All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part II

[Labster]

@Bob: Clippy is clearly a parody, and not therefore not infringing (though deleting it wouldn't be a great loss).

I tend to feel that if you're proposing to change something that people
are already comfortable with, there should be a compelling advantage to
making that change. And personally, I'm not seeing the advantage here.

No, I'm saying that no matter what I choose, someone will be uncomfortable with it.  I'm mainly worried about which class of users will be annoyed, and what will be the total magnitude of the annoyance.  The style we're leaning towards is more or less the same as what TVT puts in their custom titles, but we can make free links that ways -- and have a style guide reference to go with it.
Now the major change that I'd like to suggest is getting rid of the works namespaces from TVT, more or less entirely.  I don't know the original logic behind putting works in a separate namespace, but the reasons I'd guess are:

• Tropes with the same name as a work causing problems
  
• Works with the same name also conflicting
  
• Work names look like trope names in links, and misuse work names as tropes
  
• Easier to select the right subpages automatically (like our more manual {{work}} and {{trope}} things)
  
• When all you have is a hammer (Pmwiki), everything starts to look like a namespace
  

Mediawiki, for better or worse, was built around the needs of Wikipedia.  And so I started off by just putting the namespace in parentheses, like Wikipedia does for their disambiguated pages.  But they only use these when a page actually needs disambiguation.  And by importing all of these, it feels like "when all you know is hammering, everything goes into a round hole."  By keeping up with the namespace idea, we get:

• More typing for users in basically every work link
  
• More data storage, because almost every work link becomes a piped link.
  
• Users have to remember the all the namespaces
  
• Users have to guess the correct namespace for a new work
  
• When a page covers a work in multiple media, the choice of namespace is really arbitrary -- sometimes it's what was first written (wait, Dirty Pair was a light novel?), sometimes it's most popular (Utena was a manga first, but the anime is somehow more canonical)
  
• No real gain on site organization
  

Most of these things are a tax on the editor, rather than them needing to know just the name of the work or trope.
As for organization, Mediawiki does subpages and categories quite well.  Category:Manga can house all the manga, and can be put on a page right alongside Category:Anime when appropriate.  Subpages can organize all of the different media associated with a work, if necessary (as with the Harry Potter books currently).  So my proposal is:

• Eliminate the parenthesized part of titles, unless they're necessary to disambiguate.
  
• Use disambiguation pages where necessary, or notes on the top of a page when a work is dominant.
  
• If a work and a trope have the same title, the trope always wins the main unparenthesized page name.
  
• While moving the page names, make sure that pages have all the appropriate categories (e.g. TV and Film, or Anime/Manga/Light Novel), which means that they're more organized than before.
  
• Make sure the text actually notes the media type, because it should.
  
• Lowercase the remaining work types in parentheses (except TV, natch), to be a little more Wikipedia-ish.  Yeah, it's different, but there's no need to swim upstream against common practice in the new software.
  

This still leaves us with the potential problem of work names being used as tropes (which is another way of saying we have the potential problem of having bad editors).  We could also get pages linked to the wrong work, though I doubt that problem will be much different than it is currently.  It might confuse is people coming from TVT, but I suspect they'll pick it up rather quickly if they stick around (and we're already doing something slightly different anyway with parens and all).  The only other downside I can see is that hovering over links would provide less information than it used to (but I'd still like to hack the hovering behavior to be more informative, eventually).  But overall, I think it's easier on users to just drop the namespace part.
OK, I think you can tell I had policy analysis in my background.  What do you think?/Have I missed anything?
-- ∇×V