All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXX

[Labster]

Okay, I just looked at a sampling of his edits.  They all appear to be just transferring trope entries from the Taerel page (where they've already been approved) to the relevant trope pages.  However, that's exactly what it is -- a simple cut'n'paste, with no thought to necessary context.  For instance, "Alien Sky":

* ''[[Taerel]]'': Taerel has a strange sky with three moons, one on the West, one on the North and one on the East. This is stated in the Diwarale Kin'toni Clan's page.

With no indication what the "Diwarale Kin'toni Clan's page" is or where it can be found.

We don't have to worry about copyright infringement -- or at least any more than we did for the main page itself -- but we're going to have to check  them to make sure that what he cut'n'pasted isn't lacking important context.

they're bugging me in Discord about approving edits.

Point them at the notice that explicitly says "72-hour turnaround".  And mention that they only posted the edits like six hours ago.  We've nearly banned people for being obnoxious about approving edits before.

... and apparently this guy also uses Moderation on his own wiki.  Yeah not liking them that much.

Actually the idea of reusing descriptions raises an interesting question.  I remember the day back when someone at TVT was thinking about rewriting the software so that wicks were automatically backlinked.  Of course, it doesn't work, because the context you need is different depending on which page you're on.

But I have been thinking a bit about Wikidata and Wikibase, where it would be possible to establish those kinds of relationships.  Basically, the underlying structure of everything on wikibase is a triple, Q -- P --> Q'.  One item connects to another by a property.  Or in graph terms, each node Q is linked to another node Q' by an edge P.  All you need to do is add a statement (aka edge aka triple relationship) pointing the other direction.  Add a qualifier to each statement which describes the relationship, and you basically have our system of trope descriptions in a database form.  Add another qualifier with a drop-down menu for metatropes (played straight, inverted, etc).

Well, kinda.  You can't capture the creativity on formatting page, nor refer to previous examples.  Or even arrange things.  It would still be cool to have a database, that's something TVT doesn't have at all.

Or would it?  Is there any demand for a database, or do people just like reading pages?  You could do things like query the most commonly used tropes in anime, or find out which genres have the most tropes in common, or even find similar shows based on shared tropes.  That still isn't useful to me, but it's a thought of something we could decide to do.