All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XX

[GethN7]

There's a whole bunch of edits by "Cwf1997" in the Moderation queue. Could somebody check them against TV Tropes, please?

I've approved them anyway - the queue was getting too long.

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I seem to recall that somebody was worried about updates to ATT being copied over to TVT without attribution. Is this still a concern?

Because, if it is, we should create a page for George P. Burdell, based on what his Wikipedia page says he's accomplished, and see what happens. Of course, anybody clicking through our page to his Wikipedia page will see why they shouldn't copy the ATT page over to TVT...

I looked, edits don't ring too many alarm bells for me as ripoffs.

Speaking of that, ATT on FANDOM now has a new mod to assist me. They are a TVT member who ports their edits to us and has been incredibly assiduous about making note of this and has been (appropriate since they have a dog avatar) a plagiarism bloodhound for me. I gave them mod powers so they could deal with plagiarism without having to tag me to handle it all the time.

[Bob Schroeck]

I left this edit in the moderation queue. What's our policy on pointing links at Wikipedia for works that we don't have pages for?

Ajacraig-something, right? The edit's no longer in the queue, probably because you cleared it out afterwards. The guy doesn't seem to understand that redlinks are desired. I caught him adding links to TVT because he apparently didn't like redlinks; I denied those changes in moderation and sent him a note about it. I made the mistake of saying something like "If you absolutely must have a link, use Wikipedia".

I think we want to stop this before he decides to convert every redlink in the wiki to a Wikipedia link. And undo all the one's he's done up so far.

[GethN7]

I left this edit in the moderation queue. What's our policy on pointing links at Wikipedia for works that we don't have pages for?

Ajacraig-something, right?  The edit's no longer in the queue, probably because you cleared it out afterwards.  The guy doesn't seem to understand that redlinks are desired.  I caught him adding links to TVT because he apparently didn't like redlinks; I denied those changes in moderation and sent him a note about it.  I made the mistake of saying something like "If you absolutely must  have a link, use Wikipedia".

I think we want to stop this before he decides to convert every redlink in the wiki to a Wikipedia link.  And undo all the one's he's done up so far.

I hate redlinks too, but that's how wikis grow by encouraging people to add actual content. I say if we need to, make clear only add links to Wikipedia for things NOT in our site mission to cover, but to otherwise leave links RED for things we can trope or for work links. Might even be worth making it an official rule to prevent future issues if we don;t have it.

[robkelk]

I left this edit in the moderation queue. What's our policy on pointing links at Wikipedia for works that we don't have pages for?

Ajacraig-something, right?  The edit's no longer in the queue, probably because you cleared it out afterwards.  The guy doesn't seem to understand that redlinks are desired.  I caught him adding links to TVT because he apparently didn't like redlinks; I denied those changes in moderation and sent him a note about it.  I made the mistake of saying something like "If you absolutely must  have a link, use Wikipedia".

I think we want to stop this before he decides to convert every redlink in the wiki to a Wikipedia link.  And undo all the one's he's done up so far.

I hate redlinks too, but that's how wikis grow by encouraging people to add actual content. I say if we need to, make clear only add links to Wikipedia for things NOT in our site mission to cover, but to otherwise leave links RED for things we can trope or for work links. Might even be worth making it an official rule to prevent future issues if we don;t have it.

I knew we said it somewhere already:

All The Tropes:Frequent Redlinks

Works we don't have pages for yet.
Red links for works pages should not be removed. If you are familiar with the work, feel free to launch the page.

EDIT: I see User:Ajacraig200, User:Ajacraig2001, and User:Ajacraig2011. "200" has no comments on the Talk page. "2001" has a somewhat snarky discussion on the Talk page. "2011" is the one in question here.

RE-EDIT: My lunch break's done. I reverted all but this set of edits, which will require multiple undos.

[Bob Schroeck]

Mm. I hadn't realized that he had multiple accounts. That's normally a perm-ban offence.

I'll deal with that last set of edits during my lunchtime stroll through Recent Changes.

[Bob Schroeck]

I forgot to mention that I completed my review of the Image Links pages last night. I think we're safe on that front.

Also, Analytics shows that the Higbee visits are starting to drop off the back end of the results window, which suggests to me that they made a few fishing expeditions a month ago but couldn't find anything worth their time and effort. Once they completely fall off the results I'll probably put an entry for them in the Weirdest Inbound Links, and make a note in History.

[Bob Schroeck]

Aaaaand I discovered that I had already put Higbee on the Weird Inbounds page, so I went ahead and added it to the history.

[Bob Schroeck]

Well, crap.

I think Cwf1197 is maintaining his massive output over the last couple days by copying from TV Tropes. If he is, I'm going to need help undoing the stuff that got past us.

EDIT: It's more annoying than that. It looks like it's a mix of original material and the odd thing copied directly.

EDIT2: After going through twenty-some pages and comparing the edits to TVT, it's not nearly as bad as I was afraid, but it's puzzling... loads of original stuff, and then a trope entry that is either a direct copy or just a couple words off. I don't get it.

[robkelk]

Isn't that the user who we had to remind to use the page-creation templates, after a stretch of the user using the templates?

I wonder whether there are two people sharing an account.

[Bob Schroeck]

This is another user who seems to have started with a couple different accounts with similar names. Cwf1997 is what he's using now, but there's also ChristianFrates97 -- both created on March 19, about 20 minutes apart. We've never had any solid proof they're the same person, but... <shrug>

[robkelk]

Found a trope with a description that appears to assume nothing exists outside the lower-48: Black Gal on White Guy Drama

Do we need a dedicated cleanup tag along the lines of Wikipedia's tag about an article having only a USA perspective, or is this the only article that needs this sort of attention?

[Bob Schroeck]

Let's keep an eye out for other cases. "Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is something that needs addressing."

[Bob Schroeck]

I'm getting tired of Cwf1997 -- in a literal sense. He's churning out new material almost faster than I can keep up with it. More annoying, he seems to think every random coincidence is Hilarious in Hindsight: "The director's uncle once owed a dog whose name was one letter off from that of the lead character in the director's seventh film!" What a belly laugh.

[GethN7]

I'm getting tired of Cwf1997 -- in a literal sense.  He's churning out new material almost faster than I can keep up with it.  More annoying, he seems to think every random coincidence is Hilarious in Hindsight:  "The director's uncle once owed a dog whose name was one letter off from that of the lead character in the director's seventh film!"  What a belly laugh.

Yeah, a lot of it is stubs (which are useful, but it's getting excessive) and the wiki equivalent of shitposting (with the irrelevant garbage you mentioned). Might be worth calling them on the carpet and telling them to slow their roll or all their stuff will either sit in the queue as our lowest priority or we'll tempblock them from churning more out because we expecting some quality to go with our quantity.

[robkelk]

I'm getting tired of Cwf1997 -- in a literal sense.  He's churning out new material almost faster than I can keep up with it.  More annoying, he seems to think every random coincidence is Hilarious in Hindsight:  "The director's uncle once owed a dog whose name was one letter off from that of the lead character in the director's seventh film!"  What a belly laugh.

Yeah, a lot of it is stubs (which are useful, but it's getting excessive) and the wiki equivalent of shitposting (with the irrelevant garbage you mentioned). Might be worth calling them on the carpet and telling them to slow their roll or all their stuff will either sit in the queue as our lowest priority or we'll tempblock them from churning more out because we expecting some quality to go with our quantity.

I'm already ignoring the Moderation queue nine times out of ten because I know it'll be filled with his edits...

[Bob Schroeck]

I'll drop cwf a note asking him to slow down.

Meanwhile, on the topic of the moderation queue, no one approve or reject Samblack's changes to Bobby on Thin Ice for the moment, please. I'm dropping him a note asking him to verify his claim that two-thirds of the article and all the tropes are "false information". Given that there seems to be nothing about the band anywhere on the Web, it's entirely possible it's not vandalism. (In fact, there's so much nothing about them, I'd almost be tempted to write them off as a fake page...)

[robkelk]

One or two tropes? "Token Loli", "Token Mini-Moe", or both? Discussion here, please.

[Bob Schroeck]

I have already weighed in.

[Bob Schroeck]

I'll drop cwf a note asking him to slow down.

Meanwhile, on the topic of the moderation queue, no one approve or reject Samblack's changes to Bobby on Thin Ice for the moment, please.  I'm dropping him a note asking him to verify his claim that two-thirds of the article and all the tropes are "false information".  Given that there seems to be nothing about the band anywhere on the Web, it's entirely possible it's not vandalism.  (In fact, there's so much nothing about them, I'd almost be tempted to write them off as a fake page...)

I should note that a quick check of the Other Guys shows that at least one Troper there questioned the existence of the band in 2019, and it since has been cut "for cause", although that cause simply seems to be a dearth of links to it from anywhere.

I'm thinking maybe this is another bogus page.

[robkelk]

So, approve the pending edit, thank Samblack for drawing this to our attention, and axe the page?

[Bob Schroeck]

Samblack has responded to my query -- he says that he's a former member of the band and almost everything on the page was false. I'll approve the edit in a moment, but I've also offered him the option of deleting it outright.

[robkelk]

I'll drop cwf a note asking him to slow down.

I wonder whether he read it. There's 10 edits by him in the queue at the moment, eight of which were made within 70 minutes of each other.

Or is that "slowing down" for him?

[Bob Schroeck]

That's him telling us he doesn't care.

I suggest we tell him that every time he queues up more than 20 edits in two hours -- or more than two new pages -- we'll give him a tempban to stop him from overloading the queue while the moderation staff goes through it at their leisure.

[robkelk]

Agreed. One more message, then if it's ignored as well we point out that All The Tropes:How We Do Bans Around Here says "Disagreeing with a mod is okay; ignoring the mods altogether isn't. We want to talk with you, not to you." And if that's ignored, then it's time for a two-day attention-getter tempban.

[Bob Schroeck]

<nod> I'll do that this morning.

EDIT: What do you know, he actually has slowed down. He's left ten only edits including one new page in the queue, and other than the new page (which he added at 7PM last night my time), all the rest were from between 4:00 and 5:30 PM yesterday. So... no second warning, yet.