Tropes Needing TRS cleanup and discussion thread

That's what I do. Tropes Needing TRS was why I brought Extreme Sport Excuse Plot in—I saw it on the list and decided, why not, I'll do a wick check. Lo and behold, it's (slowly) getting reworked into Extreme Sports Plot now. Tropes Needing TRS can be very useful for finding tropes to bring in to TRS.

I used to do that too, but my concern is that half of these things aren't actually misused enough to require TRS, and since we'll never know until we do the wick check, it comes off as putting off the hard work for later rather than finding out the truth in advance. Several of them came from, like, random ass ATT and IP discussions because one person was confused about the trope. I don't want to make the barrier to add something so strict that the page becomes impossible to use, but I also don't want to have a million tropes sitting in the backlog because people added them on a random whim. Not to mention the fact that a wick check may reveal issues totally unexpected when someone wrote the original entry, or that the trope might just require a cleanup thread rather than a TRS overhaul. In other words, it's jumping the gun- declaring that something needs TRS before proving that fact.

When this was a sandbox, I made it specifically for things that have been discussed a lot. Five-Man Band, Moral Event Horizon, and Memetic Mutation were (I believe) some of the first things I added, because they were being talked about endlessly but never TRS'd. So I don't want to completely invalidate everything that has no wick check done, because discussion is also telling. But there should be more discussion than just a handful of people getting a bit confused during an Image Pickin' thread, ya know?

If people use the page as a place to find things to wick check, that's great. But I feel like the people who actually bother to do wick checks in our free time are a minority compared to the people who use this as a depository for every issue they spot on the wiki, TRS-relevant or not.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 3rd 2022 at 6:14:54 AM

What you're describing is actually why I had embarked on my (short-lived) project to mass wick check everything on the page—to slowly chip away at all the non-applicable tropes listed there.

If this thread can do it quicker though I'll take that instead. (I might still wick check more stuff on here though.)

Like I said, there's no actual plan about what to do with the non-wick-check entries. I don't want to jump the gun, but I also do feel like we need to do something to at least encourage people to gather evidence first, or to make a distinction between the non-checked ones and the ones that are definitively ready to go.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 3rd 2022 at 6:17:17 AM

Maybe we could add rules explicitly saying that a wick check or substantial confusion about the trope in prior discussion is needed (with elaboration as to what substantial means here). Not a great idea but it's all I could think of. I did something similar (admittedly unilaterally) with the complaining sandbox because people were adding articles that didn't currently attract complaining, but did in the past.

Maybe the page should be reworked as "Tropes That May Need TRS"? Make it less definitive so we can allow for the "check it later" mentality (which is better, IMO, than forgetting it entirely).

That's just about what it started as, back when it was a sandbox. Moving it to Administrivia made it seem more serious and weighty.

Actually, it started mostly as a place for people to remind themselves to bring a certain thing to TRS. I never meant it to explode like it did.

Yeah, I don't get why we made it Administrivia other than its size. It's too subjective and we have other projects that better handle the formal aspect of TRS stuff.

Edited by mightymewtron on Feb 3rd 2022 at 8:46:16 AM

And because it was made Administrivia/, it's sort of stuck as an official page, which means that now the entries are expected to be verifiable and not just hunches.

I think the response from the mods to moving it back to Sandbox would be that the Sandbox namespace is just for drafting things and not for stuff like Tropes Needing TRS.

I've come to the conclusion that we really need to have a discussion about the Sandbox namespace. Maybe in Wiki Talk, I don't know. At least one mod (Septimus) has gone on record saying that the Sandbox namespace is solely for drafting things into articles, but then you have stuff like the TRS Queue? Or the Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining? I think that moving Tropes Needing TRS to Administrivia was a mistake, and I think that the Sandbox namespace needs to undergo discussion so as to decide exactly what is appropriate to host in the namespace, and if not where else to put it. I recall a suggestion for a Projects namespace—that might be a good idea.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Feb 3rd 2022 at 8:55:30 AM

Either Sandbox/ should be allowed for project threads or we should have a Project/ namespace. But yeah we can discuss that on Wiki Talk.

We talked a little bit on the "Wick cleaning Sandbox" thread, but it'd be great to go more in-depth.

Alright, I've created the thread. We can discuss the Sandbox namespace there.

Regarding Tropes Needing TRS, I remember that a decade ago we did discuss creating a TRS queue and one major counterargument was that the queue would become another backlog. Seems like they were right...

My thinking is that with gatekeeping the list serves no useful purpose as the gatekeepers won't, for the most part, be the thread-makers. And that without gatekeeping, it just becomes overused to hell and back.

I do agree that the Tropes Needing TRS page is, as it stands, no longer useful for anything.

I'm curious though, is there any category on that page that does not require a wick check or other lengthy work? For instance, the category "really a useful note", does that require checking wicks? Because they sound like open-and-shut cases to me; and also, if we decide that something should be a useful note, it's a quick change to make. So unless I'm missing something here, maybe it would be useful to have one combined TRS thread for all the "converting to useful notes" issues?

I would still recommend it. I've moved a page to UN through TRS before and my check proved that the usage was not affecting characterization, plot, or even music. But if usage proves that people are using it as a trope in whatever way, then the case for moving to UN is weaker and the proper fix would be to amend the description to read less encyclopedic.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 4th 2022 at 12:08:11 PM

"Not Thriving" certainly doesn't need a wick check, but people are welcome to spend five minutes doing it if they want to. And you don't need a wick check for the "depreciated title" section either, which is entirely based around the title itself and not the usage.

It's also not that quick and easy to move something to useful notes. We'd still need to do a decent amount of rewriting and wick-moving, especially as useful notes aren't usable as, well, tropes. So having a wick check that definitively proves it's already how the trope is being used is beneficial in the long run to prevent headache later.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 4th 2022 at 1:15:44 PM

Is there any particular reason why Really a Useful Note and People Sit on Chairs are grouped together? It's kinda odd to do that, since it's possible to keep Useful Notes, whereas Chairs are supposed to be cut, right?

I'm guessing its because both boil down to "thing exists" without any deeper meaning. The difference is that the information on a useful notes article is considered useful enough or shows up enough in media to be worth keeping on the site anyway.

I thought "Not Tropeworthy" was what "chairs" was used for?

EDIT: Oh you mean on the TNTRS page.

Edited by mightymewtron on Feb 4th 2022 at 5:51:00 AM

~Troll Man added Improbable Taxonomy Skills and Dated History to TNTRS without discussion, though both reasons are sound. Noting to ping them

Yeah, both of those reasons seem fine; I mostly added it so that we don't get an influx of new entries before we have time to do any cleanup (if we are indeed doing cleanup).

Oh sorry, I didn't notice I was supposed to ask first.

It's cool, we probably would've said yes anyway.

Like I said, I just didn't want an influx of new problem entries added while we're trying to combat the issue. Yours are fine.