All The Tropes Wiki Project

[Labster]

Okay everyone, I have a wiki, and it's going to be awesome!  But it's not quite ready for public consumption yet.
What's the Plan
Get a new wiki up, independently hosted, so we don't have to deal with advertising.  Keep the wiki code as close to possible to the original site's syntax, while adding features like a GUI editor.  Import most of TV Tropes' content into the new format.
Why we're doing this
TV Tropes used to be a site where discussion of all types of media was welcomed, but in the past few months, they have instituted a censorship regime with little-to-no community input.  Since we believe that wikis are a digital commons, we would like to develop a trope and media wiki where the community that uses it determines its content -- not owners and advertising companies.
Who the Developers are
 * I'm Brent "Vorticity" Laabs, a meteorologist and Perl hacker from Southern California.  Available at brent@allthetropes.org
 * Evan "JabberWokky" Edwards, a wiki software developer living in Nashville.  His email is jw@timewarp.org
We're both avid tabletop gamers, and both have experience in managing non-profit wiki projects.
What has been done
We considered several different wiki software packages before deciding, including MediaWiki, Foswiki, and PmWiki.  We chose Click Wiki as our wiki software of choice for a few reasons:
 * Because it's a half-wiki, half-CMS software, it can handle our data as x-wiki/pmwiki rather than just using its own internal data types.  This means that the page syntax will remain similar (but see changes below).
 * The ability to switch between a GUI and wikicode representations, with no direct editing of HTML.
 * The fact that we're choosing a modern wiki system rather than an older one means we won't get left behind technologically.
 * It's Evan's baby, and he uses it for his job, so we can expect regular software updates.
We've registered four different domain names: allthetropes.org, storywiki.org, tropeswiki.org, and tropewiki.org.  We still need to decide the title.
Decided as allthetropes.org by vote here -- looks like I got outvoted.  A good start for a community, I should think.
Evan has written the Pmwiki composer and decomposer, and has been implementing some of the features like folders.  We're still in alpha testing, and I do mean alpha, but things are starting to shape up well.
I have been handling the data import, which has to do with converting to a slightly different syntax, and reorganizing the page content automatically.
What's Changing (technical)
Note that this is not an exhaustive list:
 * Page organization.  Since the new software supports proper hierarchical namespaces, I've reorganized the content go from Characters/WorkName to "Work Type/Work Name/Characters".  There's a lot of magic going into finding the right work namespace, but at the very least links will update even if it get moved into the wrong namespace.
 * Link syntax.  Okay, I want to say that I like CamelCase.  It's fun to make WikiWords all over the place.  But it has problems, such as the inability to have unicode in page titles or properly space things without dirty hacks.  Add to this that TV Tropes uses four different linking syntaxes (CamelCase, [[SquareBrackets], {{curly brackets}}, and [[SquaresWith/{{Curlies}}]) -- and that macros like [[folder] also use the same syntax -- and you realize that it's kind of a nightmare of brackets.  So everything will be replaced with a unified link syntax.
 * Spoiler coding.  Spoilers are so common that they should probably be Huffman coded down.
 * Table syntax.  Current tables will break.  Exactly 153 pages out of the 180,000 some trope pages use tables, so it's really not worth changing.
 * Inline notes are collapsed into a single syntax, [[note: label] text [[/note].  Again, having three different syntaxes was just confusing.
What's not changing
 * Formatting like bullet points, macros like [[AC:], headers, etc. will all stay the same.
 * Indexing, bullets, folders, etc. should all work more or less as you remember them.
New features
 * Full page histories (but not from the old site, sorry!)
 * GUI editor+wikicode editor
 * Page tagging
 * User-level javascript (which Evan still needs to fully explain to me)
 * A complete lack of advertising (more of a bugfix than a feature, really)
 * More as I think of them...
What can you do to help
Right now, the biggest thing we need is alpha testers.  That is, people who know what development software looks and acts like, and aren't put off by the unpredictable results.  People who can write bug reports.  If you want to do that, please drop me an email.
The community side has been more or less ignored by us up until this post, as we ironed out technical issues, but we have a long way to go.  Good ideas on the wiki policies are a must, and anyone willing to take a stab a writing them would be greatly appreciated.  We have a temporary development wiki for policies, so anyone wanting to be in on that can drop me an email or a forum message.
Roadmap
Once we get to a beta test stage, more or less anyone who asks to be a part of the community will be invited to edit.  It should happen within a couple of weeks.
We'll start out with a closed-beta test.  Once we get enough users that it looks like we'll be able to resist vandalism, we'll transition to an open beta.  How long we'll be beta -- well, Google Mail proved you can do it for years on end.  But we'll probably settle for a criterion like "bug reports down to less than one per week."
Content will also need to be changed to reflect the community's new identity and values.  Values like openness, tolerance, and a sense of humor should be encouraged, and we hope to attract anyone willing to build insightful content about media and popular culture.  The site will also need to be cleaned of most references calling it TV Tropes, as we don't want to infringe trademark.
If things are successful enough, we'll probably start soliciting donations, but we have enough cash and bandwidth to run things for now.
If things are super-successful, I could do another 501(c)3 incorporation (a non-profit in the United States), to handle all of the donation revenue and stuff.  I think that we'd have a legitimate shot as a educational organization that provides literary criticism.  But that's way, way down the road.
-- ∇×V

[Labster]

Questions for the community:
 1) What should the site be called?  I've registered four sites (alphabetically): allthetropes.org, storywiki.org, tropeswiki.org, tropewiki.org.  Is there one of these that you prefer, or a new suggestion?  The site's name could be unrelated to the URL, but this would make it harder for most people to remember.  Remember, we're going to have to live with this for a long time.
 2) Are there any non-technical reasons why deleting and reverting pages were functions restricted to moderator level on TV Tropes?  Normal users can blank a page, so why couldn't they just delete it?  Or they can edit to replace old content manually, so why can't they revert?  I wasn't on TV Tropes at the time that structure was put in place, so I don't know the logic behind it.
As Robert's Rules of Order warns about the chair influencing the debate, I'm going to refrain from giving any opinions on this until I've seen a bit of discussion.
-- ∇×V

[Black Aeronaut]

I'd love to be an alpha tester, but I'd only be able to really do it on the weekends. Also, there's the little issue with me never having been an alpha tester. (^_^ But, hey, I figure I can go ahead and give it a shot so long as I can get a bug to pop up consistently and write up how I got it.

[Sweno]

I would love to help, but I fear my lack of free time (or at least the amount of free time I'm willing to commit to another large project) will limit how much I'm able to do.

If you need someone who can regex up some regular expressions to convert all four of the link syntaxes into a standard fifth syntax, I'm all over that.

Or if you need to make sure that all instances of something conform to something-else, I can probably find out.

But beyond that I'm hesitant to commit on. I don't want to promise an ability to do X and only deliver 'something much less than X'.

-Terry
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

[Bob Schroeck]

I'd be happy to help alpha test.

As for names, I'm fond of "AllTheTropes", but then, that was my suggestion to begin with.

I don't think easy reversion was ever available on the user level, as far back as I can remember. I know it was often requested, usually in the wake of having to repair either massive vandalism or many small changes made by the clueless, but it was never in the user tool kit. Page deletion used to be possible for users, IIRC, but I seem to recall that it was taken away after a spate of vandalism, and it took a few years for the cutmaster system to come into being to replace it. It was also tied in to the whole issue of changing trope names, which used to be allowed freely until TVT started getting lots of inbound links (and until we had a few people who decided to change, wholesale, trope names they didn't understand or didn't like, without asking getting a consensus first).

I suppose this is just spiteful of me, but it would be nice if some common markup element or three were different enough from PMWiki's coding that it makes copying the new wiki's original content to TVT annoying for the casual user...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Sofaspud]

I'll help with the alpha testing.  Like BA above, I may be limited on how much time I can contribute, but I'm willing to help where I can and I'm told I write excellent bug reports.  Since I'm a database/software developer myself, it's kind of a pet peeve of mine -- not writing bad bug reports, I mean.

Seconding "AllTheTropes"; one of my gripes about the existing TVTropes site is that so much of it relies on in-jokes and prior knowledge -- the classic one I keep mentioning to my roommate as bad design being the Tomato In The Mirror trope, because the name of it in no way says what it is -- and if it's up to me, even just as one vote, I'd like to help nudge this wiki into sticking with clear names that state exactly what they mean.  AllTheTropes does that most clearly out of the choices listed, I think.

Bob: My read on it is that yes, that's just being spiteful.  If it were up to me -- and bear in mind I'm not a troper, I have no real dog in this fight other than not liking the high-handedness and subservience to Google the existing trope site displays -- I'd say let's just work on making this better than them.  People may copy it -- people will copy it -- but if it's better than the alternative then the alternative will either dry up and blow away, or, adapt to become more like this one.

Maybe I'm just an idealist.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

[Bluemage]

I agree with Bob and with Sofaspud.  AllTheTropes is a good name.
Also, as for making things different, are there any elements in TvT that aren't very clear to begin with, or can be simplified?  Because if there are, you can change those to make them easier to work with.  Spiteful incompatibility *and* making the site better, all in one!

---

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[Labster]

If you need someone who can regex up some regular expressions to convert
all four of the link syntaxes into a standard fifth syntax, I'm all
over that.

Thanks for the offer, but unfortunately, your skill set overlaps with my own a lot.  It turns out if you consider all of the variations, there are more than 12 different cases you have to account for.  And doing so takes ~100 lines of code, because macros and links both use double-bracket syntax, and that needed to be disentangled.

I suppose this is just spiteful of me, but it would be nice if some
common markup element or three were different enough from PMWiki's
coding that it makes copying the new wiki's original content to TVT
annoying for the casual user...

Your wish is my command.  But not out of spite, but purely technical reasons.  The current markup proposal is:

• Links: ["Page Name"]  ["Fanfic/Work Name/Characters" with alternate text]
• Macros: [[AC:All Caps Text], [[note:*]this works like hottip[[/note]
• Spoilers: This sentence ends {{with spoilers!}}
• Images and tables: to be determined, but definitely different.
  

So really, only the links and spoilers and images on every page will break.  Since I have a script that converts from TVT to the new wiki code, it will be trivial to get something up convert one way.  Going the other way, back to TVT, will probably be a harder programming challenge than the one I just did.  If we have the right to migrate data to our site, it would be kind of unfair to try and block it from going to another site.  But I'm not going to code it

Oh yeah, and if there's something that any of you really hate about TVT wiki markup, now is the time to tell me.

Seconding "AllTheTropes"; one of my gripes about the existing TVTropes
site is that so much of it relies on in-jokes and prior knowledge -- the
classic one I keep mentioning to my roommate as bad design being the
Tomato In The Mirror trope, because the name of it in no way says what
it is -- and if it's up to me, even just as one vote, I'd like to
help nudge this wiki into sticking with clear names that state exactly
what they mean.  AllTheTropes does that most clearly out of the choices
listed, I think.

I think you and your roommate need to watch The Big O.  Then you'll get the "Tomato in the Mirror" thing.  Seriously though, sometimes I like the cultural shibboleth names, sometimes I don't.  However, language is so varied, I'm not sure if we can have a clear policy on page names that would meet the ideal of "fun name that everyone understands."
So far as the reversion/deletion question: There are two general philosophies about running a wiki.  You can either try to limit the vandalism that users can do, or you can give everyone the tools to repair vandalism.  I have a tendency to lean towards the latter approach, because it creates less social stratification.  TV Tropes has a problem with moderators that think that they're the vanguard that protects the wiki against the unwashed masses.  So I don't want to have to recreate those distinctions unless extensive vandalism makes it necessary to do so.  If a page is accidentally or maliciously deleted, with easy access to a revert button, it won't stay deleted for more than 5 minutes.  Still, I'm welcome to hearing arguments that controls on these functions are good and necessary.

But beyond that I'm hesitant to commit on. I don't want to promise an
ability to do X and only deliver 'something much less than X'.

That's exactly why I've been quiet about the project until now.
-- ∇×V

[Black Aeronaut]

You know what? I just had an idea about the trope names.

Hear me out here.

So, there's a bit of a problem that comes from naming a trope after something seen in the source material. IE: Tomato in the Mirror from The Big O. The trouble is, some people have no sprockin' clue what that's supposed to mean. And while the insatiably curious will most likely investigate... others will most likely blow it off.

The fix? Go for the Dr. Strangelove naming system! So, at the heading of the page you would have something like: "Tomato in the Mirror, or, Discovering that You Are Not Who You Think You Are as You Look in the Mirror!"

Also, to keep links from getting to be ridiculous, we can simply assign each page a short hash-tag kinda thing or something.

Thoughts?

[Labster]

How about the Rocky and Bullwinkle naming system? Join us next time for "Tomato in the Mirror", or "Ketchup with Your True Self".

I think what you're basically describing is using the contents of the Laconic Wiki as a subtitle. Which is actually a pretty good idea.

If you're suggesting that we reimplement the ptitle system (a short hash), then on behalf of common decency I'm just going to say no. The general idea is that the names of pages are pithy or descriptive, and easy to remember, so you don't have to look them up. The number of tropes are probably somewhere in the low thousands, so it's not like we could just have a drop-down menu you could select with a GUI linker. But "easy to remember" is, of course, debatable.

Now I'm curious how many tropes there actually are, since Main/ is littered with all sorts of redirects. I guess in the new system, we'll be able to actually tag them with 'trope' and be able to tell.
-- ∇×V

[Black Aeronaut]

If you're suggesting that we reimplement the ptitle system (a short hash), then on behalf of common decency I'm just going to say no. The general idea is that the names of pages are pithy or descriptive, and easy to remember, so you don't have to look them up. The number of tropes are probably somewhere in the low thousands, so it's not like we could just have a drop-down menu you could select with a GUI linker. But "easy to remember" is, of course, debatable.

Easy to remember indeed!  Using the entire 'proper' title of a trope for the actual URL of that particular page probably won't work, especially when using the Rocky & Bullwinkle system.  You'd have a huge URL address well over a hundred characters long that would take a bit of practice to type out perfectly from memory.  And besides, who the heck memorizes the URLs for individual trope pages?  I certainly don't.  If one is important enough, then I'll bookmark it for later reference.
Now, I'm only saying that we should use ptitles for the URLs of tropes themselves.  For the URLs of things like works, their associated characters, people, etc., then we can use the proper names because 1) they don't need the Rocky and Bullwinkle system, and 2) their proper names will probably be shorter than the 'colloquial' names of our tropes.
EDIT: Just caught what you exactly meant by Rocky and Bullwinkle system.  Close, but not quite good enough.  The first part can be as catchy and whimsical as you like... but I feel that the second part, for the sake of somebody not knowing what they're looking at, must describe the trope well enough in a short sentence.

[Jorlem]

With ptitles, I can't hover over a link to another page, and see what the trope being linked to is. Sometimes it isn't obvious, when it is in a paragraph, instead of a list.

Also, I like being able to type part of a trope name into the url bar so the autocomplete pulls up the rest of the url.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

[Labster]

Uh, the Bullwinkle thing was a complete joke. The cartoon would always have absurd titles for its "next time on" segments, which were basically vehicles to present (even more) puns.

TVTropes does have a easy to understand page summary feature. They just hide it on Laconic subpages: http://tvtropes.org/pmwik...aconic/TomatoInTheMirror
-- ∇×V

[Morganite]

Page organization. Since the new software supports proper hierarchical namespaces, I've reorganized the content go from Characters/WorkName to "Work Type/Work Name/Characters". There's a lot of magic going into finding the right work namespace, but at the very least links will update even if it get moved into the wrong namespace.

Nice. Having namespaces for work types was a good start, but if character pages and stuff are just going to collide anyway there's still problems.

(Mind you, there's still some situations that I don't think are handled very well. Take, for instance, the page for Ar tonelico, which doesn't seem to be sure if it's for the series as a whole, or just the first game. Long-runners where some individual parts have trope pages and some don't, and multimedia franchises also don't seem to be as well handled as they could be.)

I'm not exactly thrilled by the idea of changing the link syntax, but your argument for doing so is pretty good. On the other hand, making the new spoiler syntax the same as one of the old link syntaxes strikes me as a bit *too* much of a "Screw you, kemo sabe" to anyone who has or is going to edit on both wikis.

I kind of feel like deleting pages should require a higher trust level, since a spuriously deleted page is less obviously vandalized than a blanked one.

"AllTheTropes" sounds good to me too. It has a feeling of inclusiveness.

I'm a bit wary of changing around trope names, because that seems to be where a lot of the "Stop Having Fun" on TVT started. I just can't think of a good way to have two different names for something. Having both sitting on every page is just cumbersome. If you have one as the page, and a redirect for the other name, then you're still left with figuring out which is going to be on most of the pages. The only approach I can think of that would even come close to pleasing both sides is having a user-configuration switch to show either one set of names or the other, but I'm not sure that's even remotely feasible.

On a different issue, I still kind of think a forum is a good thing to have. I find talk pages to be one of the worst methods around to have something like an ongoing discussion. A forum just seems like it would work better for handling certain things. And I think a lot of the problems with TVT's forums wouldn't be there if you just got rid of the forum games and maybe the RPs.

-Morgan.

[Labster]

Surprisingly, having the two sets of titles would be theoretically possible.  Since the software will support multiple different sets of composers and decomposers between wikicode and HTML, it could just theoretically convert to a x-wiki/tropes-forks to x-wiki/tropes-knives format on the fly (or whatever the heck those groups called themselves).  And alternate names could be saved in page metadata.  However, I don't think it would actually solve anything, other than institutionalize divisions between people.
I'm used to software where deleted pages show up with a big red indicator next to them on Recent Changes.  But if people aren't watching, there are circumstances where pages could fall through unnoticed.  Huh.  Let me think about that some more.
I was wondering when someone would bug me about the markup.  There's a reason I said it's a draft.  I wasn't going for a "fuck you" to users of the old wiki.  It was more of a "Hey, I just freed up curly brackets.  Should I use them for anything?" moment.
Spoiler coding is actually a fairly hard thing to do right, because it has three competing interests:  It's common so it should be short;  it should be easy to remember, because it's common; and it should be easy to identify, because people don't always want to read the contents while editing.  In the last, [[spoiler:] wins hands down, because it's so big and obviously says spoiler.  But it's cumbersome for something that is so common.  Evan suggested ((double parenthesis)), because it's like a parenthetical comment that's less important to see, but I think that fails the "obviously a spoiler" test.  So I proposed with double curly brackets.  Would you feel better with {{{triple curly brackets}}}?  Is there another alternative that feels better to you?
-- ∇×V

[Bob Schroeck]

Sofaspud wrote:

Seconding "AllTheTropes"; one of my gripes about the existing TVTropes
site is that so much of it relies on in-jokes and prior knowledge -- the
classic one I keep mentioning to my roommate as bad design being the
Tomato In The Mirror trope, because the name of it in no way says what
it is -- and if it's up to me, even just as one vote, I'd like to
help nudge this wiki into sticking with clear names that state exactly
what they mean.  AllTheTropes does that most clearly out of the choices
listed, I think.

I think you and your roommate need to watch The Big O.  Then you'll get the "Tomato in the Mirror" thing.  Seriously though, sometimes I like the cultural shibboleth names, sometimes I don't.  However, language is so varied, I'm not sure if we can have a clear policy on page names that would meet the ideal of "fun name that everyone understands."

The thing is, "Tomato in the Mirror" derives from "Tomato Surprise", a phrase that's been used in publishing circles since at least the late 1970s (I created the "Tomato Surprise" page on TVT, inspired by a set of writer's guidelines I got circa 1980 from George Scithers, then-editor of Analog magazine, in which he described the trope under that name).  "Tomato in the mirror" is just a logical subtrope -- where the surprise is something about yourself.  It's not opaque once you know the language the writers themselves use.

Which is a point that I helped drive into a semi-policy at TVT and I hope becomes explicit policy at ATT:  if writers or editors or other creative folks already have a name for it, we use that name; we don't make up one we like better because we don't understand theirs.  Part of the point of an article is creating that understanding, after all.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[nylor]

I will happily volunteer for alpha-testing. I should be able to write a decent bug report, having been in IT for this long.
AllTheTropes works for me, I think I mentioned that in the other thread. Another inclusive name possibility : EveryTrope.org. Just a thought along the same lines.

[Sofaspud]

Bob Schroeck wrote:

 It's not opaque once you know the language the writers themselves use.

Which is a point that I helped drive into a semi-policy at TVT and I hope becomes explicit policy at ATT:  if writers or editors or other creative folks already have a name for it, we use that name; we don't make up one we like better because we don't understand theirs.  Part of the point of an article is creating that understanding, after all.

As someone who hasn't been involved in trope discussions -- as J. Random Casual Visitor, in other words -- I believe that as currently implemented, the goal of creating understanding is not being met.

Or perhaps better put: you're only meeting that goal for people who have a prior commitment (personal or otherwise) to digging into your references to de-mystify them.  Others -- folks like myself, for example -- aren't 'hooked' enough by these sorts of titles and don't feel like burrowing through them to find out what they actually refer to.  Sure, I can read the article and thereby in theory gain understanding.  But if the trope name itself doesn't make any sense to me, there's no connection to be formed there and I'm not going to use it.  Yes, I know what Tomato In The Mirror means.  It did not and does not gain mindshare with me in the same way that, for example, Deus Ex Nukina or Artificial Stupidity do.  When I think of a TITM situation, the first thing that comes to mind is not that trope -- because I don't have the emotional attachment to the source material and the name is sufficiently opaque as to not associate itself with that situation in my mind.  The two I listed (and many more!) say what they mean; they are clear and self-evident.

That said, I'm all for including the names of well-established tropes.  If the Tomato Surprise has been around since the 70s, I'm not about to try and change it; I believe you when you say it's industry-standard, so to speak.  But it still doesn't speak to me, and personally, I'd prefer to be more inclusive and less clique-ish.  My suggestion would be to index it by another name as well -- a pointer, in programming terms; I'm not sure what a wiki calls it.  Redirect, maybe?

You said yourself "once you know the language the writers themselves use".  I'm suggesting that we help people get there rather than hiding it behind a in-joke wall.

EDIT: Perhaps it'll help clarify what I mean if I point out that, in looking through a list of tropes, nothing about Tomato In The Mirror or similarly-named tropes would leap out at me to even tell me that it applies to the situation for which I am searching.  That's what I mean by hiding.  Unless you know what it means, you won't know what it means.  I think that's bad.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

[nylor]

On the other hand, a distinctive but somewhat opaque trope name usually makes me want to click it to see just what the hell it's all about.  

[Dartz]

There's no reason redirects can't be used. Quite a few of the old trope names specifically redirect to the new ones? Or alternate names for the same trope as they come up

I'd like to help as well, though I'm genuinely not sure what exactly I can do. I suppose I can be a good approximation of the usual clueless user in beta-testing. I tend to break TvT's markup everytime I've used it, then go into a trial and error with the preview button to get things to final work. And still things don't link up properly, or spoiler tags get munged. I'm a good average user.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Labster]

It's obvious that we're not going to solve the page naming issue that has plagued TVT for years with a new policy that won't enrage either side of the debate. Now, there might be a technical solution to making the laconic versions of the tropes more accessible, and that might solve a lot of the issues. I have some half-baked ideas for doing so, but I'm going to need to think about it some more. Certainly, having lots of redirects is also part of the solution.

I'm a little concerned about the name "All The Tropes" has a bit of a TakeThat aspect to it that might not serve us as well in the future. But it looks like I'm going to be outvoted on that one. Once I realized that it will abbreviate as ATT, I kind of want have the Death Star as our logo. I'm sure Lucasfilm isn't using it, right?

And Bob, what you're suggesting will have a much greater chance of becoming policy if you write the policy. Not that I want to take you away from writing DW or anything.
-- ∇×V

[Morganite]

I'm used to software where deleted pages show up with a big red indicator next to them on Recent Changes.

I'm used to not looking at Recent Changes, so that wouldn't mean much to me. I'm thinking purely in terms of someone finding a link to a spuriously deleted page on some other page. A link to a page that doesn't exist isn't unusual. Existent but blank pages are, and it draws one's attention to something possibly being wrong.

It was more of a "Hey, I just freed up curly brackets.  Should I use them for anything?" moment.
Spoiler coding is actually a fairly hard thing to do right, because it has three competing interests:  It's common so it should be short;  it should be easy to remember, because it's common; and it should be easy to identify, because people don't always want to read the contents while editing.  In the last, [[spoiler:] wins hands down, because it's so big and obviously says spoiler.  But it's cumbersome for something that is so common.  Evan suggested ((double parenthesis)), because it's like a parenthetical comment that's less important to see, but I think that fails the "obviously a spoiler" test.  So I proposed with double curly brackets.  Would you feel better with {{{triple curly brackets}}}?  Is there another alternative that feels better to you?

I suspect using curly brackets for *anything* that's not at least link-related is going to cause confusion.

As for short vs. obvious, I don't think you can have it both ways. Anything that short is going to be too easy to miss. And given that a lot of people who aren't me seem to actually care about spoilers, obviousness is probably more important. That combined with feeling that keeping the old syntax where possible is a good thing, I'm going to vote for sticking with [[spoiler:] .

(I also feel like spoiler tagging is already overused, and so have my doubts about encouraging people to pile on *even more* of it by making it so simple...)

The two I listed (and many more!) say what they mean; they are clear and self-evident.

Here I've gotta respond "Maybe to you." I'd never heard of Deus Ex Nukina before, and what I thought the name *sounded* like before I searched it is... well, *related*, in the sense that both involve nukes. But not all that close beyond that. And the name doesn't really make sense to me. TITM, on the other hand, does, and I have no attachment to The Big O either. (Which I'd have to question actually calling the source anyway...)

Basically, I think what you're saying about TITM could be said about most of the tropes in the wiki, and this is not really a soluble problem. Names that hardly seem to make sense to *anyone*, yes. (I think TVT's existing guidelines on this are actually pretty good.... although I'll make no statements just now about their *implementation* of said guidelines.)

Also, isn't "people who are interested in digging into references" already the target audience here? That strikes me as a bit like complaining that people who don't like racing will have a hard time figuring out NASCAR.

vorticity: Where's the "TakeThat" in the name? It's definitely something that *distinguishes* us from the competition, who have decided that they don't want All of them, but it's not like they're ashamed of their positions...

-Morgan.

[Sofaspud]

 Here I've gotta respond "Maybe to you." I'd never heard of Deus Ex Nukina before, and what I thought the name *sounded* like before I searched it is... well, *related*, in the sense that both involve nukes. But not all that close beyond that. And the name doesn't really make sense to me. TITM, on the other hand, does, and I have no attachment to The Big O either. (Which I'd have to question actually calling the source anyway...)The Big O 

Well, I can only speak for myself, obviously.

I had no clue what Deux Ex Nukina was; to pull that example, I literally just went to the big list o' tropes and yoinked the first one that I hadn't seen before that seemed to be clear as to what it meant, that caught my eye.  Turns out I was right about what it was... which is the case, most of the time, with trope names.  I may be off on the details but the gist comes through.

That doesn't happen with TITM, and others of its kind.  Introducing people to tropes invariably leads to me having to explain that one, in particular, which is why I picked it as an example.

As I said, though: I'm not looking to change them.  I just would prefer if a trope resource is easier to use, as in, easier to find what you're looking for, and it seems to me that adding references doesn't hurt and might help.  Alternative names, not replacements.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

[robkelk]

Any use of the phrase "Tomato in the Mirror" that does not cover this movie is a bad use, IMHO. I'd go so far as to say that movie should be the Trope Namer in this case.

Now, what did you folks mean by the phrase? Probably nothing to do with that movie...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Bob Schroeck]

A "Tomato Surprise" is a story where the whole point of the plot is the revelation of some detail that has been deliberately hidden from the reader/viewer, which if it were known from the beginning would have made the whole story moot. The tongue-in-cheek example given in the writer's guide I mentioned above is hiding the fact that the narrator is a tomato until the last sentence. Most of the time it's a cheap gimmick that carries a bad story along, but sometimes it can make for a good story -- witness that one Twilight Zone ep from the POV of a plastic surgery patient, whose vision is blurry (keeping us from clearly seeing the people around her), who is hoping that her procedure has fixed her terrible ugliness. Sadly, we learn it hasn't. The Tomato Surprise at the end is that she is beautiful by our standards, but the race into which she was born all have deformed pig-faces.

A "Tomato In The Mirror" is when the Tomato Surprise is about a character but is hidden from the character himself, and he finds it out usually as part of the climax of the story. There was a 1950s B movie about androids replacing humans ("Attack of the Humanoids" or something like that, maybe?), where at the end the hero discovers that he, too, is an android but didn't know it -- classic Tomato In The Mirror.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.