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The new don't-panic thread for the TV Tropes pedo purge
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Comments
Obviously at some point TvTropes needs some quality control in general, but at this point, they've sunk pretty deep into the quagmire that their lack of such quality control brought them.
My main issue with monitoring is that from all observations, they seriously lack people interested in doing such janitorial work, let alone over thousands of pages with hundreds that are more obscure and thus harder to track. If they did have people checking over, not even NSFW pages would be that much of a problem, though this is an area which dearly needs to be an exception to No Notability.
Honestly, my whole issue with the whole thing is that the wiki simply doesn't get better because they don't address their editors and instead, they just clean up their messes. Some get the message, most don't.
it's not random. they've just been reading the sa thread
I'm deliberately avoiding any and all mention of some pages at this point, because I know there'll be no way I'll be able to defend them, but I don't want to see them cut. (Some of them are obscure enough that they'll hopefully be ignored for at least a while.)
Yeah, this. Can't we talk about things without sounding like we endorse them?
I was wondering what was going on when I noticed certain pages were cut. I mean removing pages for, say, Mahou Shouji Ai or Night Shift Nurses, I could understand. But nuking, for instance, Fate/stay night just because it has gratutious sex scenes (that were eliminated in the anime, manga, and PS2 adaptations)? Yeah, something seemed stupidly off.
I have to admit, for a while that bugged me about, say, the R-Type page before the other shmup pages got filled with images. I just couldn't help but get the feeling the page (and, by extension, the people writing it) was getting into too gushy of a tone.
One thing I've noticed is that, once FSN fans are assured the page will be restored, they stop panicking. This is in marked contrast to how the mods keep saying they can't do a general announcement because people will start panicking.
My main issue with the cuts is that it does lend legitimacy to the argument of "if TV Tropes has a page on [X] work, then TV Tropes supports the content of [X] work."
After all, we're moving from a strict "We will have pages for all works of fiction, whether we agree with the content or not" position to a "We are deleting certain works because we do not find the content agreeable." This carries with it the implication (correct or not), that we do support the content of the remaining works, at least to some degree. Otherwise we would be deleting them too.
I personally am not happy about removing a bunch of work pages as opposed to cleaning and locking them, but the costs for operating the site don't come out of my pocket, so in the end it's Eddie and Janitor's ball to run with.
I'm guessing this "having a page on [X] means TVT supports it" comes from the "celebrating fiction" aspect of the site. Which apparently means "we write pages for stuff we like" instead of "we enjoy fiction".
"We celebrate fiction" doesn't mean "we only add tropes to works that we personally enjoy." The goal was still to eventually have a page for every work, and have every work described from a neutral point of view.
However, now that we are officially making judgments on works based on content, I don't know that a neutral POV is enough any more.
The thing has been that while the aim has been to maintain neutrality, TvT hasn't been able to even support that claim in a long time, in between all the unedited and non-updated-to-this-standard articles
Hell, even Wikipedia is not much better in terms of being consistently up-to-date and up-to-par, thanks to its sheer scope.
Some examples (yeah, I know, lol shmups):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoDonPachi_Dai_Ou_Jou
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushihimesama_Futari (note the quality standards flag, it's been there for THREE YEARS)
Yeah, wikis in general are problematic to maintain at best and sheer hell to even think about at worst.
^^^ I'll grant you that, and I wasn't particularly trying to argue that we were succeeding at the goal in practice on all pages. I simply feel that the argument of "having a page despite a neutral POV means we support the work in question" is now more legitimate than it was before this policy change.
There's this spectre of Google looming in the background, so the easy answer why shit is arbitrarily deleted would be that nobody wants Google to cut off the juice.
Meeble - What lrdgck says is absolutely it. These pages are being cut because of Google, and therefore ultimately because of money, no other reason. It does make something of a mockery of there being no such thing as notability, but rules/principles often go out of the window when financial survival is at stake.
Now I wonder if there's someone purposely Google-trolling TV Tropes in a surreptitious effort to change TVT policies and content.
This.
Sometimes, libertarian free-market solutions are not the correct solutions. And sometimes, there is no market in the first freakin' place.
This.
If I can calmly describe General Custer's erection as being three pixels long (and diagonal upwards), everyone should be able to.
That's just an aim; that doesn't mean the aim has been achieved.
Yeah, that's what I said, and...?
Oh I'd bank on it being a troll. As has been stated before, the reported page specifically did not even have Google ads.
I doubt that it was an effort to get TVT to actually change policies though. I can't really see anyone expecting reporting tentacles to lead into a pedo hunt, however badly it needed to be done. I mean hell, if that was the aim why wouldn't they just report the KNJ page itself or something?
The difference between pornography and a serious work should be fairly obvious to anyone, really. The problem arises when people start judging a work purely as pornography without taking a look to see if it's actually trying to tell a story.
Hell, it doesn't even really need to be a story at all, as long as it serves some narrative purpose, such as humor. One of my favorite webcomics, for example, is Oglaf. It's very sexually explicit, but that's not the main appeal, it's the humor. If I treated it solely as porn, most of the time I'd just find it gross.
Um, I'm pretty sure it's been mentioned somewhere that it isn't about advertisers anymore. At least not entirely.
^^ That reminds me. There is a juvenile but funny (and alarmingly explicit) sex farce that is currently intact, but that I expect to undergo review soon. I have no idea whether it will be allowed to remain. If it is removed, I will be one of the loudest protesters shouting this phrase:
"No! Not My Balls! Don't take My Balls!"
Naas - You may have a point, as there was discussion going on before Google cracked the whip. Perhaps it's fairer to say that the financial survival of the site is the main reason this has become urgent.
No I mean, word going around is that the administration have decided to do this based on other factors, after the Google thing. Am I allowed to link to the posts?
edit: posts by Martello and Rhyme Beat. If linking like that is against the rules, a moderator can remove it.Anyway, i can't find the specific TVT staff comments, since they're kinda lost in the threads.
Last I checked (two or three days ago) what no longer has to do with Google is the no-lolicon thing. The rest of the NSFW saga at that point still had everything to do with Google.
InsanityAddict>
Not really. It's an easy enough thing to do, so it could be just a single guy doing it. I had originally thought it was SomethingAwful pulling it, but it's really not their style per say. They're more likely to show up on forums calling everyone "paedos" and generally intentionally inciting trouble.
Doesn't preclude a single Goon deciding it would be funny.
Links doesn't really work, either -- TVTropes has far too much inbound traffic to tract specific inbound links, and the first thing a good troll does is learn to cover his tracks.
And Whale, the sad thing is, the fact that there are trope pages on Brave New World or Blue Lagoon or Lolita or what have you kinda proves the point I was banned over -- You can talk about a work without condoning it's values or it's content. Kodomo no Jikan, Fate Stay Night, Boku no Pico, they're really just another work when you get right down to it. They have tropes, we categorize and cataloge these tropes, without comment on their value or importance.
Book burning and incendiary language from KnJ's hatedom doesn't really accomplish anything.
Let's see whether this gets nuked.
@ MrW Exactly. It's pretty hilarious, really.
Edit: Oops, accidentally edited my old post instead of making a new post.