To-do list:

• Consensus was to retool The Team into an exampleless supertrope for the broad act of grouping characters together to accomplish something. Rewrite the description if necessary, and move examples that fit a subtrope (listed on The Index Team) accordingly. Cleanup is being tracked at Sandbox.The Team Wick Cleanup.

Original post:

The Team is a trope about a group of people with varying roles who are working towards a specific goal. The description of this trope has a heavy emphasis on the roles people have within teams, and it shows in the examples; most of the on-page ones are written in the supertrope-subtrope style, which is bad indenting. Many examples, both on-and-off page, often fail to explain enough about the team's composition, roles, or purpose.

If this sounds familiar, it's because Five-Man Band was sent to TRS for the exact same reasons. In fact, it's possible that some of The Team's issues are related to that thread. Officially Five-Man Band is being cleaned up by getting examples rewritten into single-bullet examples, but the wick check shows that some of them are being moved to The Team without any formatting changes.

50 wicks were checked to see if the style of formatting has any correlation with whether the example has enough context. Context in this case is an example describing the names and roles of people in a group. Note was also made of any wicks that were changed wholesale from Five-Man Band. Due to the multiple analyses performed, the wick check results are in the following folder:

Contrary to my expectations beforehand, the wick check suggests that four out of five examples written in single-bullet form lack sufficient context, as opposed to the 50/50 chance that an example in supertrope-subtrope formatting is a ZCE. While this means the supertrope-subtrope formatting isn't as bad for the trope as initially thought, it's still improper formatting. Additionally, usage of the trope is fairly evenly split between single-bullet (30%), supertrope-subtrope (32%), and inline (34%) wicks, the last of which tend to come up whenever the concept of a team someone's on is mentioned.

The biggest issue that came up is the disproportionate amount of ZCEs. Two-thirds of the solo example list wicks lacked sufficient context, whether it was because examples just had a character name and a listed role with no elaboration, never actually mentioned a team was involved, or was just "a team exists". I think there are two factors at play behind the ZCE problem:

• The description's fixation on roles in the team and the on-page examples' supertrope-subtrope formatting makes people think a subtrope and a character name are sufficient context.
• People not reading said description combined with the excessive number of potholes to any mention of "the team" results in them missing that describing what people do for the team is also important.

As a side note, 8 of the 50 wicks were originally Five-Man Band wicks that received no changes from their original form when the wick was swapped. This corroborates concerns that have been raised about wick cleaning in general not being done properly; discussion about this aspect of the wick check that's unrelated to the trope can be taken to the "On improper TRS cleanup" thread.

As for potential fixes, I think rewriting the description to focus less on specific archetypes and more on either overall team composition or the goals a team has would go a long way to encouraging single-bullet formatting and proper context, while making it more distinct from its subtropes. Rewriting the on-page examples to use single-bullet formatting would also help reduce poorly-formated examples. Alternately, in the event that we just can't make it work, we could redirect this trope about teams in general to The Index Team, an index about various types of teams.

What do you all think?

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 13th 2024 at 4:50:26 AM