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Comments
The FORUM is the issue
But the wiki is pretty good
Eh, I still have plenty of issues with the way the wiki approaches media
but as a trivia list of things that have happened in tv shows and shit? it's cool.
The wiki is...all right, as long as you don't take it seriously, I guess would be the best way to put it.
Thats the problem, the wiki flip flops between being informal and being formal
I guess my approach to the wiki is that I don't necessarily take it seriously. Like, I use it to inform myself, but don't use it as a be-all-and-end-all of analysis. It's got bits and pieces of analysis all over the place, so in that way it's very useful.
Also, I didn't know it was called Early Installment Weirdness; I always thought it was Second Installment Weirdness.
It's like telling us that a cabin is made of logs, metals and glass. Technically true, but without knowledge of how those things are shaped or fit together, it's functionally useless.
Ehh, I don't look at trope lists to find work summaries. I just go by the stuff at the top of the page.
What I _do_ look at the tropes for is to find works with similar elements to a work I know, to be able to compare different (possible) instances of a trope.
Yeah, a good page might summarize the work in the main description.
"Google's interfering"
?
Anyways, an example of the site's problems is, say, the Julia Roberts article. On any other wiki, that's the kind of thing that would be classified as a "stub", but the fact that there's no quality control system at all is only the fundamental issue. The article doesn't tell you a damn thing about her that you couldn't figure out from an IMDb page aside from two inconsequential "tropes". Nothing about her acting style or typical roles, nothing about why she's so acclaimed, but apparently some "berserk button" and a mildly creepy fetish take precedence.
And ever since the anti-negativity purge, I'd say the site is a textbook example of false balance, but it's not even good at that. The inability to put anything remotely critical on a page effectively neuters any meaningful analysis. That makes pages on things such as Fox News Channel just as stub-quality and worthless. Even if you can't criticize things directly in the interests of impartiality, you can still summarize the typical arguments for and against it, but the users are far more focused on inane trivia in general than actually describing something in a page (e.g. pick a Pokemon character page. Even some obscure move that is infinitesimally relevant is listed as a trope).
Then again, the site is in dire need of a visible Featured Article system, since even I only know the bare minimum in writing a good page.
V I'm not intent on being a regular member here again for reasons I can explain in private conversations, but thanks.
wtf didn't think i'd see you back here again
Welcome back, man.
^^ Hmm...I remember occasionally marking TVT articles as stubs myself. Don't know what came of them...well, there was at least one that never got edited much after that, I remember. Mostly because no one knew what it was. (Might have been the page on the game Energy Breaker.)
I do remember specifically directing someone on deviantArt who was knowledgeable of the Telefang series (the one that involves phoning monsters to battle for you, and has been infamously used as Pokémon Jade/Diamond bootleg carts) to fill up the TVT page on Telefang. That person did so beyond all my expectations and turned it from a tiny stub into a huge page.
My personal opinion of the wiki is that it is too middle-of-the-road on certain issues to really become any of the great things that it could be, so it ends up highly uneven in all respects.
The forums are something else entirely. Some of the media sub-fora are decent, but the general ones are a mess and the overall forum culture appeals to me less and less as time goes on. Sure, there are cool people there still, but the constant cycle of new, initially socially inept users replacing older, interesting-but-disillusioned ones is a wearying one to bear witness to. To whit, the moderation structure and code of conduct is totally out of whack.
And yet I linger, out of habit and inertia.
Too darn many megathreads on the forum.
That said I'm pretty sure the site is well-known enough that this is basically a megasite with totally different community dynamics compared to a small site like, say, ours.
@RedEyedAbyss:
Well, for one, all tropes pertaining to rape (and some other pages) were put behind a curtain when Google started pulling ads again. This caused a few feminist websites to write about the issue (since those websites tend to like the wiki).
^^ True points.