All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XVI

[Bob Schroeck]

Argh. I'm really hating our choice of forum plug-in, I am. I clicked the delete icon on a message and the entire thread went away? And no management tools?

[Bob Schroeck]

On a less upsetting subject...

It never ceases to astound me just how ... stupid? careless? some TVT contributors were/are. In going through all the works in the "missing tropelist" list I keep coming across works pages that were apparently named without ever looking at their title pages, title cards, or box covers. It's gotten to the point that I routinely confirm anything I don't immediately recognize and isn't a fan work against Google and Wikipedia. (Which is how I find most of our bogus/non-existent works.)

[robkelk]

So... "The Mamas and the Papas" or "The Mamas & the Papas"? The official website uses both forms. which should we use?

No we don't have a page for them... yet.

[Bob Schroeck]

Wikipedia uses "The Mamas and the Papas"; when in doubt make sure the Wikipedia button works. <grin>

[robkelk]

Sounds good to me. Of course, we can use the other form as a redirect...

[Bob Schroeck]

That we can.

Why, look, there it is. <grin>

[robkelk]

We have a proposal in the forums to change a trope. Tropers, please read and comment. For, against, take a third option, - just comment, please. Mods, too.

[robkelk]

Anybody else getting site-not-found errors when trying to connect to Miraheze? It was there an hour ago...

EDIT: Looks like it's at my end - Google is giving me site-not-found errors now.

RE-EDIT: And now it's fixed. And I discovered that my machine was set to find a DNS server automatically. Any suggestions for a free DNS?

[robkelk]

Rob, you'll be glad to hear that after months of work, the end of the "Work pages without tropelist template" task is in sigjht -- literally.  There are less than 500 pages so afflicted left, and the very last on on the list is visible and moving closer all the time.

And now the end of the "Heartwarming pages without heartwarming template" list is in sight.

Give us a month or two and this page might actually be down to zero entries... Nah, I'm dreaming there, I know. Things have been going relatively quickly because we've been grabbing the low-hanging fruit. Some of those entries are going to need some serious work to be cleaned up.

[robkelk]

Just asked the Stewards to globally permablock a user.

I've also semi-protected "Reptiles Are Abhorrent‎‎". Why is that page such a vandalism magnet?

EDIT: Dealt with.

[robkelk]

Changing topics to something more pleasant...

I've put a stub description on Category:Film Festivals. Anybody want to make pages for the festivals listed there that we don't have pages for?

(beat)

Why's everybody looking at me for TIFF and OIAF? I've never been to TIFF, and I've only sen one film at OIAF (Nausicaä, during a retrospective of Miyazaki's work). I'm not qualified to write pages for those festivals.

EDIT: And I've just realized that I've put enough into that category page to start a stub Useful Note. So... moving the text to "Film Festivals"

[robkelk]

I know enough about National Lampoon to know that that phrase shouldn't redirect to National Lampoon Films... but I don't know enough to write an article about them.

As a quick patch, I've turned "National Lampoon" into a disambiguation page, with a redlink to a page for their magazine and a bluelink to the page listing their films. Somebody who knows more about them than I do is invited to fix my quick patch.

[Bob Schroeck]

Other than general pop cultural osmosis stuff, all I know about the National Lampoon is that they were born out of the group from the Harvard Lampoon who wrote Bored of the Rings... <sigh>

[robkelk]

The "Images imported from TV Tropes without an identified license" list is below 42,000! EDIT: Make that "below 41,000" - as I type this, the count is 40,999.

That means we've identified the licenses for (or deleted) at least 5% of the files we inherited during the fork. EDIT: Make that "at least 8%" - I seem to recall we inherited over 45k files from TVT.

[robkelk]

New category, for when we have too much of a good thing.

[Bob Schroeck]

A month-old user, for his second and third edits respectively, decided to add laconic pages to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008 film).

The first one was missing all markup and its summary of the film was "Evil alien fascists invoke their equivalent of White Man's Burden to make demands of an entire planet." which is more than a little at odds with the way the film is generally remembered and summarized, not to mention more than a bit heavy on the political bias.

The second one is properly marked up, but the laconic is "Evil alien who intends to commit genocide arrives on Earth, is offended at being treated like an evil alien who intends to commit genocide, decides to commit genocide." Now I don't know the Keanu Reeves re-make at all, not having seen it, but this strikes me as just as much off the mark as the first, just by the language. Can someone who's seen the 2008 please confirm whether or not this is a user trolling us?

[robkelk]

There was a remake? Okay, okay - I don't make a habit of seeing movies that star Keanu Reeves... so I haven't sen the remake.

All I could do was hang "verify" tags all over the entry.

EDIT: While we're at it, could somebody who's familiar with Final Fantasy VII Remake double-check this user's other edit, please?

RE-EDIT: So, what would people say is a decent Laconic description of the original TDTESS?

• Alien lands on Earth, discovers what humans are like up-close, and tells us to either grow up or stay in our playpen.
  
• 1950s-era Christ allegory.
  

Or something else altogether.

[robkelk]

I just completed the Miraheze annual survey.

For "Is there any reason you chose Miraheze over other wiki hosting farms?", I answered "No ads on the wiki pages." I'm not saying anybody else has to say that (and you shouldn't use my wording if you do), but if you're looking for an answer to that question, that's IMHO a pretty good one.

[DHBirr]

RE-EDIT: So, what would people say is a decent Laconic description of the original TDTESS?

• Alien lands on Earth, discovers what humans are like up-close, and tells us to either grow up or stay in our playpen.
  
• 1950s-era Christ allegory.
  

Or something else altogether.

Alien policeman informs Earthpeople that nuclear war will get the whole planet arrested.

[robkelk]

That's a lot better than what I came up with!

---

Anybody want to fix some dead links? Here's the list.

[robkelk]

A month-old user, for his second and third edits respectively, decided to add laconic pages to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008 film). 

The first one was missing all markup and its summary of the film was "Evil alien fascists invoke their equivalent of White Man's Burden to make demands of an entire planet." which is more than a little at odds with the way the film is generally remembered and summarized, not to mention more than a bit heavy on the political bias. 

The second one is properly marked up, but the laconic is "Evil alien who intends to commit genocide arrives on Earth, is offended at being treated like an evil alien who intends to commit genocide, decides to commit genocide."  Now I don't know the Keanu Reeves re-make at all, not having seen it, but this strikes me as just as much off the mark as the first, just by the language.  Can someone who's seen the 2008 please confirm whether or not this is a user trolling us?

Not a troll, just a special snowflake.

Bob, you know how I'm often asking you to tone down the snark in comments to tropers? Not this time, please.

[Bob Schroeck]

Let me think on it and see if I get inspired.

[robkelk]

Slight change to the Main Page: "Source" now has an icon. (That category is our library, right?)

Anybody have any ideas for an icon for "Setting"? Or something other than our current JAFAAC for "Laconic"?

[GethN7]

I discovered a wonderful thing: Offline browsing of All The Tropes without setting up a local version of MediaWiki!

Courtesy of this:

https://www.kiwix.org/en/

It's not perfect. The ZIM file format and the limitations of how it saves pages mean certain things like category redirects and certain special formatting that are plugin specific (not stock MediaWiki or are specialed HTML code) mean a few pages (mostly the front page) are a tad garbled, but it's a great and quick way to view a snapshot of our entire wiki and over 98% of our current content out of the box in a perfectly human-readable format.

They already have a quite recent ZIM backup of our entire wiki for download on their site and thus we don't need to worry about requesting one, they are interested in providing snapshots of our content (and they source them by CC BY SA appropriately) entirely on their own.

Just a heads up for anyone interested in an offline viewable version of the site, and it might be worth setting up a policy page where we discuss off-site backups and how to set them up.

In other news, I have continued to assist our True Tropes Wiki brethren (with partial assistance from the good people at our Discord, they set up a special Discord for TTT's specific needs) by integrating their Discord into their spinoff, so they can continue to improve their own fork without conflicts with us (though they are still free to have water cooler space to talk shop in a civil manner with the wider troping community on our Discord).

I hope these efforts at outreach with our TTT cousins continue to promote healthy cross-wiki cooperation and prevent further conflicts if any are extant at this time.

[robkelk]

I finally realized what I didn't like about one of our featured pages, "The Hero". It was written in such a way that it implies heroes have to get into fights (fist-fights or with weapons).

While that's often true, it isn't a constant.

So I added a second picture to the page.

I'll leave it up to other mods whether the second picture should go into the featured article blurb.