All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXIV

[Bob Schroeck]

I can throw together an inline notice template complete with associated cleanup category linked off the community portal in less than 10 minutes (assuming no 50* errors get in the way), if people want something specific.

Oh, cool, that would be great. I was looking at doing it myself, but I wasn't sure if I was remembering all the bits and pieces needed.

As for flag or delete... I'd be inclined to delete, but only after we've checked whether we have the trope under a different name. (We still occasionally get TVT refugees adding links to "Red Baron" as a trope, after all.) Mind you, somebody's going to say "you have a policy of keeping redlinks for works and creators", so we should have an explanation ready as to why tropes are different.

I agree with "investigate" being the immediate option, and "delete" for the long-term on anything we didn't rename. (Note to self: remember to deal with "Mata Hari".) As for the why of it, works and creators are (reasonably) objective. They exist, and anyone can look them up to document them. A trope name, on the other hand, is not guaranteed to mean the same thing to any two people people who might be unfamiliar with the corresponding page on TVT. Such a redlink is an implicit link to TVT, and as such is against our policy of not linking to TVT for any reason.

And perhaps we should have an explicit rule that we don't list or reference tropes that don't exist. We've said as much informally to users in the past -- if you're going to reference a trope we don't have, it's your responsibility to get it through the Workshop first.