Discussion JustForFun / TropeOverdosed

I agree with that, and furthermore designating this and Overdosed Tropes as Just for Fun pages that don't index to the pages they list.

When we raised the thresholds almost five years ago (how time flies...), we took it via a crowner on Trope Talk. Do you think we should do that again?

Yeah, I believe it can be done.

I don't think doubling the thresholds will be necessary, simply raising them to 2000-4000-8000-16000 should be enough. Works that are 1500-1900 can be moved to Trope Kilowicked.

Alternatively, thresholds that are multiples 3000(i.e. 3000-6000-9000-12000) might also work and requires a lot less moving.

3000-6000-9000-12000 would look something like this: Sandbox.Trope Overdosed June 2017

Again, I haven't redone any of the counts.

I personally don't like it. The 9000 category contains very few entries, and is sandwiched between two significantly larger categories. It just looks weird.

2000-4000-8000-16000 wouldn't make much a difference with regards to the main problem – that there are way too many entries. I'm honestly more inclined to go back to three categories and have them be 6000-12000-24000 (i.e. my original suggestion, except without the 3000 category).

I'm inclined to agree that it should be at the 3000-6000-12000-24000 intervals. As seen on the sandbox just above, the 9000-12000 is tiny compared to the other categories surrounding it. To double the value of each interval would in theory provide a pyramid rather than a distorted shape.

I started a thread on Trope Talk.

No. In the case of the former two, they may have a vast shared universe but other than that tend to stand on their own. When the works within the company cross over, that warrants a separate entry (eg The Avengers; perhaps a Marvel Cinematic Universe entry while not counting any films or series towards the other entries [like the Captain America films would count for MCU but not Captain America for example]) Works in Disney Animated Canon are not necessarily connected to each other (I'd only lump a DAC movie with another DAC movie if the latter is a sequel). I also consider it a stretch to lump the rest of those listed in the same category to be honest.

So does that mean we can add the MCU and DCAU as an entry?

Reporting in forums.

I think I know what's up; the %% markup removes the entire line, not just what comes after it. It's an easy workaround (just place the comments on a separate line), but it's not supposed to be necessary.

Here's how it's supposed to look: Sandbox.Trope Overdosed 4

If there were work pages on the individual pages, I'd check these for wicks too. In the meantime, we only record what we see when we click on the "Related" button.

I think it's fine as-is. Probably going to take a while more before having to move up the wick thresholds again.

If it says 1050 pages, that includes the redirects. So it has a number of non-redirect wicks, 482 redirect wicks from one place and 107 redirect wicks from another place, for a total of 1050 wicks.

Notice how I didn't say 461 non-redirect wicks. This is because if:

• Anime.Apple Boy has one wick from Citrus Dame
• Manga.Apple Boy has one wick from Citrus Dame
• Main.Apple Boy has one wick from Citrus Dame

• The redirect from Manga.Apple Boy counts as one wick.
• The redirect from Main.Apple Boy counts as one wick.
• "Manga.Apple Boy" on Citrus Dame counts as one wick.
• "Main.Apple Boy" on Citrus Dame counts as one wick.
• "Anime.Apple Boy" on Citrus Dame counts as one wick.

In short: No, it does not count.

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for taking the time to answer. :)

My impression is that the MCU shouldn't have its own entry on the list at all. I don't see The DCU, the Marvel Universe, or the DCAU on there. That said, I'm not sure there's really any rhyme or reason as to which shared universes get their own entries that sublimate their component series... for example, I think That Guy With The Glasses should be lumped together, but I don't have a good reason why that should be lumped together and the ones I just mentioned shouldn't be, aside from the fact that it doesn't do the site justice for it not to be represented on the list at all, while Batman is saturated on his own.

I would suggest that you ask the guy who wrote it. That would be me. So, what's your question?

I'm getting the following error in Python 2.7.3 in Windows 7: "Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:UsersMorganDocumentsoverdosed.py", line 7, in <module> subList = re.findall(r'href="([^"]+)"', line) Name Error: name 're' is not defined"

Still up, in case anyone else hasn't weighed in.

Now that the change has been made, maybe it's time to discuss whether something similar should be done about Overdosed Tropes?

I like it. I like it a lot.

Why are none of the thresholds over 9000?

Actually, one of them is. It just so happens to be that memes are frowned upon as far as titles/subsections go. The sequence makes sense because the threshold doubles for every step up the ranks.

And besides, having compiled this myself, I see that having a category for 9000+ wicks alongside 6000+ seems biased towards the former. I didn't see very many between 6000-8999.

I'm opposed to new categories, but if there was one I'd call it "Tropesplosion".

I'd be more inclined to change this to a 1500-3000-6000 interval, tbh, rather than to create a new category.

The interval increase sounds like a good idea actually, as long as there are others on board... fine as it is though.

Well, something should be done. Both Batman and Star Wars have north of 16000 wicks. That's more than four times the highest threshold, when each threshold is twice that of the previous one. Does that seem right to you?

Of course, at the bottom it says "No more categories, thanks. Maintaining these three is enough work." This doesn't preclude changing the thresholds, though. Moreover, creating a category requiring even more wicks wouldn't increase maintenance very much at all.

As it is now, I think the page is far too crowded. Seeing how this index is (presumably) supposed to be at least slightly exclusive, I think that changing it to 2000-4000-8000 would be the ideal solution. It would eliminate a lot of the content (although whether or not that's a good thing is debatable) and create a new, exclusive category without necessitating too much moving of content from one category to another (it would require counting the wicks of the 4000+ category, but not the others).

Perhaps that's something to be brought up to the workshop. Myself, I'm still on board with the 1500-3000-6000 intervals, and if we are to do four categories after all, having the 9000+ category for the big franchises (such as Batman and Star Wars) could work out.

Huh, now that is what is meant here... a bit of a problem though, seeing as all the respective films aside from Thor have all been counted towards their respective franchises on this list.

And yeah, the wording to my reason would have been a lot better. I was thinking along the lines of "if we are to include this, we may as well include Disney Animated Canon as a single entry". To me that just didn't work that way.

Okay, I guess I can see where you're coming from. But then, they do do crossovers (not just The Avengers; Tony Stark shows up in The Incredible Hulk, Howard Stark has a fairly large role in Captain America: The First Avenger, etc.), which, to my knowledge, Disney doesn't (at least canonically).

Then again, this is kind of an interesting dilemma: how do you treat that which shows up in a "foreign" continuity? Does Alien vs. Predator belong to the Alien franchise, the Predator franchise, both franchises, or its own (I would argue both and its own)? Does Alien and Predator (or for that matter A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th) become a single franchise after the crossover, despite not being conceived that way (I would argue that they do not)?

Regardless, I don't think it should matter in this case. The films are meant to be viewed as a whole, without forcing it upon the viewers to keep up with one "sub-series" to understand another if they don't want to (kind of like how you don't have to read The Silmarillion to understand The Lord of the Rings, even though it certainly helps).

Yes, not a bad idea.

But we should put webcomics, Web Original and so on in one category "New Media", and also throw anime/manga/Light Novel together. I can never tell them apart.

To answer your question, certain works alone wouldn't make the mark, but factor in multiple incarnations of a given series and you have yourself an overdosed work (so long as there's the sufficient wicks).

The Beatles WOULD make the mark, but it had linked to the Music namespace, whereas most of the wicks still remained at the Main/ namespace which is now being used as a disimbaguation. Even so, The Beatles is an artist page, not a work, so I'm not sure about even reinstating it.

In the case of Beauty And The Beast... yes, if you factor in all the namespaces of the related works of the same name (and especially the Disney adaptation), it is overdosed.

A couple other things I find rather ambiguous: including websites (like You Tube) and including retellings/takes of a certain work to said work. To me, that would be like lumping Hook with Peter Pan, or AI Artificial Intelligence with Pinocchio: a stretch.

That might work, and Radical Dreamers would technically be part of that as well. However, many fans of Chrono Trigger tend to treat Chrono Cross as a Dis Continuity. They may be in the same universe, but the case of it being overloaded would be up to debate (as much as I love Chrono Cross).

PS - Well... going to do it anyhow...

I didn't know that Fanon Discontinuity is a valid reason to remove a title from this List. Chrono Cross is a sequel. Deal with it.

Already did. :P

Quite a bit of Battlestar Galactica was that way and Deus Ex is on my waiting list yet the second game felt that way.

Whether the fans like it or not, Chrono Cross is a sequel to Trigger.

Radical Dreamers would also count as an alternate continuity i think.

I'm pretty sure Xenoblade is only borrowing the name, so not sure if it counts. Find out about that first.

Also, by looking at the "related to" page, Half-Life gets 674 links while Half Life has 1542. Adding them together, as both are equally valid names for the series, Half-Life has over 2000, so shouldn't it be bumped up a category anyway?

No. No. I made that mistake before. Half-Life's final number includes that of the redirects.

Although I have to say that was rather odd, since the "Half Life" menu doesn't seem to specifically list "Half-Life" as a redirect...

And come to think... with acknowledgments and in-game references aside, there really isn't much of a connection between Half Life and Portal, so... I'll just leave them as they are...

And speaking of universes, I guess we gotta have a "Motherverse" page for Earth Bound/Mother 3/Earthbound Zero

I'm not familiar with the series, but with over 1,000 wicks it definitely qualifies. Seeing that it's a Spiritual Successor to Guilty Gear (itself with over 700 wicks), I'll add it on the list under the Guilty Gear umbrella, which is standard procedure around here.

That's... not the best idea, I think. Just because they're Spiritual Successors, we should not lump two different franchises together.

I mean, Pokemon is a Spiritual Successor to the Mother-Series, but they still deserve their own entries.

EDIT: And if the rumors about a proper Guilty Gear-sequel are true, the series WILL become overdosed soon enough.

Eva got moved back to Saturated, as it should. I'll do the same with Mass Effect.

Deleted; like Paper Mario, Persona, Final Fantasy etc., they're part of a bigger franchise already on this list. Won't mind putting them to Saturated, though (only if they fit, of course).

The series doesn't really have a "superseries" page, unlike, say The Legend Of Zelda or Super Mario Bros, which kind of complicates things. But yes, if it has 1000+ relateds it goes.

Someone really needs to create a Franchise-page; I'd do it myself - but I never even played these games (I'm German, so: No Export For Me).

This is a debate worth having. I think the DCAU is overdosed enough to be on the list, but is having so much of the universe involved with Batman and Superman, with their own over-arching entries, enough to keep it off? Or are the various Justice League entries enough to make it qualify?

I'd love to hear other opinions.

For reference, the page for William Shakespeare has 1228 references, while his plays collectively have 3052, which would make him either Overloaded or Saturated, depending on how you count it.

Considering they're only linked through an author, I'd say no.

It's just that Shakespeare is such a literary giant and his works are identified almost more often as a Shakespeare play than works in their own right. Plus, something seems right about having Shakespeare in the Saturated section.

Why should being linked through an author not make them saturated? It would be unusual to be sure, but that's because he has a unusual number of links.

(Having checked the old page, I will note, however, that Terry Pratchett and some others also qualify by that criterion.)

In fact, if you add the Lovecraft links to Cthulhu Mythos, you get Trope Overdosed. Hmm. Are all Lovecraft's work under the mythos?

Not all Lovecraft is Cthulhu. Most is not, in fact.

Just because a group of works have a common author doesn't make them in the same series. It has to be connected in some canon ways. Each of the plays should be listed individually, if there are any of his works that is Trope Overdosed that is.

Simply states the number in "related to", so, no, it's fine.

Seems the forum discussion expired. Posted it again and fixed the link.

Should we move the minimum qualification for Overdosed up?

If we do, we'd need to move the minimum qualification for everything up, or there would be too large a gap.

Kind of what I meant.

right... The question is, do we want to continue having the minimum bar at 1000? If we do, we should just add a larger category on top, about 8000, I'd say. If not, we have to work out how to change the categories, geometric or arithmetic and the quantities by which to multiply each category- maybe even logarithmic, with the lower categories getting a smaller increase in minimums...

I think adding an 8000 category is the least labor-intensive measure, and requires the least debate and deliberation.

The %comments% in the page says that there should be no more than three sections. Should we remove the 1000+ section?

huh... didn't notice that. Makes things easier

In that case, yeah, I'd just go multiplicative X2 and go with 2000, 4000, and 8000.

Where does the idea that there are things that hit the 8000 level coming from? I just went through all of the stuff in the 4000+ part and only a few things have even hit 6000 and least one (Stargate) doesn't even reach 1000 hits.

Umm, the Stargate series has 4,293 in all. SG-1 alone has 2,369.

Ah, I just checked the links for each title.

Still, just how many series actually have 8000 hits?

Perhaps 8000 is too high. The problem is, if you look at the page history of Old Man Ho Oh's edits, at least two series do go beyond it. And any category containing examples more than twice the quantity of things in the same category is a little too broad for accuracy, the genesis of the idea of a fourth category in the first place.

And the top category only had five or less until recently, remember. Its sudden stuffiness is what prompted the idea of changing requirements.

Create a new category and you create incentive to Entry Pimp more stuff into it.

As pointed out before, there's a warning in place not to outright add a new category. No idea what the rules are for inflating the pre-existing one.

Yeah, I think we should group Tolkein's Legendarium together as one entry; we've done the same with other metaseries containing multiple distinct units (Mega Man, Power Rangers, Transformers etc.)

Does the series have an encompassing super-series like Power Rangers though? Or do we need to make a page?

The Silmarillion pretty much is the encompassing superseries. The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings are simply very, very, very, very expanded versions of the last chapter.

It is in the sense that the book The Silmarillion contains the plot of everything, but "The Silmarillion" is not a good title to give to all of Tolkien's legendarium.

In the absence of a better idea, I've stuck it under "Tolkien's legendarium".

I think MS Paint Adventures is the right entry to add if Homestuck is a subset of it.

"We might as well not have the page at all if there's no way to objectively verify how many wiks a work actually has."

There is a way - it's just that it's manual rather than automatic. On the whole, I think cutting the entire list is a little too trigger happy. Raising the qualifying threshold seems like a better idea, and leaves the page less bare = prettier.

I understand what you are saying. For most of the entries finding the number of Wicks is easy: Just use the "reference to..." at the top of the page. But that is not all there is to it. YOU come up with the correct number of Wicks for Star Trek or Star Wars. And then tell us how you found them. If you figure out a reasonable way to get those numbers, it can be applied to the rest of the entries.

A bit of an update here- most of what I wrote before is moot, as Fast Eddie completely redid the page a few minutes after I finished writing up that discussion post. The rubric has been changed so that there's no numbered ranks, just an alphabetical listing of all works that fall under the numerical threashold. This means that anyone can add a new series to the list if it meets the mathematical requirement (Family Guy and Code Geass quickly come to mind as series that qualify but aren't currently up there, as well as Harry Potter for possibly being Trope-Saturated as opposed to Trope-Overdosed), and that we don't hyperventilate about which series is x amount of wiks more popular than the other.

I still believe that keeping exact numbers of how many pages reference a series would be a pitifully simple task if we were allowed to put more than one Wiki Word into the "related to" search function, but at least now this page has a rubric that's far more easily understood.

Aye. I was just thinking of retaining the third category while changing its parameters (1000-2000 wicks for example), since that's still quite a large number of references to have. Basically, it would keep the current format of the page, but expand it to include the "overdosed" category.

I'd like that, I sorta miss the "overdosed" category. Plus it seems odd to cut that category out when that's what the trope is named.

Three levels seems more reasonable.

• Trope Overdosed (4000+)
• Trope Saturated (2000+)
• Trope Loaded (1000+) (because that's still a huge number of hits)

I support the alphabetical organization over numerical order.

A quick check of the list suggests a need to reorganize it and shows just how difficult this will be. Avatar The Last Air Bender only gets 18 hits by the proscribed method. OOTS just 1708.

Doing an unpunctuated 'related to' search on Avatar: The Last Airbender gives you over 2000 wicks. But I'm not so much concerned with the technicalities as with the purpose of the page.

If, as Some Guy said, the article is meant to catalogue the popular titles for people's convenience, I think it'd be a good idea to feature more than the already well-known and mainstream works that are on the page right now. Having a third category of popular examples could give exposure to works that are immensely popular on the wiki while perhaps being too niche to be household names, which is what I think people would be looking for in this article.

I think a good start point would be reviewing the Overdosed list that got deleted, and prune the examples that don't reach (as of yet) the 1000+ minimum. There would probably be other works that meet the criterion that aren't listed, but those can be added as we find them.

That's part of what makes this funky- accurate counts require not just checking the main page related counts, but also redirects. The non-p-title Avatar The Last Airbender scores 2284 hits because it's the one most commonly potholed. It also makes things like a manual count of Final Fantasy nearly impossible- you'd not only have to add the dozen odd title in the series up, you'd also have to calculate how many are duplicates, since Final Fantasy can only use, say, Mysterious Waif once for the sake of this tabulation even though five separate Final Fantasy games are mentioned on that page.

You have to use this bar in order to gather counts on redirects- put the title in question after the last slash.

Besides that, are there any objections to restoring the third category?

I'm in favor. Trope Overdosed does need overdosed tropes!

OK, this is the (probably incomplete) list of the Trope Overdosed examples (1000+ wicks) taken from the examples earlier deleted by Some Guy.

• Ace Attorney
• Angel
• Babylon 5
• Battlestar Galactica
• Castlevania
• City Of Heroes
• Danny Phantom
• Death Note
• Digimon
• Disgaea
• Dragonball
• The Dresden Files
• The Fairly Oddparents
• Fallout
• Fate Stay Night
• Fire Emblem
• Half-Life
• Halo
• Heroes
• Homestar Runner
• House
• Justice League
• Kim Possible
• Kingdom Hearts
• Knights Of The Old Republic
• Lost
• Mass Effect
• The Matrix
• Metroid
• Mystery Science Theater 3000
• Power Rangers
• Ranma 1/2
• Red Dwarf
• Resident Evil
• Scrubs
• Sluggy Freelance
• Street Fighter
• Supernatural
• Super Robot Wars
• Super Smash Bros
• Suzumiya Haruhi
• Tales Of Symphonia
• Team Fortress 2
• Teen Titans
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
• Terminator
• Touhou
• Watchmen
• Yu-Gi-Oh

Hey! I didn't delete those! Seriously, none of those were there when I took my first stab at the page. I think it was modified into the "top 35 trope-gathering shows" form long before I showed up. Everyone seems to agree that defining this trope by wiks is much better than by rank, especially in lieu of a method to tabulate duplicates.

I think if we add folder control to this page there will be no objections if we re-institute the 1000+ wiks category.

At first: Fasten your seatbelt please, this is gonna be a bumpy ride.

Seriously guys, I feel really cheated. In the past I did a lot of work to keep Trope Overdosed up to date, but now it looks like this has been for nothing.

I even had written a Python script to calculate exact numbers for each page, which also sorts out duplicates, JBM, WMG and Contributor pages.

As said, I've put a lot of effort in maintaining this page. Nobody bothered to tell me what you were up to.

Come on now. It's not like we knew you were gonna be into it or something. Have you ever tried using the watchlist feature? That would tell you whenever your favorite pages are being edited, and you could swoop down with your Python to save us all.

I've put up a methodology listing to tell us basic qualifications, but feel free to put up your own if you've devised a better formula than I have.

Incidentally, I've redefined Trope Overdosed to be at the "above 2000 below 3000" threshold, since the list seems a bit long. It makes a lot more sense to define these categories by even thousands, considering there's an excessive bit of difference between a work with 2050 wiks and 3900 of them that we really should reflect in the tabulation.

If you're going by increments that double the previous number, 1000-2000 and 2000-4000 categories make perfect sense. 1000 wicks is a lot, and the point of the page is to categorize, not to try its hardest to avoid categorizing.

It does look neater now, at any rate.

Agreed. The whole point of this page is to acknowledge which shows have an unusually high number of wicks; eliminating everything below 2000 makes absolutely no sense in that regard. Do you honestly believe the likes of The Dresden Files, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Mass Effect, and Disgaea don't count as Overdosed? That's more than enough wicks for it be difficult to find a page that doesn't reference them. Trope Overdosed should include works with 1000 wicks and up.

Looking back at what it was before the exact counts were dropped, it was:

Trope Saturated (4,000 wicks or more) (with 5 entries)

Trope Overloaded (2,000 - 3,999 Wicks) (with ~40)

Trope Overdosed (600 - 1,999 Wicks) (with ~90)

Film Overdosed: (Number of references for a single film (or with one sequel) — trilogies and longer series should have enough material to be a candidate for the main Overdosed list above — 80 reference minimum) (with over 100)

Creator Overdosed: (Number of references for popular writers / directors / musicians / whatever — 100 reference minimum) (with ~50)

IMO, we should have all the categories with some modifications to the # of Wicks. Saturated would still be 4000+, Overloaded would be 2500-4000, Overdosed 1000-2500 (a compromise of previous comments), Film 200+, Creator 150+. And all categories, from Overdosed down, would be folder-ed to lower the page length.

How does that sound?

As far as making new categories goes: NOOOOOOO. Three is more than enough.

The Saturated/Overloaded/Overdosed division seems reasonable enough, though.

That should be a Big "NO!" link ;)

Going to move this over to the forum topic as my next comment is more YMMV then hard numbers.

@Some Guy:

"I've put up a methodology listing to tell us basic qualifications"

Er, WTH? Is this a valid English sentence at all? Try it again.

About my script: To get an accurate number of wicks for for works where you have to add up wicks for several pages, you click each of the links for this work, and then at "related". You look at the source code of the HTML page, scroll down, and copy the line that starts with "<div class="wmglead" ><span style="color:chocolate;". (It's often a very long line, because it contains all the wicks, but treat it as a single one.) Copy this line (for each file) into a simple .txt file, and save it when you did this for all the links. Afterwards, you simply run the python script and check what it says about individual results.

That's it. It's still a bit of work, but it automatically removes the JBM/WMG/Troper pages, and also all the duplicates. Using this, I got the 4000+ wicks for Final Fantasy, and the other results.

I'm also not in favor of restoring the original categories. Three is perfectly fine. I just think the thresholds need to be adjusted.

I'm unconvinced that 1000 hits is a reasonable threshold. It was back when we first started this page, but that was when the wiki was way younger and a work having that many hits was unusual. It seems foolhardy to me to define the categories on this page in such a way that it just becomes an index of every work of fiction, ever, especially when so many of them are just flat listings without capsule descriptions.

Anyway, Frank, I don't think I using all that much Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, but to simplify- I put words on the page saying how we determine the numbers. Your Python script sounds interesting, though. I find it very believable that we're lowballing the Final Fantasy numbers using the current estimates. I recommend you keep pursuing Fast Eddie on this point. Explain to him, as an example, how I can't verify the Final Fantasy series having more than 2800 wiks using current wiki tools but your script apparently can.

If you have this page on your watchlist now, as I suggested, you could at least convince Fast Eddie to let you act as Page Guardian, a term I totally made up just now to refer to people who scrutinize edits to specific pages. Since you're the only one with access to the script, you presumably have a better ability to determine accurate wik counts than the rest of us do. We don't need exact numbers, but we could still use ballpark estimates.

It still is unusual. There are hundreds—maybe even thousands—of works on this wiki that are nowhere near 1000 wicks. Yes, there are substantially more shows that have managed this than have managed 2000 or 4000 wicks—this will be true of any similar list. The greater the quantity of something that must be accumulated to qualify for a a category, the fewer things will be capable of qualifying for that category. It is The Way Things Work. Expecting an even distribution throughout the categories demonstrates a severely flawed understanding of statistics and probability.

"I'm unconvinced that 1000 hits is a reasonable threshold."

To go ahead and delete a bunch of example because you are personally unconvinced when more people are in favor of a 1000 threshold is kind of... well, rude. At least consult other users, like the rest of us are doing?

This is a fair point- I deleted them in part because I saw in the page history that Fast Eddie was the one who initially deleted them, and was likely to do so again the next time he saw the page. So, I figured I'd at least keep the Trope Overdosed classification by redefining it in such a way that the examples would not be considered forfeit, with the added bonus that the eight more highly referenced works now have a hierarchical position more coherent with their overall usage.

It might help to look at things this way- what is the purpose of Trope Overdosed? We already know it's not a wik-measuring contest because Fast Eddie has decreed that outright. I doubt that it's supposed to be a long list of works that use tropes for the same reason. So, what the heck is it?

Here's what I've always assumed it to be- it's a page explaining why why certain works have such a ridiculously large number of wiki references. This list has to maintain some exclusivity, or it becomes a meaningless garble of every semi-popular work we have. Everything above the 2000 wik threshold has a capsule description explaining why the large number of references. What does it help to list a bunch of works that have 1000+ wiks, but no capsule description, and which don't seem all that disproportionately popular compared to the several dozen other shows in the same category?

Well, I can neither speak for Fast Eddie nor the creator of the page, whoever it might have been, but it serves to note which fandoms are popular across this site. If we stick to the highest of the thresholds, we will only come up with Lord of the Rings, Batman, Harry Potter, and stuff that is already part of the mainstream. If we spread it out to include more examples, works that are more niche would get exposure as well.

As we are talking about the entire Trope population, may I suggest (again) that we move the conversation to the forums so more people will see what is going on?

The list already has exclusivity. You are vastly underestimating the number of Works on this wiki.

Regarding the shows without capsule descriptions: they had capsule descriptions before being deleted. Wiki Magic would, presumably, ensure that they would have them again.

To put it bluntly, you jumped the gun and "solved" a problem that didn't actually exist. Certainly not as far as anyone other than yourself was concerned. This is not a basis on which to make such a big change to the page. Fast Eddie gets to make those kinds of decisions unilaterally because he's a mod—don't try to do his job for him. That way lies only Edit War.

I did solve one problem that actually existed- the conflating of the 2050 wik work with the 3800 wik work. It still strikes me as very silly that for the sake of tabulation we were considering works with roughly the twice the exposure of those below them as being like entities.

The Trope Overdosed section at present is about one page scroll long. I think that's about as long as one of these sections can get before we run into tldr. Any longer and it just looks like an index with a hodge-podge of works from across the board. I'd argue that the 2000+ Trope Overdosed section has about as good a cross-section of popular/niche as we'd get from 1000+ anyway going by percentages. Avatar, Nanoha, and Order Of The Stick are not what I'd call "mainstream popular", nor would I say that of Buffy or Warhammer.

I do agree on one point- I don't have authority in the sense Fast Eddie does, but I consider it more than likely that he would have simply deleted the entries again anyway. Be that as it may, this really is getting to be a lengthy, forum-style discussion. I've written my piece- take it as you will, but I'm done here. Belian has the right idea- further discussion should take place in the forums. That's your best chance at reaching a consensus that won't be discarded by administrative fiat.

Any list is going to be tldr. That's just the nature of the beast. This page, as far as I can see, serves to catalog - and if we're not cataloging anything but the already known and mainstream works, what is the point of the page then?

Some things, in no particular order:

1. @Some Guy: I have a watchlist, but I don't check it every day. Especially not for a page like Trope Overdosed, which I used to update... not every other week.

2. Trope Overdosed was supposed to be about pages which have a lot of tropes. Theoretically, with the new page categorization system we may even find a way to calculate how many wicks from tropes (as opposed to other pages) a work really gets. It was never supposed to measure what the mainstream likes, since tropers may have other preferations. And while I'm not a Buffy fan myself, we maybe shouldn't forget that this wiki started with Buffy, AFAIK.

3. Yep, the list was pretty long at the end. IMO justified though - TV Tropes nowadays has more than 50k pages. Of course Trope Overdosed is going to be longer than it was when the wiki just had 5k pages. As a personal guess, Trope Overdosed may double its length if the wiki becomes four times bigger (rule of square).

4. The change still came pretty fast. Shouldn't we have discussed this at least for three days before, like for a YKTTW?

5. If people want to expand the list in the future, they may want to check pages first which were cut now from the list. So I made Archive.Trope Overdosed (essentially the old list before the cut) to allow people this.

1.Understandable

2 and 3. I like your logic

4. You would have to talk to Some Guy and/or Fast Eddie. I brought up the issue of it being out of date in the forums, this solution was proposed, and within the day acted on. Though not without some thought on the matter.

5. I'll be adding that archive link to the main page now. Much easier then going down through the history to find the information.

So, what I'm getting from this is that Some Guy is actually the only one who wanted the Overdosed category to require more than 1000 hits, and he's also the only one against changing it back to 1000+. Is that correct?

Mostly yes, but these sorts of questions are exactly why I keep trying to move the conversation to the forum ;-)

And Some Guy agrees with me:

"...this really is getting to be a lengthy, forum-style discussion. I've written my piece- take it as you will, but I'm done here. Belian has the right idea- further discussion should take place in the forums. That's your best chance at reaching a consensus that won't be discarded by administrative fiat.

...Perhaps this discussion has caused a certain amount of bias for me, but I'm inclined to take anything Some Guy says about admins with a grain of salt. More importantly, that thread seems to have died, whereas this discussion is still active.

Edit: Apparently, I spoke too soon.

@ Belian:

There is a simple way to accurately determine the number of references: Just Use Google.

Go to Google (advanced search), type the name of the show in the This exact wording or phrase column, then, in the Search within site or domain column put "https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/". (Don't just put "https://tvtropes.org/" 'cause if so the search will spit out forum threads, discussion pages, and every other useless bit of data that doesn't count.)

The result will show the exact number of tropes used by the show referenced here.

Here's an example for Buffy:

That's the link showing the first results

And here's the link showing the LAST results, I browsed that far to confirm that all the results were trope pages.

A similar search for "Batman" spits out a whopping eight fucking thousand results, whereas "Airbender" gives around 3,500. Most of the list here is correct, although I haven't checked all of them.

So, what does the %% bits mean in the context of the page?

The double-percent signs just mark a bit of text as "comments" so they show up when you view the page source or try to edit the page, but don't show up when you're viewing the page normally.

Didn't answer the question. What do they mean in the context of Trope Overdosed?

We have Example Explanation Density, but I'm not sure that's what you're looking for.

What we're talking about is the recognition that it's more impressive when Firefly (13 episodes, 1 movie, maybe a few comix) gets Trope Overdosed than when something like Star Trek (which has six series, four of which have over 100 episodes, as well as 11 movies) does.

That is, the ratio of amount of work to tropes listed for the work.

We used to routinely note how many items might be creating the links, but our sole formal acknowledgment was having a separate category for films that had fewer than two sequels — which by definition should be harder to overdose than most other media.

Doing this properly would range from difficult to impossible. Perhaps we could measure TV by the episode, or by the hour; if we do it by the hour, we might be able to make a comparison between TV, film, and videogames, which are all part of the recording arts. Printed media — literature and comics — would go by the page. But there is no good way to compare films and TV with books and comics. Okay, maybe you could use the audiobook to convert books to hours, assuming you can find an unabridged one. But nobody's gonna make an audio graphic novel!

Yeah, that used to be part of this page already. Fast Eddie cut it, so if anything, it would need to be a separate article.

Actually, it occurs to me that with a series like Batman, we could probably get an accurate Trope Overdosed count by using a body text search (found in the Tools sidebar). Any article that references Batman will probably include his name at some point, and since body text search is a single search function, we wouldn't get any duplicates.

...Body text search yields 4628 articles, so Batman is good for Trope Saturated. For future reference, we're doing it alphabetically now, so that means it goes to the top. Also, there's nothing stopping you from adding more description after the Batman Pot Hole.