Unpublished Works clarification

Per this discussion

There's some confusion over what Unpublished Works is supposed to be

• A sandbox to let inspiring writers to trope a non-existent work. (which contradicts The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours regarding hosting original writing)
• A recycling bin when a work gets deleted without a copy and it'd be a pity to remove it from a site.

As for the latter, do we need some more explicit guidelines than "one person said the link is dead, Web Archive doesn't have a copy and Google doesn't show anything" and also always preserve articles at Darth instead of deleting them?

Also, would it be worth moving pages from DarthWiki/ to Unpublished/ or something similar?

Also, is the name clear? I had an idea for "Unavailable Works" because "Unpublished" may imply the work was never public.

Any other discussions are welcome.

The opening of Unpublished Works goes: "Stories and series that only exist in private roleplays over email or Discord, on the author's hard drive, or worse, in their head." That's pretty indicative that nonexistent works and "recycling bin" works are allowed. I think there's a clear separation re: hosting. You can trope your (nonexistent) fic on Darth Wiki, pretending it's real, and that's fine because we catalogue tropes, but you can't enter your (otherwise nonexistent) fic on Darth Wiki.

More explicit guidelines might be... difficult? It'd likely take notability into account when we don't exactly use notability to judge whether a work can be troped. For works "big" enough, usually Keep Circulating the Tapes applies. This question has come up before. E.g. the roleplay cleanup thread usually moves inaccessible roleplays to Darth Wiki but allowed Warriors: The Umadpelt Uprising stay at Roleplay/ because, while the tapes apparently weren't being circulated, it was still frequently enough alluded to by the userbase that it didn't feel, ah, fair to Darth it. It came down to a bunch of people going, "What a thing that was!"

Perhaps just a clarification in the Unpublished Works description? Unpublished Works: For Unavailable and Unpublished Works.

For reference, I dug up the original version of the page:

Curious to see that entry pimping unpublished works was originally allowed. Not sure when that changed.

And a year later there's a plug for Troper Works to boot, which was turned into a "see also" the following year. Curiously, by 2014 the prohibition on creating subpages because it "makes them look like part of the main wiki" was in place, but the reference to Entry Pimping was still there as well. It was still there in 2018 when the prohibition was strengthened to a ban on any links to unpublished works outside Darth Wiki. You yourself removed the reference in 2020, actually, with the edit reason "i assume this was written prior to the 'don't wick unpublished works' rule".

You also added the "private roleplays over email or Discord" clause, as well as the "some works can't be verified publicly" sentence at the start of the second paragraph, which are the main parts of the description that, to my reading, hint at previously published works being welcome there. But even then, you still referenced that part of the wiki being a place for "authors", who generally aren't the ones creating pages for previously published works. I don't get the sense that the point of the section was ever consciously changed, but nonetheless the focus of the description and stated point of the section seems to have shifted from "works a troper made up but didn't actually publish or even write" to "works we can't publicly verify".

Yeah, I figure previously published works are allowed on Darth Wiki; the part I'm unsure of is when/if they're required to be moved there if they had been available when the works page was originally made.

The "we can't publicly verify" change was made a while back because of concerns arising over preservation of TV Tropes content that may have been valid at one point, or could potentially be valid in the future — say, if a private RP were ever published.

We don't want to erase genuine effort that people have put in, but verifiability is one of the key requirements to qualify for a work article in the main wiki.

In a hypothetical "TV Tropes 2.0" design, this sort of thing would be handled by an "unpublished" flag on the work article itself. Selecting that would cause the article to be segregated and none of its examples would crosswick.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 21st 2023 at 9:30:40 AM

In a Missing Episode situation, it may be harder to tell what counts as unpublished.

I recently had to pull back a planned edit to a fanfic page when I realized there might be no one except myself—not even the author—who could verify it.

This reminds me - I was considering making a page for fun about an infamous lost fanfiction in one of my main fandoms that now only exists as a plot recap and a couple of snippets, but wasn't sure when something like that would fall under Unpublished Works.

Technically my case would be verifiable via Fanlore article (which... I also wrote), but the entire thing is still very much unavailable and the author has made it very clear it's never coming back. (And it was removed 4 years ago so I doubt that's ever changing)

Edited by Serilly on Oct 2nd 2023 at 9:04:31 AM

If you trope it, it qualifies as an Unpublished Work.

To the site, verifiability and availability are effectively the same, another source giving an abridged version doesn't substitute being able to check what's in the work unless the work is copied in full.

If this is wrong, this can be discussed further with Notability, Verifiability, Tropability in mind.

That's what I thought, thanks.

Coming across this topic, I have my own query regarding the subject, particularly with this:

Do not link to unpublished works or add trope examples except from Darth Wiki pages. Either action can imply that the work can be independently verified, and until it does, the work is not allowed on the main wiki.

Does that include the Tropers pages? Like a troper that creates an unpublished work of their own, and link it on their own page?

Tropers Pages don't really count as "real" pages (they aren't on related tabs) so I don't see why not