How should gendered redirects be used?

Abusive Parents is gender-neutral, therefore no redirects are needed. As with all trope examples, cut the preamble and just say what happens.

• Abusive Parents: Chloe's single dad drinks and beats her.

That's it. No need for beating around the bush or performatively waffling over language.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 14th 2022 at 2:03:14 PM

ah alright, I think making crowners is still a mod only action thought right?

Yeah, only mods can make crowners still. I'll make one using Amonimus' suggestions + additional feedback.

Crowner hooked.

Ok. While I already voted, I'm wondering what will be the last day when someone can vote?

The crowner will stay up until the votes have stabilized. I'll give it at least a week to see where things go.

I had to have a big think about this one. I have warring gut instincts between voting no to gendered redirects, but want to acknowledge that certain characters may have specific gender identity that fans of a work may want to reflect in the trope name. However, whenever you create a situation where there are exceptions, you rely on people understanding why exceptions exist, how to identify an exception, and how to apply it. I'm not convinced that works on a wiki where alphabetisation ^note (where things may need to be constantly corrected or explained repeatedly) or characterisation ^note (entries are supposed to be understandable to people who don't know the work, so how do you make it clear a trope name is altered and therefore potentially in a different location to people who don't know the work) matters.

In the options, I think "Allow gendered redirects on Characters/ pages where applicable" and "Allow gendered redirects if they use words canonical to the work" go hand-in-hand, so I'm not sure they should be separate options. I don't think the "affect alphabetisation" option will work. I think there are too many editors on the wiki for that approach to be applied consistently, and it'll eventually descend into the current situation, where people go through pages changing the trope names to gendered redirects regardless of the impact on alphabetisation. We see this with other nuanced wiki rules, such as the first come, first serve approach to US/Commonwealth spelling. Tropers like me constantly find our edits being changed to US spelling by other tropers, meaning that the wiki's official position is theoretical only; in practice, this wiki is "US spelling only". The nuance and knowledge will not stand the test of time.

So, in the end, I voted for no gendered redirects at all. However, my caveat to this is that I think there does need to an effort to end the creation of tropes with gendered names (with exceptions for Always Specific Gender tropes, which would specify the Always "Gender" nature of the trope in the description anyway).

Note: I'm not saying we go through re-naming all existing gendered trope names, just that we stop doing it for future tropes. I don't know how much work it would be to change all existing gendered trope names, but I think that might be too big a job and it would stop other urgent work from being done.

...You know you can notify or report people who do those things, right? It's like saying that the wiki's stance on ZCE is "use them" because people still do them despite the rules. People who change those things either just don't know the rules, don't know they weren't just correcting a typo, or are deliberately defying the policy.

The existence of rulebreakers doesn't mean we can't make nuanced policies, it means we just need to be vigilant about policy enforcement.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 14th 2022 at 5:48:45 AM

If the "no gender redirects on trope lists" passes, I don't think we (mods) would create any new gendered redirects because that doesn't make any sense. Also, redirects are primarily for search engine assistance and searching the gendered variant of a trope should take you to said trope even if the redirect doesn't exist.

It's too widespread for the odd notification, and those notifications get ignored anyway. I have tried using notifications in the past, but I haven't seen any sign that they're effective (not on this subject, anyway). I don't think it's the same thing as a straight-forward rule like ZCE. It's the situation-specific scenarios that suffer the most.

I should probably clarify that's not the only reason why I made my choice. It was just one of them.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jun 14th 2022 at 2:57:17 AM

If notifiers don't work and the person continues to ignore the "first come, first served" you can still report it to ATT. This goes for any rule or guideline people ignore. People have gotten suspended before for such issues.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 14th 2022 at 5:57:22 AM

Except "first come first served" rules are black-and-white, with only a few exceptions that make any sort of difference. The rule is, "if someone else already used this spelling/grammatical choice/etc, then don't change it". I'm not sure where the nuance would even be.

In this case yeah there'd be a little bit more nuance, but not so much nuance to where it'd just be okay to do whatever you want. We'd still have rules about what can go where and when, which is still very black-and-white.

I'm of a similar mind, also having future tropes be gender neutral with no redirects would make cleanup projects on TRS or LTP/STP easier since we wouldn't have to sift through those redirects *stares at Fetishized Abuser*. Again though, that doesn't help tropes that currently have problems, but good for the future.

I actually didn't think the leading options would have that many votes (obviously things are subject to change). Gender neutral names just make things easier and I don't see the problem with using tropes with gendered names on characters that have a different gender. It's just a title so whether or not it matches the character shouldn't matter much.

EDIT:Bastard Boyfriend and Bitch Girlfriend were two separate Tropes, so that doesn't count. Also, that clearly would only organize examples, not create more.

Another thing I want to ask is will the "First Come, First Served" principle still apply regardless of which option wins?

For example, if the first option wins and you find an entry with a gendered redirect yet is otherwise fine, you'd keep it the same. However, if you find an option without a gendered redirect yet is otherwise fine, you'd also keep it the same.

Edited by RandomTroper123 on Aug 7th 2022 at 3:30:04 AM

I've thought it's clear that "First Come, First Served" would apply if an option loses, if an option wins it just makes it non-ambiguous what to do in that case.

Well, they were discussing that policy, so I wanted to be 100% sure.

EDIT: Improving the wording.

Edited by RandomTroper123 on Jun 15th 2022 at 4:56:07 AM

If the first option lost, then gendered tropes would be okay and we'd have to discuss if we can keep what's now or continue changing to gendered trope names.

Since the option is "let's not do that", then gendered redirects in example lists have to be dewicked.

With how it's currently leaning, for Characters/ pages it's okay since they are personalized to characters, but not okay elsewhere. If the other options gets out of grey line, it would be okay in example lists as well if the gendered word in trope name is not the first one.

How would these two be prioritized against each other? If the former gains consensus but not the latter, then does an example being on a characters page override alphabetization? (e.g. The Man Behind the Man can be listed as The Woman Behind the Man) If both gain consensus, then can gendered redirects only be listed on characters page as long as alphabetization isn't affected?

...

I think this crowner option

should actually be two options:

Part of the reason I'm asking is because it states "they'll be exceptions".

And I don't think decking all of them would be necessary as cleaning up would just be a huge waste of time; just look at how many times Nice Girl is used. It would also cause (what is considered) Word Cruft (e.g. "Hoist by His Own Petard: More like Hoist By Her Own Petard..." when it started off as "Hoist by Her Own Petard:...").

EDIT: It will also cause people to pothole in trope names more frequently too.

Edited by RandomTroper123 on Jun 15th 2022 at 3:08:39 AM

I wasn't talking about dewicking but naturally that's something we'd do if the leading option wins because I don't see why we would make a rule we aren't going to enforce.

^^ Does that mean that we should redo the crowner? There were that much feedback when we were talking about crowner weeks ago so I thought things were fine and just did what was suggested.

As I saw...

• 2 wins 3 loses: allows The Woman Behind the Man on Characters/
• 2 loses 3 wins: The Woman Behind the Man isn't okay, but something like The Man Behind the Woman would be.
• 2 loses 3 loses: The Man Behind the Man only
• 2 wins 3 wins: I guess 2 takes priority since it's heavier.

Feel free to make new options if further clarity is required.

Just wondering, why did it say there'd "be exceptions" then?

If you mean exceptions as in particular instances in which a redirect is used, then we would just need to cut the last sentence of that How to Write an Example paragraph.

EDIT: Slightly revising.

Edited by RandomTroper123 on Jun 24th 2022 at 3:50:32 AM

I didn't read what you said in the above posts when I woke up and I didn't know that I was supposed to answer to them.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 15th 2022 at 8:09:58 AM

I was also talking this post and what the crowner was saying when it said there would be exceptions.