No replies at all? Ok, we guess you're still busy pondering about what we wrote yesterday. Take your time, here's more as we promised yesterday.
Oh, BTW: Since we just read on the ATT forum that you want to bring back the Title Bin: We also liked that feature and brought this back a while ago. We guess you don't mind if we send you the old files (before we converted it to our wiki code), as soon as we find them.
OK, now about how we want to make things different than Tv Tropes did.
First: The big question - Content Creation Wiki or Content Classification Wiki? vorticity mentioned this already. We're not sure whether we understood him correctly, but we think it's like this: "creation" refers to new wiki pages about tropes, works, creators etc. and especially examples, whereas "classification" includes the boring maintenance: Correcting "villian" to "villain", adding a missing comma, or alphabetizing lists.
(Other than that we can't imagine which creation you're talking about. Creating works? Maybe someone out there was inspired by Tv Tropes to make a great work, but so far, we've only seen that vlog Echo Chamber, that ARG "The Wall Will Fall" and a lot of forum roleplays. No, we don't think you mean that.)
About our own experience: We liked to go to our watchlist(s) and get excited whenever a page was changed, hoping for a new example from media, an interesting tidbit or at least some funny snark. But all too often, instead we got boring stuff like removed ZCEs or the ubiquitous namespace changes. Tv Tropes started to suck when those moments happened more and more often.
At least we hope that our software can get rid of the boring stuff like adding namespaces (because they're automagically there) and alphabetizing lists. Those tropers who like classification and maintenance will be busy enough with typos and ZCEs.
Other than that: Not sure how we can prevent the wiki crossing the line from "content creation" to "content classification". If troper X creates an example (e.g. Palpatine being the Big Bad of SW), then troper Y can rearrange this example, elaborate it, correct it, but can't re-create it because it's already there. (Duh.) But we think you shouldn't worry, there are more than enough un-troped works out there, and more than enough works with missing tropes.
Second: Bringing back the fun Tv Tropes was in old days. (Some of us have been around since before the Great Crash.) Take the titles, for example. SPOON may be right that some trope names were hard to understand, but they were fun and made you curious what's behind a title. "Parker Lewis Ferris Bueller" sounds better than "High School Hustler", and even totally obscure titles like "Flaming Cobra Sugar Cellar" were interesting.
We understand the point of FoRKS and would like to bring to old experience back. Maybe something like "FoRKS Friday"? Each Friday, the titles of some renamed pages are changed back to their old names for a day. A cron job on the server should suffice for this.
Fortunately, our software makes changing page titles easier. You don't have to change all the wicks by hand, and even if you do, our "Related pages" show a) how many wicks are coming from one page and b) in which part of the page they are.
(That's just the start of it. You guys have been on Tv Tropes for a long time, you should remember how things were when troping was pure fun. Esp. Looney Toons. In fact, we'd like to hear a story how things were on Tv Tropes in these days. In short: Suggestions are welcome.)
Third: What are the basic rules? At first, we think we should consider the difference between what we call "laws" (like "don't use the wiki for trading crack") and "rules" (like "don't use the word 'recently' in examples"). Leaving that aside, we were quite happy with the old Troping Code. Though we'd change "don't be a dick" to "don't be an asshole". Criticizing people should be allowed; snarking about works like Twilight, Eragon and Sonichu was fun; and not every insult is ban-worthy. (Calling people "asshole" for nothing is still not cool, but the appropriate punishment should be more like "no editing/posting for a week".) Also, we really don't see a problem with calling RL people like Hitler (or Stalin) Complete Monsters. That's why we want to change "No Real Life Examples Please" to "Be Careful With Real Life Examples Please" in general.
Then, there's the point of honesty. Without this, nothing will work. Just say how things are. Just as we do when we say "Brent, your openness about who you are and what you do is fine, but we prefer to stay anonymous for the moment."
Means: People are allowed to like guro hentai, but they're not allowed to claim that it was fine for six-year-old girls. Tropers may express their opinions, but they may not lie about facts. If you attack other tropers, or claim they attacked you, better bring some good proof along. As we told vorticity about how one of us was banned from Tv Tropes because of a fight with another troper: We can't stand these people who evade truth no matter how wrong they are.
Fourth: The old question how to get a better "signal-to-noise" ratio. Tv Tropes is trying something with removing Zero Context Examples, that's a start. We let the software deal with ZCEs and also introduce some new measurements to tell the difference between well-written pages and those which are... not.
* The SLI (Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness Index): Calculates an index based on the length of the used words and the length of sentences. Doesn't automatically mean the example's good, but we have way more empty examples or one-word examples than examples that sound intellectual but are without meaning.
* The Bad Writing Index: For works. Simply the percentage of tropes on the Bad Writing Index. We guess that measurement will say something about how well-written one work is.
* The Trope Rarity Index: Many works have lists that consist of the most common tropes like "The Hero", "Big Bad" and "Badass", while cool and interesting tropes are neglected. So we give every trope a point value for rarity which becomes smaller as the number of wicks for that trope grows. The TRI is the average of the rarity value of the used tropes in a work. A higher TRI hints that the tropers who made that page have a bigger trope vocabulary. Just like some people have a vocabulary of 25,000 words, and some only know 500.
* Average Content Score: The percentage of examples that aren't Zero Context Examples. The more, the better.
Now these are mathematical measurements, but fun can't be measured like that. But since our software is example-based, we could introduce something like value measurements: Whenever a troper posts an "Awesome Moment", you may give your vote whether you think it's indeed awesome or not. So we'll have an easy measurement for the popularity of examples and such.
Furthermore, since your signal may be another troper's noise: That's what the filter table is good for. You don't like e.g. Radio series? Switch the filter for Radio to "No", and the software won't display any pages or examples from radio series anymore. Works just like with works that are too naughty for your taste. - And just to make sure you don't forget that this is a kind of echo chamber, the software will also display something like "42 of 123 examples filtered out" on pages you look at.
Fifth: How to build up the new community? You (Brent, Bob, Rob & Geth) are some great tropers who have done a lot of (and for) troping; and that's in fact the reason we contacted you, because a wiki needs tropers like you. But we also need some more people if we don't want our wiki to stay a small clubhouse. Unfortunately, the internet has changed a lot since Tv Tropes started (or WP, or the Eternal September). At that time, many people didn't have internet yet, wikis attracted only true geeks and troping was only for an even smaller subset. But today, there are thousands of experienced trolls, and even more people ready to join new websites. Remember what happened when reddit was down and people wanted to use voat instead, but voat couldn't handle the sudden traffic? Talk about drinking from the firehose. Yeah, we have no solution for that either, at least for now.
So what's our plan? We prefer organic growth of our wiki. That's why we'll make it invitation-only for the beginning. You'll get some 64-letter registration codes as soon as our wiki's online, enter it, and start editing. Then, you'll also have five registration tokens, which means you can send such a token of code to some other troper you know and trust, so they can join the wiki too. If they don't want to, you'll get your token back. Do the math: We start with five tropers, who invite up to 25 more, who invite 125, and so on.
This also means: If some new troper really creates havoc, we can also tell which troper is responsible for inviting such a tool/troll/spammer/whatever.
Sixth: Community strengthening. Many tropers out there are frustrated because they work hard for some wiki page, and nobody seems to notice, and if someone does, it's either a mod criticizing they did something wrong or another troper starting an edit war. Discussion pages are rarely used, and the fora tend to exist independently from the wiki. So much about Tv Tropes.
What do we do in a different way?
* First, our fora work with tagged threads. (A thread may have more than one tag.) And only existing wiki pages are allowed as tags. When you're on a wiki page that has forum discussions, you'll get a link to a page with all the threads tagged with this page. Discussion pages and fora are united, so to speak.
* Second: Tropers have watchlists, and many tropers like to list on their troper pages which pages they made and/or like. It's reasonable to think that tropers will have these pages on their watchlist too. But on most wikis, you can't see what people are watching, or which people watch a certain page. That's why we include the watchlist in the troper page. See? Whenever you put a page on your watchlist, you'll also add it as a quasi-example to your troper page. This means: Tropers can see who else likes the pages they made, and can connect with these other tropers.
* Third: Scientists say communities cross a line when their size grows beyond the magic number of 150, because most humans can't remember more than 150 different people. We expect that we'll have to deal with this problem too. What's the solution? Organize the wiki community around fandoms. As soon as a page has three tropers who are fans, they may start to moderate themselves. (If they grow beyond 150, they'll have to.) Of course, you're by no means restricted from joining more than one fandom. We wouldn't have it like that either. Just keep in mind that if you tick off a fandom, they also have the right to exclude you or something like that.
Finally: Some tidbit about wiki code we had promised to tell vorticity about:
On most wikis, bold code is done by using ''', and italics are ''. So far, so good. Unfortunately the inventors of that code didn't consider the Bold Inflation and the consistent use of italics for work titles. As a result, there are some example sentences where wikis (both MediaWiki and PmWiki) fail. Take these:
''StarTrekTOS'''s Kirk is a kosher ham. '''Cause Shatner is Jewish, geddit?'' (Should look like: Star Trek TOS's Kirk is a kosher ham. 'Cause Shatner is Jewish, geddit?)
''It's over '''NINE THOUSAND!!!''' (breaks device)'' (Should look like: It's over NINE THOUSAND!!! (breaks device))
Notice something? Both use the same apostrophe pattern (2-3-3-2), but the resulting formatting should be different. So unless we'd be willing to blow up our wiki parser by adding a sophisticated AI that can recognize leading and trailing apostrophes (hint: we weren't), that problem would stay with us. Try it out, on whichever wiki you like - one of these sentences has to be parsed incorrectly.
That's why we decided to use a modified BBCode, with tags like [ B ] and [ I ].
The advantage (for you, not for us): Code from our wiki can be translated to MediaWiki code without any ambiguity, whereas that wasn't the case when we translated the site rip. Or when we want to import ATT changes.
Oh, BTW: Since we just read on the ATT forum that you want to bring back the Title Bin: We also liked that feature and brought this back a while ago. We guess you don't mind if we send you the old files (before we converted it to our wiki code), as soon as we find them.
OK, now about how we want to make things different than Tv Tropes did.
First: The big question - Content Creation Wiki or Content Classification Wiki? vorticity mentioned this already. We're not sure whether we understood him correctly, but we think it's like this: "creation" refers to new wiki pages about tropes, works, creators etc. and especially examples, whereas "classification" includes the boring maintenance: Correcting "villian" to "villain", adding a missing comma, or alphabetizing lists.
(Other than that we can't imagine which creation you're talking about. Creating works? Maybe someone out there was inspired by Tv Tropes to make a great work, but so far, we've only seen that vlog Echo Chamber, that ARG "The Wall Will Fall" and a lot of forum roleplays. No, we don't think you mean that.)
About our own experience: We liked to go to our watchlist(s) and get excited whenever a page was changed, hoping for a new example from media, an interesting tidbit or at least some funny snark. But all too often, instead we got boring stuff like removed ZCEs or the ubiquitous namespace changes. Tv Tropes started to suck when those moments happened more and more often.
At least we hope that our software can get rid of the boring stuff like adding namespaces (because they're automagically there) and alphabetizing lists. Those tropers who like classification and maintenance will be busy enough with typos and ZCEs.
Other than that: Not sure how we can prevent the wiki crossing the line from "content creation" to "content classification". If troper X creates an example (e.g. Palpatine being the Big Bad of SW), then troper Y can rearrange this example, elaborate it, correct it, but can't re-create it because it's already there. (Duh.) But we think you shouldn't worry, there are more than enough un-troped works out there, and more than enough works with missing tropes.
Second: Bringing back the fun Tv Tropes was in old days. (Some of us have been around since before the Great Crash.) Take the titles, for example. SPOON may be right that some trope names were hard to understand, but they were fun and made you curious what's behind a title. "Parker Lewis Ferris Bueller" sounds better than "High School Hustler", and even totally obscure titles like "Flaming Cobra Sugar Cellar" were interesting.
We understand the point of FoRKS and would like to bring to old experience back. Maybe something like "FoRKS Friday"? Each Friday, the titles of some renamed pages are changed back to their old names for a day. A cron job on the server should suffice for this.
Fortunately, our software makes changing page titles easier. You don't have to change all the wicks by hand, and even if you do, our "Related pages" show a) how many wicks are coming from one page and b) in which part of the page they are.
(That's just the start of it. You guys have been on Tv Tropes for a long time, you should remember how things were when troping was pure fun. Esp. Looney Toons. In fact, we'd like to hear a story how things were on Tv Tropes in these days. In short: Suggestions are welcome.)
Third: What are the basic rules? At first, we think we should consider the difference between what we call "laws" (like "don't use the wiki for trading crack") and "rules" (like "don't use the word 'recently' in examples"). Leaving that aside, we were quite happy with the old Troping Code. Though we'd change "don't be a dick" to "don't be an asshole". Criticizing people should be allowed; snarking about works like Twilight, Eragon and Sonichu was fun; and not every insult is ban-worthy. (Calling people "asshole" for nothing is still not cool, but the appropriate punishment should be more like "no editing/posting for a week".) Also, we really don't see a problem with calling RL people like Hitler (or Stalin) Complete Monsters. That's why we want to change "No Real Life Examples Please" to "Be Careful With Real Life Examples Please" in general.
Then, there's the point of honesty. Without this, nothing will work. Just say how things are. Just as we do when we say "Brent, your openness about who you are and what you do is fine, but we prefer to stay anonymous for the moment."
Means: People are allowed to like guro hentai, but they're not allowed to claim that it was fine for six-year-old girls. Tropers may express their opinions, but they may not lie about facts. If you attack other tropers, or claim they attacked you, better bring some good proof along. As we told vorticity about how one of us was banned from Tv Tropes because of a fight with another troper: We can't stand these people who evade truth no matter how wrong they are.
Fourth: The old question how to get a better "signal-to-noise" ratio. Tv Tropes is trying something with removing Zero Context Examples, that's a start. We let the software deal with ZCEs and also introduce some new measurements to tell the difference between well-written pages and those which are... not.
* The SLI (Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness Index): Calculates an index based on the length of the used words and the length of sentences. Doesn't automatically mean the example's good, but we have way more empty examples or one-word examples than examples that sound intellectual but are without meaning.
* The Bad Writing Index: For works. Simply the percentage of tropes on the Bad Writing Index. We guess that measurement will say something about how well-written one work is.
* The Trope Rarity Index: Many works have lists that consist of the most common tropes like "The Hero", "Big Bad" and "Badass", while cool and interesting tropes are neglected. So we give every trope a point value for rarity which becomes smaller as the number of wicks for that trope grows. The TRI is the average of the rarity value of the used tropes in a work. A higher TRI hints that the tropers who made that page have a bigger trope vocabulary. Just like some people have a vocabulary of 25,000 words, and some only know 500.
* Average Content Score: The percentage of examples that aren't Zero Context Examples. The more, the better.
Now these are mathematical measurements, but fun can't be measured like that. But since our software is example-based, we could introduce something like value measurements: Whenever a troper posts an "Awesome Moment", you may give your vote whether you think it's indeed awesome or not. So we'll have an easy measurement for the popularity of examples and such.
Furthermore, since your signal may be another troper's noise: That's what the filter table is good for. You don't like e.g. Radio series? Switch the filter for Radio to "No", and the software won't display any pages or examples from radio series anymore. Works just like with works that are too naughty for your taste. - And just to make sure you don't forget that this is a kind of echo chamber, the software will also display something like "42 of 123 examples filtered out" on pages you look at.
Fifth: How to build up the new community? You (Brent, Bob, Rob & Geth) are some great tropers who have done a lot of (and for) troping; and that's in fact the reason we contacted you, because a wiki needs tropers like you. But we also need some more people if we don't want our wiki to stay a small clubhouse. Unfortunately, the internet has changed a lot since Tv Tropes started (or WP, or the Eternal September). At that time, many people didn't have internet yet, wikis attracted only true geeks and troping was only for an even smaller subset. But today, there are thousands of experienced trolls, and even more people ready to join new websites. Remember what happened when reddit was down and people wanted to use voat instead, but voat couldn't handle the sudden traffic? Talk about drinking from the firehose. Yeah, we have no solution for that either, at least for now.
So what's our plan? We prefer organic growth of our wiki. That's why we'll make it invitation-only for the beginning. You'll get some 64-letter registration codes as soon as our wiki's online, enter it, and start editing. Then, you'll also have five registration tokens, which means you can send such a token of code to some other troper you know and trust, so they can join the wiki too. If they don't want to, you'll get your token back. Do the math: We start with five tropers, who invite up to 25 more, who invite 125, and so on.
This also means: If some new troper really creates havoc, we can also tell which troper is responsible for inviting such a tool/troll/spammer/whatever.
Sixth: Community strengthening. Many tropers out there are frustrated because they work hard for some wiki page, and nobody seems to notice, and if someone does, it's either a mod criticizing they did something wrong or another troper starting an edit war. Discussion pages are rarely used, and the fora tend to exist independently from the wiki. So much about Tv Tropes.
What do we do in a different way?
* First, our fora work with tagged threads. (A thread may have more than one tag.) And only existing wiki pages are allowed as tags. When you're on a wiki page that has forum discussions, you'll get a link to a page with all the threads tagged with this page. Discussion pages and fora are united, so to speak.
* Second: Tropers have watchlists, and many tropers like to list on their troper pages which pages they made and/or like. It's reasonable to think that tropers will have these pages on their watchlist too. But on most wikis, you can't see what people are watching, or which people watch a certain page. That's why we include the watchlist in the troper page. See? Whenever you put a page on your watchlist, you'll also add it as a quasi-example to your troper page. This means: Tropers can see who else likes the pages they made, and can connect with these other tropers.
* Third: Scientists say communities cross a line when their size grows beyond the magic number of 150, because most humans can't remember more than 150 different people. We expect that we'll have to deal with this problem too. What's the solution? Organize the wiki community around fandoms. As soon as a page has three tropers who are fans, they may start to moderate themselves. (If they grow beyond 150, they'll have to.) Of course, you're by no means restricted from joining more than one fandom. We wouldn't have it like that either. Just keep in mind that if you tick off a fandom, they also have the right to exclude you or something like that.
Finally: Some tidbit about wiki code we had promised to tell vorticity about:
On most wikis, bold code is done by using ''', and italics are ''. So far, so good. Unfortunately the inventors of that code didn't consider the Bold Inflation and the consistent use of italics for work titles. As a result, there are some example sentences where wikis (both MediaWiki and PmWiki) fail. Take these:
''StarTrekTOS'''s Kirk is a kosher ham. '''Cause Shatner is Jewish, geddit?'' (Should look like: Star Trek TOS's Kirk is a kosher ham. 'Cause Shatner is Jewish, geddit?)
''It's over '''NINE THOUSAND!!!''' (breaks device)'' (Should look like: It's over NINE THOUSAND!!! (breaks device))
Notice something? Both use the same apostrophe pattern (2-3-3-2), but the resulting formatting should be different. So unless we'd be willing to blow up our wiki parser by adding a sophisticated AI that can recognize leading and trailing apostrophes (hint: we weren't), that problem would stay with us. Try it out, on whichever wiki you like - one of these sentences has to be parsed incorrectly.
That's why we decided to use a modified BBCode, with tags like [ B ] and [ I ].
The advantage (for you, not for us): Code from our wiki can be translated to MediaWiki code without any ambiguity, whereas that wasn't the case when we translated the site rip. Or when we want to import ATT changes.