podcast, and it's got zero-context problems. It's a good test case for our policy.

That "intended for publication" question is highly germane, and I think we can apply a basic smell test to it: are the participants RP'ing for themselves or for an audience? There's a very real qualitative difference in these cases. A play-by-post RP on a forum is not intended for publication. A game run in someone's house is not intended for publication. To work in that format, someone would have to be writing up summaries, after-action-reports, compilations, etc. and posting them in coherent chunks online.

However, an RP that is broadcast, streamed, or held at a public location with spectators clearly is intended for an audience. Then we'd apply the same standards as for any other work: only trope the fictional content, not the participants; participants cannot add their own YMMV examples, etc.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 16th 2019 at 10:01:42 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That all sounds perfectly reasonable to me. By that standard, Disney Conquest is not intended for publication, is not tropable, and should be cut. DNDND, on the other hand, is intended for publication, is a tropable work, and should be cleaned of ZCEs and the page creator pinged to see if they're willing to help add context.

Does that sound right?

Edited by HighCrate on Jul 16th 2019 at 7:00:49 AM

Aren’t people who engage in publicly available play-by-post RP’s doing so with the implicit knowledge that it could and will be available for the public to see? If roleplayers are producing content solely for themselves, then they can do so by keeping it to private channels.

I understand there’s a deep problem with substandard pages in the Roleplay namespace and would be more than happy to assist in a cleanup effort, but getting rid of roleplays that are publicly available under the assumption that they weren’t intended to have an audience doesn’t seem correct.

they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGob

It is self-evident that most of these RPs are troped by the participants. If there is enough of an audience that a fan of the RP wants to write a TVT article, we can have a conversation about it, but I don't think it's worth the effort.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

In that case, how can you reliably tell that a page for an RP was made by a participant and not a fan? Some will be obvious, but a different screen name and neutral writing style could lead to participant-made pages slipping under the radar, or fan pages being cut.

Moreover, despite the prevalence of substandard pages, there are pages for public play-to-post RP’s that are up to the standard of the wiki. Should these pages that are correctly documenting an available creative work be thrown out with the bathwater?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t know why we should apply a special, tricky-to-enforce rule for the roleplay namespace that we aren’t applying to any of the others- especially other namespaces that have plenty of participant-created pages, like Fan Works, Literature, Web Original and its subsidiaries, etc.

they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGob

I'm not quite sure what you mean. We do apply those same rules to those parts of the wiki. If there are "high quality" articles for private RPs, they are vastly outnumbered by the crap ones.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 16th 2019 at 12:14:54 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The dicatomy between explicit/implicit assumptions is the basis for the proposed "smell test". When the players/GM are openly acknowledging their audience, we know this is a work that is intended for public consumption. They want an audience. Not all roleplay sites/forums mark themselves private. They may implicitly acknowledge that other people watch, but if they don't care then why are we treating the work as if the creators care about generating an audience?

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Adding to the above, for an RP to be tropable on this wiki, it should actually have an audience, otherwise it's just Auto-Erotic Troping on the part of the players.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I’m talking about publicly available roleplays, not private ones. Moreover, when has it been our policy to cull works that are legitimately up to the standards of the wiki on the basis that there are others in the namespace that aren’t?

Why do we care at all about the creator’s intent in generating an audience or not? Unless I’ve misunderstood, the purpose of the wiki is to document tropes in a story. Roleplays are stories that make use of tropes. Should we not judge the legitimacy of roleplay pages by whether it meets the wiki’s standards and doesn’t run afoul of Auto-Erotic Troping (that being ‘the work exists and is publicly available, the participants do not add to the YMMV page, and the work isn’t being Entry Pimped into other articles’), which is what we do for every work, rather than whether we can ‘prove’ it has an audience, which is more tenuous and almost seems to run afoul of our notability policies?

Edited by whizzerd on Jul 16th 2019 at 6:12:23 PM

they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGob

It's not that simple. I could write a work and trope it, even if no one reads it. There Is No Such Thing as Notability, after all. If the work exists publicly, it can be troped, barring the obvious exceptions of porn and the like.

The question is not whether the roleplays are tropeable, it's whether they are worth the effort.

I say... probably not, to be honest. Most of these roleplays are made for the players, not the audience, despite being technically available to the public.

Edited by RallyBot2 on Jul 16th 2019 at 1:10:25 PM

You're right, such a work could be troped... in Darth Wiki, because if only you've read it, the most likely scenario is that the work isn't made public. If it's been publicized even a bit, there's a good chance at least one other person has read it, and that's enough to qualify as an audience.

Roleplays are tricky. On one hand, an audience could be viewing the content. We'll never know; it's not like lurkers tend to make themselves known. On the other hand, these pages tend to be made by the gameplayers themselves, so even if they're "public", the creators are still engaging in Auto-Erotic Troping, similar to fanfiction authors making their own YMMV pages.

My issue is, whether or not a public RP (one posted in a place that can allow for lurkers, even if it's unlikely) has an audience is almost impossible to know. In this case, we'll have to assume that these pages do have readers, just like I assumed RallyBot's hypothetically posted work does have a small audience.

The real important part (IMO) is that we identify pages made by creators and made by fans. Creator made pages, for a start, usually have multiple editors. I also find it hard to believe any audience member would be such a fan of a roleplay they aren't involved in that they'd go and make a million subpages for the thing, but that's just an assumption on my part.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 16th 2019 at 1:33:26 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

One of those standards is that the work is published for an audience.

---

This was probably written while I was posting, but just in case, I'll restate what I'm saying; No other media namespace accepts works that are not explicitly intended for public viewing. Demanding that a Roleplay be explicitly for an audience is only unusual in the sense that we may end up putting valid Roleplay works in a different media namespace. (See Record of Lodoss War vs Critical Role)

Edited by crazysamaritan on Jul 16th 2019 at 2:20:06 PM

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

If a page is edited mostly by users with the same name as the RPers, it's easy to tell that it's Auto-Erotic Troping, but it's much harder if not impossible to prove it's NOT being edited mostly by the participants. And given how pages for RPs are edited almost exclusively by their participants, the odds are too high to go by "innocent until proven guilty".

Even if we do end up keeping pages for RPs, we shouldn't keep their YMMV pages. The very high rate of Auto-Erotic Troping makes them not worth the risk. I'd support a blanket ban on YMMV subpages for roleplays that aren't intended for public viewing.

When a work is "intended for public consumption", the installments have to be easily located and in digestible format. I say that if the roleplay forum is private and requires invitation to even view, it should be grounds for immediate cutlisting.

Regarding Disney Conquest (as an example),

• You don't have to sign up to view what users post, but they're all over the place, with half the subforums empty of content, so not a coherent format by my standards.
• None of the links from the roleplay/tearjerker/nightmare fuel pages work, and I first suspected it was because it required sign-up, but I think it might just be because the threads were deleted or that there really are private threads here. I can only speculate.
• The reaction pages are all written by a single, very dedicated person.
• The character pages are split into four subpages, where empty folders outnumber those with content.
• The creator page is about real-life users.

In my opinion, these pages should not be on TV Tropes, but where do we draw the line? None of the above are hard evidence that there's Auto-Erotic Troping present or that this roleplay isn't intended for public consumption and should thus be cut.

I'd agree completely with the blanket YMMV ban.

These works do tend to have character pages, and giant ones at that, but I suppose that's something that can't be helped since character pages in general are usually bad, and we can't just target RP character pages exclusively...

TBH, I'd be fine with cutting Disney Conquest on quality reasons alone, but I know that's not really ideal.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 16th 2019 at 2:38:14 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Sorry for coming in so late, I'm a new member and created the DNDND page because I'm a fan. I'm very much open to content editing because I'm not that familiar with the TV Tropes format for page creation, but it isn't an example of auto-erotic troping. DNDND is decidedly intended for public consumption, and the podcast is published in an episodic format on iTunes, Stitcher, etc. The creators record themselves playing DND and then the content is edited into an hour-long format, complete with original music by a professional composer. They were even sponsored by Loot Crate at one point.

Edited by acendead on Jul 16th 2019 at 12:03:09 PM

Thanks for coming to our discussion, and welcome to Tv Tropes!

Okay, it's good to get confirmation that the page is being written legitimately and is legitimately tropeable. You may want to look at Zero-Context Example policy, but you should be fine otherwise.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Yeah, the fact that the DNDND page emphasizes the podcast format so heavily was a strong indicator that the work is publicly-available, tropable, and as page-worthy as anything else. It still has lots of context problems, but that's something that can be worked on. I'd suggest looking at the ZCE policy page linked by Warjay above, and going to the Fixing Zero Context Examples thread if you have questions or need input.

What about RPs on TVTropes itself, like Yu-Gi-Oh! East Academy? That one has the benefit of being completed.

The Protomen enhanced my life.

I don't see why we should make an exception for roleplays on TV Tropes. The same concerns that apply to RPs that exist only on another forum apply here too.

If anything, I'm less interested in making exceptions for on-site R Ps, since those users have no excuse for not knowing and following the standards of the wiki.

That page doesn't look horrible, but it has its problems.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

It's telling when there have been no edits to Yu-Gi-Oh! East Academy since 2015 that weren't part of a cleanup effort. However, it's at least in order in a single thread and accessible without logging in, so it's better than many other role plays in that regard.

Okay. Tryin' to do more Fragile Flower wick cleanup, and I found Roleplay.Jellyneo Altador Cup VI and the sequel. The problem? The forum it was posted on seems to be nonexistent now!

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness