All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXIX

[GethN7]

Has HLIAA14YOG spent enough time in Moderation since his last tempban?

Anyone else have an opinion on this besides Rob and me?

Seems to have kept his head down and out of trouble. I'm cool with a provisional release from the timeout chair.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, that's three of us all right with giving him another chance to eat with the grownups. Brent, care to put in your two cents' worth?

[Labster]

No input, I'm not even aware of the original reasons for the tempban.

If you haven't voted in the Miraheze Board Election, please do so.  It would really help out.  The nominations and questions are available for you to read, but there are only 3 candidates for 4 seats, and they're all good people who I want to continue to work with.

[Bob Schroeck]

No input, I'm not even aware of the original reasons for the tempban.

He was helping in the ongoing effort to replace disambiguation links with direct links to works -- but was doing so stupidly and mechanically, ignoring cases where the disambiguation link was the right thing to use -- for instance when an example on a trope page was present in multiple versions of a work (like something that had an anime, a manga, a light novel, and a live-action adaptation), and there wasn't a pre-existing franchise page to cover it. In such cases, he would pick one version of the work apparently at random, and replace the disambiguation link with that, regardless of the implied inanities that caused (like implicitly suggesting that agent code numbers were only present in the film versions of James Bond). We caught and fixed this multiple times, and gave him numerous warnings, which basically got a "sorry" from him as he kept on doing it -- he gave every indication of not even understanding what he was doing wrong. Eventually we tempbanned him and pulled his automod bit to keep him from doing it any more. (Which has worked, but sadly not the way we wanted -- he hasn't touched a disambiguation link since his ban expired.)

Anyway, with three in favor and one abstention it looks like he's getting autopatrolled/automod back.

[robkelk]

...
If you haven't voted in the Miraheze Board Election, please do so.  It would really help out.  The nominations and questions are available for you to read, but there are only 3 candidates for 4 seats, and they're all good people who I want to continue to work with.

I'm holding my vote until either May 9 or each of the candidates answer the question asked by コレイ on April 19, whichever comes first.

Folks made a big deal about transparency. Answering questions about how they plan to carry out operations is part of transparency.

[robkelk]

What's with whatever tool we're using on the Reviews subpages not understanding the standard wiki formatting in the page description boxes? It reports at least one standard Magic Word as a missing template (although it actions the magic word correctly), it doesn't display the category "Reviews" in the category list, and it prefixes the word "Category:" to the categories that it does display (although it sends people to the correct categories). Somebody's going to wonder why the heck this thing is broken...

The way we do reviews has long been broken. I have an archive of reviews carried over at the fork from TVT, and I haven't done anything with them because (among other reasons) of it.

Another thing I don't like about our Review plug-in/widget/gadget/whatever: its interaction with the Work page header is such that it created redlinks for Reviews subpages for ''every work on the wiki''. Bad enough in the past, but now that Special:Wanted Pages is cached and has a maximum of 5000 entries, these redlinks are crowding out the redlinks to pages that we really want.

Hence the sitenotice that I just posted on the wiki. We need to do something to make the redlink list useful again, and that "something" is either "junk the Review plug-in/widget/gadget/whatever" or "ask the Tropers to contribute reviews".

[Labster]

I'm holding my vote until either May 9 or each of the candidates answer the question asked by コレイ on April 19, whichever comes first.

Folks made a big deal about transparency. Answering questions about how they plan to carry out operations is part of transparency.

In some sense, I understand why you think that a community director should answer questions that the community asks. On the other hand, given the upset and rancor yesterday caused by simply uploading an icon on a wiki, I would fear for my physical safety to answer that question.

[Labster]

What's with whatever tool we're using on the Reviews subpages not understanding the standard wiki formatting in the page description boxes? It reports at least one standard Magic Word as a missing template (although it actions the magic word correctly), it doesn't display the category "Reviews" in the category list, and it prefixes the word "Category:" to the categories that it does display (although it sends people to the correct categories). Somebody's going to wonder why the heck this thing is broken...

The way we do reviews has long been broken.  I have an archive of reviews carried over at the fork from TVT, and I haven't done anything with them because (among other reasons) of it.

Another thing I don't like about our Review plug-in/widget/gadget/whatever: its interaction with the Work page header is such that it created redlinks for Reviews subpages for ''every work on the wiki''. Bad enough in the past, but now that Special:Wanted Pages is cached and has a maximum of 5000 entries, these redlinks are crowding out the redlinks to pages that we really want.

Hence the sitenotice that I just posted on the wiki. We need to do something to make the redlink list useful again, and that "something" is either "junk the Review plug-in/widget/gadget/whatever" or "ask the Tropers to contribute reviews".

It turns out no one likes the Review software: formerly Flow, currently StructuredDiscussions, and future deprecated.  I was going to file a bug report on the link until I found out the whole extension is being discontinued.  The replacement is Extension:DiscussionTools -- which looks like it might be great for our talk pages, but not possibly not so good for our review pages.

The redlinks are coming from the linking to the review namepsace in the {{work}} template.  I could go ahead and fix that temporarily by doing {{#ifexist:Review:Foo}} in the header -- it's an expensive function, but not too bad for only one.  (The subpages list is another expensive function, but it only does one DB roundtrip, looking for one page more is another one!)  But honestly, there are only 22 reviews so it would be best to just copy them to a Work/Reviews and I can change the work template.

I think we just need to figure out what our format looks like in wikitext, and then paste stuff, and lose our old reviews.  Simple with linebreaks, or a template that draws a box around a review, with another place to add replies to the review below?

[robkelk]

In some sense, I understand why you think that a community director should answer questions that the community asks.  On the other hand, given the upset and rancor yesterday caused by simply uploading an icon on a wiki, I would fear for my physical safety to answer that question.

Uploading an icon caused a furor? Looks like I need to go read Meta again... EDIT, a half-hour later: Where's the furor? I can't find it...

As for the question, I don't need an answer immediately. I don't even need an answer that commits somebody to a future course of action. But I do want something so that I can make an informed vote.

It turns out no one likes the Review software: formerly Flow, currently StructuredDiscussions, and future deprecated.  I was going to file a bug report on the link until I found out the whole extension is being discontinued.  The replacement is Extension:DiscussionTools -- which looks like it might be great for our talk pages, but not possibly not so good for our review pages.

The redlinks are coming from the linking to the review namepsace in the {{work}} template.  I could go ahead and fix that temporarily by doing {{#ifexist:Review:Foo}} in the header -- it's an expensive function, but not too bad for only one.  (The subpages list is another expensive function, but it only does one DB roundtrip, looking for one page more is another one!)  But honestly, there are only 22 reviews so it would be best to just copy them to a Work/Reviews and I can change the work template.

I think we just need to figure out what our format looks like in wikitext, and then paste stuff, and lose our old reviews.  Simple with linebreaks, or a template that draws a box around a review, with another place to add replies to the review below?

That's better than either of the options I came up with. I vote that you proceed with your plan.

[GethN7]

In some sense, I understand why you think that a community director should answer questions that the community asks.  On the other hand, given the upset and rancor yesterday caused by simply uploading an icon on a wiki, I would fear for my physical safety to answer that question.

Uploading an icon caused a furor? Looks like I need to go read Meta again... EDIT, a half-hour later: Where's the furor? I can't find it...

As for the question, I don't need an answer immediately. I don't even need an answer that commits somebody to a future course of action. But I do want something so that I can make an informed vote.

It turns out no one likes the Review software: formerly Flow, currently StructuredDiscussions, and future deprecated.  I was going to file a bug report on the link until I found out the whole extension is being discontinued.  The replacement is ExtensioniscussionTools -- which looks like it might be great for our talk pages, but not possibly not so good for our review pages.

The redlinks are coming from the linking to the review namepsace in the {{work}} template.  I could go ahead and fix that temporarily by doing {{#ifexist:Review:Foo}} in the header -- it's an expensive function, but not too bad for only one.  (The subpages list is another expensive function, but it only does one DB roundtrip, looking for one page more is another one!)  But honestly, there are only 22 reviews so it would be best to just copy them to a Work/Reviews and I can change the work template.

I think we just need to figure out what our format looks like in wikitext, and then paste stuff, and lose our old reviews.  Simple with linebreaks, or a template that draws a box around a review, with another place to add replies to the review below?

That's better than either of the options I came up with. I vote that you proceed with your plan.

I'll side with anything that makes more sense than our current setup.

[Bob Schroeck]

It turns out no one likes the Review software: formerly Flow, currently StructuredDiscussions, and future deprecated.  I was going to file a bug report on the link until I found out the whole extension is being discontinued.  The replacement is ExtensioniscussionTools -- which looks like it might be great for our talk pages, but not possibly not so good for our review pages.

The redlinks are coming from the linking to the review namepsace in the {{work}} template.  I could go ahead and fix that temporarily by doing {{#ifexist:Review:Foo}} in the header -- it's an expensive function, but not too bad for only one.  (The subpages list is another expensive function, but it only does one DB roundtrip, looking for one page more is another one!)  But honestly, there are only 22 reviews so it would be best to just copy them to a Work/Reviews and I can change the work template.

I think we just need to figure out what our format looks like in wikitext, and then paste stuff, and lose our old reviews.  Simple with linebreaks, or a template that draws a box around a review, with another place to add replies to the review below?

That's better than either of the options I came up with. I vote that you proceed with your plan.

Likewise. And once we have a template, I can maybe automate converting the hundreds of tiny text files I have...

[Labster]

In some sense, I understand why you think that a community director should answer questions that the community asks.  On the other hand, given the upset and rancor yesterday caused by simply uploading an icon on a wiki, I would fear for my physical safety to answer that question.

Uploading an icon caused a furor? Looks like I need to go read Meta again... EDIT, a half-hour later: Where's the furor? I can't find it...

As for the question, I don't need an answer immediately. I don't even need an answer that commits somebody to a future course of action. But I do want something so that I can make an informed vote.

Apparently it was all on Discord, and the bullying was bad enough to make our President of WikiTide Foundation quit and GDPR his wiki account. I don't even know man, snowflakes everywhere.

I'm also not on the Discord now, but that's for another somewhat related reason: during my presentation at MWcon, one of our moderators was pretending that he had been directed by the board to say stuff on our behalf, which had the end result of making everyone even more upset. I removed his moderator privileges for abuse of authority, and called for other privileges to be removed -- this is not a one time problem since this guy also tricked me into hosting a meeting saying it had been approved by someone else. Anyway, people got really upset that it was a huge abuse of power to remove moderator from someone who lies to them, and I had to go through a process of voting instead. I left Discord because I don't want to be involved in an outlet where people spread disinformation.

Which is to say that I don't know what happened in this particular furor, because I didn't see any of it.

[Labster]

The code for the abuse filter is:

!("autoconfirmed" in user_groups | "sysop" in user_groups | "skipcaptcha" in user_rights)
& added_lines irlike "n[1i!*]gg[3*e]r|r[e3*]t[4@*a]rd|f[@*4]gg[0*o]t|ch[1!i*]nk"

The last one, is a normal English word that has lots of non-offensive uses, and the second one has a non-offensive verb form.

The main problem is likely that Mediawiki's diff algorithm is quite bad, as you have seen on diff pages, so it will flag as added lines things that were not touched.

[Bob Schroeck]

Well, crap. Thanks to the glitch we've lost all of the discussion about this issue. <sigh> At least far as I can tell, he was never actually prevented from submitting his edits; as I posted before the problem, the logs indicate that for some changes he was warned, and for some others no action was taken.

[robkelk]

And checking the abuse filter logs shows that he's the only editor who tripped that particular filter in the last three years.

I'm inclined to agree with Labster here -- MediaWiki error, nothing we can do about it other than file a bug report somewhere.

[robkelk]

So... This page waiting in the Moderation queue.

It's new content, not a copy form Wikipedia or TV Tropes... except for the final one-sentence paragraph, which came straight from the matching TVT page.

Approve and delete the offending sentence (and rename to match our naming conventions), or reject for a single line? It's the first edit from a new troper -- I don't want to discourage contributions, but I also don't want to encourage bad writing practices.

[Bob Schroeck]

Hard call. We've been saying for years that the smallest bit of text identifiable as originating on TVT counts as copyright infringement and is grounds for rejecting a submission, but you also have a point that we don't want to stomp someone we'd rather encourage. However, I also note the page is missing all footer markup, as well.

I'd say give it a rejection on that ground, with a note that the final sentence would have merited rejection on its own, and suggest resubmitting the page without it and with the proper markup.

[Labster]

I'd approve and just edit it out of the page after the fact.

[Bob Schroeck]

Well. Actually, as a result of looking into that page two days ago, I discovered that most of the redlinks on The Simpsons (animation)/Recap were pointing at old TVT-namespaced pages that would hang off the nonexistent top-level page "Recap" -- just like the one he created: "Recap/The Simpsons S 14 E 9 Strong Arms Of The Ma". Checking the page history, it looks like a mass link update run circa 2014 didn't quite do the job?

Anyway, having discovered that, I fixed the redlinks so they all pointed at pages that hung off The Simpsons (animation)/Recap in our preferred format, and made an apologetic rejection explaining why it (mostly) wasn't his fault and encouraging him to try again now that things were fixed.

[Labster]

I don't think Characters subpages should be deleted for not having examples -- the characters are the example of the trope, although it's a very weak connection.

As a replacement for the Reviews pages, we can either make a special template that adds boxes around reviews, or we can enable DiscussionTools, which works like, well, the "Add Topic" button on [https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community...]Community Portal[/url].  DiscussionTools stores information in normal wikitext, can be enabled by a magic word on the page, and is far easier to reason about than Flow/StructuredDiscussions.  But this way wouldn't get us any extra things that a template would, like 5 stars or "Category:Reviews by X".  It would be possible to use both together.  What would we want here?

Flow is in general kind of annoying to work with, and WMF is discontinuing it.  Which is to say they will not be fixing the bugs, since everyone who worked on it left.  They will eventually get a convert script available because they need it for their own projects, and we can move our talk pages into wikitext with DiscussionTools enabled. (Reviews namespace is small, and we can do it this week.)

[robkelk]

I don't think Characters subpages should be deleted for not having examples -- the characters are the example of the trope, although it's a very weak connection.

Well, I hung the delete tag on the pages after a strict reading of All The Tropes:How to Write An Example. We should probably re-write the policy if that's a problem.

---

Speaking of wiki policy, what is our policy on AI-generated text? It came up in this decision to reject an edit, but wasn't the main reason for the edit rejection. ("Adding incorrect text and presenting it as fact" was the deciding factor for both the edit rejection and the placing of the troper On Notice.)

I'd be inclined to invoke our requirement for text to have a certain minimum level of grammar, but our Style Guide doesn't appear to have any such requirement.

[robkelk]

As a replacement for the Reviews pages, we can either make a special template that adds boxes around reviews, or we can enable DiscussionTools, which works like, well, the "Add Topic" button on Community Portal.  DiscussionTools stores information in normal wikitext, can be enabled by a magic word on the page, and is far easier to reason about than Flow/StructuredDiscussions.  But this way wouldn't get us any extra things that a template would, like 5 stars or "Category:Reviews by X".  It would be possible to use both together.  What would we want here?

Flow is in general kind of annoying to work with, and WMF is discontinuing it.  Which is to say they will not be fixing the bugs, since everyone who worked on it left.  They will eventually get a convert script available because they need it for their own projects, and we can move our talk pages into wikitext with DiscussionTools enabled. (Reviews namespace is small, and we can do it this week.)

I like the option that requires the least amount of work in total, on account of I am lazy.

But until we have that convert script, we're pretty much stuck with what we have, aren't we?

[robkelk]

New Useful Note (created because multiple pages already linked to it) needs categories.

[Bob Schroeck]

Speaking of wiki policy, what is our policy on AI-generated text? ...
I'd be inclined to invoke our requirement for text to have a certain minimum level of grammar, but our Style Guide doesn't appear to have any such requirement.

We have such a requirement on the Trope Workshop Guidelines page:

Proper English grammar and usage: It doesn't matter if you hit all the other points above right on the head, if the trope candidate reads like it was written by Google Translate or a dyslexic ten-year-old (or both working together), it will not get launched. And although wiki admins have been known to step in and do their best to translate trope candidates from whatever they were written in to proper English, it is ''not'' their responsibility to do so -- it is that of the user(s) who want to see the trope candidate go live. If the description is so badly written a reader can't figure out what it means, and/or the examples are so garbled their relevance to the trope cannot even be guessed at, the article has failed at what it is supposed to do, which is communicate clearly and succinctly a pattern in storytelling.

I suggest we generalize this and put it in the Style Guide and other Page-Type Guidelines pages.

As for AI-generated text... well, for now I'd say deal with it on a case by case basis. We have rejected pages for being illiterate messes before, and that should be sufficient reason to nope out anything that looks like it was written by a travesty generator, regardless of whether it originated in a biological or silicon processor. For a more specific policy, we should propose it to the community after drafting it here.

[GethN7]

Speaking of wiki policy, what is our policy on AI-generated text? ...
I'd be inclined to invoke our requirement for text to have a certain minimum level of grammar, but our Style Guide doesn't appear to have any such requirement.

We have such a requirement on the Trope Workshop Guidelines page:

Proper English grammar and usage:  It doesn't matter if you hit all the other points above right on the head, if the trope candidate reads like it was written by Google Translate or a dyslexic ten-year-old (or both working together), it will not get launched.  And although wiki admins have been known to step in and do their best to translate trope candidates from whatever they were written in to proper English, it is ''not'' their responsibility to do so -- it is that of the user(s) who want to see the trope candidate go live.  If the description is so badly written a reader can't figure out what it means, and/or the examples are so garbled their relevance to the trope cannot even be guessed at, the article has failed at what it is supposed to do, which is communicate clearly and succinctly a pattern in storytelling.

I suggest we generalize this and put it in the Style Guide and other Page-Type Guidelines pages.

As for AI-generated text...  well, for now I'd say deal with it on a case by case basis.  We have rejected pages for being illiterate messes before, and that should be sufficient reason to nope out anything that looks like it was written by a travesty generator, regardless of whether it originated in a biological or silicon processor.  For a more specific policy, we should propose it to the community after drafting it here.

I concur with all the above.