All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XIX

[robkelk]

I don't know whether anybody noticed the navbox that I put together last September.

If it was noticed, I don't know whether anybody noticed that there are a couple of points on the sliding scales that don't have pages yet...

I don't have time to make the missing pages. Just saying.

[LulzKiller]

I'm all for more navboxes in general.

[Labster]

How do we feel about infoboxes? I've been thinking of adding them to more pages.

[GethN7]

How do we feel about infoboxes?  I've been thinking of adding them to more pages.

I have no objection.

[Bob Schroeck]

Nor do I. Anything to make the best use of MediaWiki resources and visually distinguish ourselves from the competition.

[robkelk]

How do we feel about infoboxes?  I've been thinking of adding them to more pages.

Pretty comfortable, myself. I've gotten pretty good at coding them, considering how many we use on the freebie wiki and the There's Nothing Better wiki.

Oh, you mean using infoboxes... 

Yeah, I can do some for ATT. What do we want to start with?

[GethN7]

Bob, because I am not insensitive to your concerns, I have explicitly signed up our Ruqqus guild for this

https://ruqqus.com/+ApoliticalGuildsUnio...ilds-union

It's a ring of guilds that are identified as zones free of political slants, where we just want to talk about our specific interest and do not want to entertain political soapboxing, this should serve to identify ourselves as free of partisanship.

After checking out the various communities there, they DO have all political spheres represented to some extent. Everyone from the unironic Communists to the unironic Naizs and everything in between, but the way the place is set up, we can effectively exist independent of them entirely, and I've decided to head off any noxious political garbage by making clear, up front, we do not want to discuss that (except for very narrow things like copyright and other things of interest to troping) nor be involved in slapfights between political extremists of any shade.

[Labster]

Let me see, I know I wrote about this before...

Where you're coming from Lulzkiller, is ED which has too damn many large navigation templates. I'm not opposed to lots of them, if they're kept pretty small. Media franchises could each get their own.
But in the grand plan, I'd almost like the Wikipedia right-side infobox. Things that would be listed: Genre, Medium, Episode count/volume count, production dates, laconic description, [[Central Theme]. We need to avoid the whole wtf-is-this-page phenomenon. A trope equivalent would be laconic description, older than..., namer, ur example, maybe categories? And I think doing this would more worthwhile than making navigation templates, but likely much harder.
-- ∇×V

Okay, that's been sitting a while. (And what happened to the HTML markup on that forum page?) But we should try it. Making a good summary of the work easier to find would be a massive improvement.

[robkelk]

How do we feel about infoboxes?  I've been thinking of adding them to more pages.

Pretty comfortable, myself. I've gotten pretty good at coding them, considering how many we use on the freebie wiki and the There's Nothing Better wiki.

Oh, you mean using infoboxes... 

Yeah, I can do some for ATT. What do we want to start with?

Let's start with books. The template in use on the wiki, and the template itself, including documentation so that other people can use it.

I'm pretty happy with the error-checking that I put into this infobox. If there's no title, the page title will be used instead. If there's no image, the image caption will not appear (and the page gets "Category: Pages Needing Images", too). If there's no franchise name given, the "Preceded by" and "Followed by" lines will not appear, even if somebody gives values for them. If "source page exists" is blank, the link to the Source subpage will not appear. And nobody needs to code any links in the infobox values, and every page that uses the infobox is added to "Category: Literature".

So... where did I get it wrong? What did I miss? I did toss this together in under an hour, after all.

[Bob Schroeck]

Bob, because I am not insensitive to your concerns, I have explicitly signed up our Ruqqus guild for this

https://ruqqus.com/+ApoliticalGuildsUnio...ilds-union

<snip>

<nod>  Thank you, that looks ideal.

[Labster]

The problem with Rob's template is that it's missing all of the interesting fields.

* Elevator Pitch: an overall summary of what the thing is. In Wikipedia this would be the first paragraph, but we tend to be more creative writing oriented so frequently goofy. The single most important thing IMO.
* Genres: A list of genres. The stupid reason why genres aren't listed on a page is because they often make terrible examples. And this is because genres are fundamentally collections of tropes, so all of the other tropes are the justification.
* Central Theme: Maybe? This one is hard, but sort of at the core of lit crit. And, of course, somewhat subject to debate. But everything has one. I mean, take Aria: "Life is more enjoyable if you slow down and go with the flow."
* The Wiki Rule: Link to any wikis dedicated this work.

I kind of wonder on implementation of the `genre` field what we want to do. Given dates, it might be possible to automate categories like "Action Films of the 2000s". It could always be added later.

[LulzKiller]

per infoboxes we could nick the infoboxes of biographys from wikipedia for the creators, and remove the extraneous.

[robkelk]

I thought of that, but there's so much extraneous in the Wikipedia infoboxes that it's faster to write a new one.

[robkelk]

The problem with Rob's template is that it's missing all of the interesting fields.

* Elevator Pitch: an overall summary of what the thing is.  In Wikipedia this would be the first paragraph, but we tend to be more creative writing oriented so frequently goofy.  The single most important thing IMO.
* Genres: A list of genres.  The stupid reason why genres aren't listed on a page is because they often make terrible examples.  And this is because genres are fundamentally collections of tropes, so all of the other tropes are the justification.
* Central Theme: Maybe?  This one is hard, but sort of at the core of lit crit.  And, of course, somewhat subject to debate.  But everything has one.  I mean, take Aria: "Life is more enjoyable if you slow down and go with the flow."
* The Wiki Rule: Link to any wikis dedicated this work.

I kind of wonder on implementation of the `genre` field what we want to do.  Given dates, it might be possible to automate categories like "Action Films of the 2000s".  It could always be added later.

Ask, and ye shall receive. Same sample page.

Although you have to pick one wiki.

EDIT: I didn't do Central Theme since you put a "Maybe?" on it on your list... and I'm wondering whether people would confuse it with Elevator Pitch.

[robkelk]

Anybody know who this character is?

The page that uses the file says this is "Kusanagi" with no explanation. (I've put our "who?" tag on the entry.) It can't be the famous Kusanagi, because (a) this is a person, not a sword, and (b) the elemental power shown is fire, not wind.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, given the file is named "kyo-fire_4728" a quick lookup on "kyo kusanagi" turns up Kyo Kusanagi from King of Fighters.

[robkelk]

Thanks. Image licence updated...

[robkelk]

We have "Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You" as a trope. Laconic: "When a character points a weapon at the camera so it looks like he is about to attack the audience with it."

Do we have "You Are About to Shoot Sean Connery" under any name? This one's where you're looking down the gun barrel at the story's protagonist, and the earlier James Bond movies are the Ur Example. Apparently it's sufficiently well-known to have at least one homage.

EDIT: Never mind - found it. Bond Gun Barrel

[robkelk]

The problem with Rob's template is that it's missing all of the interesting fields.

* Elevator Pitch: an overall summary of what the thing is.  In Wikipedia this would be the first paragraph, but we tend to be more creative writing oriented so frequently goofy.  The single most important thing IMO.
* Genres: A list of genres.  The stupid reason why genres aren't listed on a page is because they often make terrible examples.  And this is because genres are fundamentally collections of tropes, so all of the other tropes are the justification.
* Central Theme: Maybe?  This one is hard, but sort of at the core of lit crit.  And, of course, somewhat subject to debate.  But everything has one.  I mean, take Aria: "Life is more enjoyable if you slow down and go with the flow."
* The Wiki Rule: Link to any wikis dedicated this work.

I kind of wonder on implementation of the `genre` field what we want to do.  Given dates, it might be possible to automate categories like "Action Films of the 2000s".  It could always be added later.

Ask, and ye shall receive. Same sample page.

Although you have to pick one wiki.

EDIT: I didn't do Central Theme since you put a "Maybe?" on it on your list... and I'm wondering whether people would confuse it with Elevator Pitch.

Are people happy with the infobox as it currently sits? Can I take the "still in development" tag off of it and start applying it to other works of literature?

Or does it still need work?

[Bob Schroeck]

I'm pretty impressed with it overall. After looking at the code and the doc page, my only real question is, how will this fit into franchises that span multiple media, like Star Wars? It seems like the relevant fields/links don't require they be books, so it doesn't appear to be an issue, but I just wanted to raise the question and be sure.

[robkelk]

Multimedia franchises are something that I hadn't considered while coding the template - I was concentrating on books - but, as you said, the template doesn't care what media the linked pages are describing. The template doesn't do any error-checking for those links, either; if somebody says the franchise is "Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You" (for example), the template will display that trope as the franchise name.

And there's no requirement to specify a preceding or following work (although they won't appear even if specified unless the franchise is specified as well).

[robkelk]

Just realized that there's something we need to decide, because I've seen this answered both ways and it makes a difference to the template.

How do we name works within a franchise?

Example: the franchise is named "foo", and it has books named "bar" and "baz". Are the ATT wiki pages named "bar" and "baz", or are they named "foo/bar" and "foo/baz"?

I like the former - it's more likely to match Wikipedia's names for the individual books, and it shows the names that you'd be looking for in a bookstore or wherever. It also saves the subpage functionality for our by-topic subpages (headscratchers, crowners, YMMV, etc.)

Our pages for Harry Potter and Discworld already use the latter, presumably to show that the individual works are part of a franchise.

We need to make a policy decision before the infobox is ready for general release.

[robkelk]

I just discovered an issue with the template: It doesn't seem to like images from Commons.

Probably because I just added the Commons image to the ATT page, since the image for Gulliver's Travels is also from Commons and the template had no issues with it.

Oh, and I added another field to the infobox: "Original Title".

[Bob Schroeck]

How do we name works within a franchise?

Example: the franchise is named "foo", and it has books named "bar" and "baz". Are the ATT wiki pages named "bar" and "baz", or are they named "foo/bar" and "foo/baz"?

I like the former - it's more likely to match Wikipedia's names for the individual books, and it shows the names that you'd be looking for in a bookstore or wherever. It also saves the subpage functionality for our by-topic subpages (headscratchers, crowners, YMMV, etc.)

I like the former, too.  I find the Potter and Discworld pages confusing and annoying to code.

[robkelk]

Related to this, here's another navigation box. Since I just asked what format we want to use for books in a franchise, I haven't linked to Soul Music, Feet of Clay, Night Watch, and Going Postal because I don't know what the final page names are going to be (all four have tropes by those exact names). And, of course, Raising Steam and The Shepherd's Crown are redlinks because we don't have those pages at all yet.

EDIT: Three of those four that we have tropes for have Wikipedia pages that I'm now cribbing from: "Night Watch (Discworld)", "Feet of Clay (novel)", and "Soul Music (novel)". Alas, The Other Wiki's page "Going Postal" is about the book.