All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXIV

[GethN7]

Thanks, Geth.  I'm going to try to be dedicated about checking at least once a day, too, but there I times I find I've overlooked it for days at a time.

I think if we each just took a day in turn and handled everything that comes in that day it should be enough.  The question is keeping people reminded when it's their day (it'd be so much easier if there were seven of us <grin>).

When you say Burnator's edits were theft, I'm presuming you mean TVT plagiarism as usual.  I'm thinking we've hit a limit on the crap we should take from him, but I'll review his history just to be sure.

Yes, all his edits were shameless copypasta of of TVT material.

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah... Okay, the Ban Fairy has smacked him on the noggin with a two-week vacation.

EDIT: And ExploringEditor, who had received two warnings and a ban almost exactly a year ago for previous instances of copyright violation, just got permbanned for his third strike.

And I've dropped notes on their talk pages and to Wimpythechild to explain what's going on.

[robkelk]

...
EDIT:  And ExploringEditor, who had received two warnings and a ban almost exactly a year ago for previous instances of copyright violation, just got permbanned for his third strike.
...

I see that EE expected to be allowed back, and promised to confine his activities to his sandbox page. I replied with "You had already been given a chance to redeem yourself; you chose otherwise."

And I double-checked his sandbox page - and deleted it as a copy from TV Tropes with a few entries added. (Crash & Bernstein and its Characters subpage, in case anybody's interested.)

[Bob Schroeck]

I saw his posts (and yours), and realized that I had forgotten to disable editing of his usertalk page, which I then did immediately. Thanks for catching the sandbox page -- that had completely gone past me.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, what the hell's wrong with the wiki now? It disappeared for about half an hour, maybe a bit less, not quite an hour ago, and right now attempting to search on a phrase delimited by double quotes invariably results in a "bad gateway" or 503 error. If you want to find any page with the words "a", "day", "in", "the" and "life" on them, no problemo, it comes up immediately. But ask for "a day in the life" and the wiki all but crashes.

Are we going to have to file another Phabricator ticket about this? Because, dammit, I thought the search shit was fixed.

EDIT: And we're back to "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties" as soon as I try to look at recent changes.

[GethN7]

I doubt it will be an issue, but due to recent world events, I believe it goes without saying we stand neutral on the Ukraine and Russia situation, and we ask partisanship for either side to not be put on ATT. As for myself only, I simply pray the bloodshed stops and an honorable peace is restored for all parties concerned.

[robkelk]

Just in case, and because I was cleaning up the page anyway (adding crosslinks, fixing typos, etc), I've added a mod note to our page for Ukraine.

MOD: As of February 2022, there is a great deal of uncertainty as to the status of Ukraine. Please note that this site is All The Tropes, not All The Politics, and keep the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment in mind while editing this page. Propaganda slanted in either direction will be deleted without warning.

[Bob Schroeck]

Works for me.

[Bob Schroeck]

Two things:

First: I marked a new user by the name of Anmolleads as a spammer in Moderation. His only contributions were an obvious ad inserted into Doorstopper and a small, confusing nothing added to Shin Megami Tensei II.

Second: If you have not yet read the message thread on his talk page, please do not hold multiple rejected contributions from Smijes08 against him. If his progress this morning is any indication he's going to be a good member of the community.

[robkelk]

Second:  If you have not yet read the message thread on his talk page, please do not hold multiple rejected contributions from Smijes08 against him.  If his progress this morning is any indication he's going to be a good member of the community.

I noticed that talk thread, and decided I should leave moderation of their posts to you for a few days.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, here comes another "do we have this"?

Do we have a trope for vampire fangirls chasing down the unwilling undead and begging to be bitten? Or something more generic along those lines?

[GethN7]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to float an idea for enabling the following as an option

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Evelution

It's a skin that emulates the Wikia/FANDOM Oasis appearance. It would be an option for those who come to us from that wiki farm who desire something more familiar for browsing. As a mere skin option in the user preferences, this would cause no one any harm and has support for all standard features we currently use. It is actively maintained and also in heavy use by other wikis on Miraheze, either as a default skin or as an opt-in choice.

[robkelk]

I followed that link, discovered MediaWiki had changed their own skin, and took a few minutes to change it back... Aargh.

As long as a new skin is opt-in, I'm okay with making it available.

[Bob Schroeck]

Like Rob, as long as it's an option and not the default I'm fine with it.

[robkelk]

I've gone through the moderation queue up to last Saturday (and a couple of short changes from today), but now it's time to go to work...

[robkelk]

So... I jus put together a new source page for a work originally in French, providing the original followed by a translation.

Should I have put them side-by-side? There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this. For now, I didn't, but that can be changed easily enough.

Opinions? This is a style issue, so whatever decision we reach could (not necessarily should) go into the Style Guide... which means I should be asking on the wiki...

[Bob Schroeck]

You could use the tabber the way we do for regular/self-demonstrating pages...

[robkelk]

Which doesn't need a policy decision for page styles, since we're already doing it. Thanks, Bob.

[Bob Schroeck]

<tips hat> You're very welcome!

[Bob Schroeck]

Hey folks. I just approved a trope candidate in the mod queue that was clearly based on but not copied an original at TVT, which still made reference to two different tropes we don't have. I've commented them out and added mod notes about it, but it got me thinking that maybe we should have a set of templates and pages for this kind of thing that work like our when/where/who stuff -- a "Not a/our trope" template for flagging these inline, which includes a ""Pages with nonexistent tropes" category on the page, a corresponding category page of course, and modifications to the Community Portal and anywhere else we display this kind of "needs work" info.

Or we could just delete them when we find them.

What do people think?

[robkelk]

I can throw together an inline notice template complete with associated cleanup category linked off the community portal in less than 10 minutes (assuming no 50* errors get in the way), if people want something specific.

As for flag or delete... I'd be inclined to delete, but only after we've checked whether we have the trope under a different name. (We still occasionally get TVT refugees adding links to "Red Baron" as a trope, after all.) Mind you, somebody's going to say "you have a policy of keeping redlinks for works and creators", so we should have an explanation ready as to why tropes are different.

[robkelk]

Wow... I just made a "Greatest Directors of All Time" navbox with fifteen names on it, and only three of them are redlinks. Do you know how rarely the proportion of redlinks on a "best of " navbox is that low? It's only 20%!

So... Who wants to make pages for one, two, or all three of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Renoir, and David Lean?

[Bob Schroeck]

I can throw together an inline notice template complete with associated cleanup category linked off the community portal in less than 10 minutes (assuming no 50* errors get in the way), if people want something specific.

Oh, cool, that would be great. I was looking at doing it myself, but I wasn't sure if I was remembering all the bits and pieces needed.

As for flag or delete... I'd be inclined to delete, but only after we've checked whether we have the trope under a different name. (We still occasionally get TVT refugees adding links to "Red Baron" as a trope, after all.) Mind you, somebody's going to say "you have a policy of keeping redlinks for works and creators", so we should have an explanation ready as to why tropes are different.

I agree with "investigate" being the immediate option, and "delete" for the long-term on anything we didn't rename. (Note to self: remember to deal with "Mata Hari".) As for the why of it, works and creators are (reasonably) objective. They exist, and anyone can look them up to document them. A trope name, on the other hand, is not guaranteed to mean the same thing to any two people people who might be unfamiliar with the corresponding page on TVT. Such a redlink is an implicit link to TVT, and as such is against our policy of not linking to TVT for any reason.

And perhaps we should have an explicit rule that we don't list or reference tropes that don't exist. We've said as much informally to users in the past -- if you're going to reference a trope we don't have, it's your responsibility to get it through the Workshop first.

[Bob Schroeck]

Wow... I just made a "Greatest Directors of All Time" navbox with fifteen names on it, and only three of them are redlinks. Do you know how rarely the proportion of redlinks on a "best of " navbox is that low? It's only 20%!

So... Who wants to make pages for one, two, or all three of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Renoir, and David Lean?

Oh, "Directors".

I read that as "Dictators" at first.  And was saying, "how strange is it that that's the case?"

[robkelk]

I just added a paragraph to the "External Links" section of the Style Guide. Here's a screen shot - necessary because a quote wouldn't look the same.

   

Now I'm wondering - Is it only the default skin that flags external links, or do all of the skins we make available flag external links? If they all flag these links, we can take "in the default interface" out of the text.