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I am not ready to quit TV Tropes yet
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Comments
Also, if a Great Gatsby reader gets angry about other works like that, then it probably doesn't say much for the average Great Gatsby reader.
The implications of this quote were what made me say that.
True.
If it were something like Touhou that was being plastered all over the site, then you guys would probably be jumping all over me for liking it, and I'd be apologetic and hastily trying to cut down on the obviously shoehorned quotes/images.
Let me preface this by pointing out once again that Wikipedia, the site that has the strictest notability policy of any wiki that I'm aware of, still has problems with Wiki Groaning. The fact that there are more and larger articles on pop-culture related subjects than on classic works on Wikipedia is the reason why it's called Wiki Groaning in the first place. So for those of you who think No Such Thing As Notability is magically the cause of the problem, you are demonstrably wrong.
The reason that I am sick of the Wiki Groaning discussion is that it's a bullshit, cheap-shot argument against the quality of a website, especially a general interest website that has articles on all types of fictional media. The reasons that it is a bullshit, cheap-shot argument are as follows:
1.) It is based on the ridiculous premise that somehow word counts are a measure of quality. That if you ran the article for The Great Gatsby through a word processor and it had more words than Haruhi Suzumiyah, then the website is somehow objectively better.
2.) It completely ignores the inherent subjectivity in the enjoyment of entertainment media. It makes the assumption that people who read and entry-pimp the popular webcomic of the day are somehow worse people than those that read and edit for a classic work of literature, and thus if you have more of the latter than the former the Website Quality Commission is sure to award you the "Objectively Better Than Other Websites" award.
3.) It ignores the fact that people are likely going to spend more time reading and writing about the media they are passionate about, and unless you're reading this in 1925 it's statistically unlike that the media you are most passionate about is The Great Gatsby. Most people simply enjoy some flavor of the modern, popular culture of the day... in fact, the reason you can even call it "pop culture" is due to the fact that it's popular among a large number of people.
That last point applies to the majority of people that are happy with TV Tropes. It also applies to the majority of people who don't know TV Tropes exists. And yes, it even applies to the people who complain about TV Tropes. You can see that by looking at the edit histories of people using the Wiki Groaning argument here on IJBM, and you can see that most of the people complaining about it on Something Awful later make some kind of equivocation along the lines of "Well, okay, so I haven't actually read any of those books, but I'm totally gonna do it next week, I swear!"
Now keeping in mind that we're already dealing with a bullshit argument that no one would even care about if it wasn't being used by people on the Something Awful thread who have admitted on this forum that they're going to make full use of hyperbole in order to laugh at us, let's look at what it would take to solve the Wiki Groaning problem on TV Tropes.
Of course, we can't just get rid of No Such Thing As Notability, because Wikipedia. So that means that the only way we could somehow enforce classic works having a higher word count than pop-culture works would be to forbid having pages on anything that is not classical literature and The Godfather. For a website called TV Tropes. That was based out of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan forum.
And if we did that? We wouldn't even have a fraction of our current readership. If it even attracted 1/100th of the readers we do today, I would be amazed. The reason that readership would take such a hit would be because we would be arbitrarily removing media that our 60,000 daily unique visitors are interested in, for the trade off of hopefully making a few people on Something Awful make fun of us less.
The fact of the matter is that a TV Tropes website that didn't have Wiki Groaning or No Such Thing As Notability would be a completely different website. And if that's what you're looking for, the simple answer is to go out and find it.
Now I will close by restating this: for those that don't want to go to a different website, but would at least like for the word counts of classic literature articles to be larger than they are now, the simple solution is to stop griping about it, stop making excuses, sit down in front of your computer and just make it happen. Like many of the people who aren't here complaining about TV Tropes being a pit are doing even as we speak.
I would've picked something from Yack Fest, but I couldn't decide which was the most terrible.That, and y'all know the hard-on folks have for Yack Fest.I thought.. never mind
I don't disagree with your post at all. It's pretty much entirely compatible with what I had said in my post.
Yes, people are going to discuss the works they are fans of more than they discuss Shakespeare or Dickens. I can see how that would be a problem for the fans of the latter in the TV Tropes forums, but what can you do to fix it? Ban discussion on everything but classical literature? What would TV Tropes possibly have to gain from doing such a thing that would be worth the cost of murdering the middle forum row?
Wiki Groaning isn't the result of bad policies, unless every general interest website shares the same policies. It's not like Eddie gets a stack of applications for new editors and thinks "Hmm, this guy specializes in literary analysis and is a Oscar Wilde reader, but what I was really looking for were more XKCD enthusiasts so Access Denied." There's just simply more of the latter than there are of the former. Unfortunately for the hardcore Dickens fans, they are going to have a hard time finding a place where discussion of their media of choice isn't heavily out-weighed by discussion on modern pop culture, unless they limit themselves to areas that specialize in classic literature.
Wiki Groaning is nothing more than an admittedly humorous reflection in pop culture trends and, since it's an internet phenomenon, especially a reflection of internet pop culture trends. So yes, pretty much everywhere you go you will be seeing talk about the next big anime, or TV series, or action movie, or sci-fi novel. Primary interest in the classics is going to be niche in pretty much any non-specialized web community.
But the thing of it is, there's nothing standing in the way of having those discussions, or entry pimping those works. Just as interest in classic lit is not enforced, neither is it forbidden. The only thing that stops people (not all people, mind you, as if you look at the history link I posted earlier for The Great Gatsby, editing there is alive and well) is this defeatist attitude you mention when they see more discussion on works they don't like.
If every single person that threw their hands up in the air bemoaning the prevalence of Homestuck actually got out there and put forth the effort, they would have others in their own fandom to talk about it to. However, if they're expecting Eddie and the mods to hold their hands and force it happen for them, they're going to be waiting a long time. Until Eddie perfects his subliminal messaging mind control device, most tropers are going to talk about pop culture simply because most people talk about pop culture.