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-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
I am not ready to quit TV Tropes yet
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Deleting all my TVT bookmarks.
On Why TVTropes Uses The 2:1 Guideline For Crowners
The purpose of crowners is to measure the general acceptability of a proposed change among the userbase as a whole. With that in mind, common sense would suggest that a simple majority should work well enough, as if 55% of the population wants something, that should outweigh the 45% who don't.
However, such an approach falls short for a couple of reasons:
1.) The lack of Trope Repair Shop participation. Due to the fact that so few people are involved in most Repair discussions, it's really not feasible to accept a simple majority as being representative of the userbase as a whole. After all, if you only have a total of 50 people voting on a single prop, and 27 are in favor of a change versus 23 opposed, you may have a majority but it is far from a decisive or representative one. The four votes that would make such a crowner tied could have been due to something as simple as a handful of people who would normally vote the other way not being able to get online due to being especially busy offline, or just plain not noticing the thread for that particular change.
When you have such a low number of people voting (and believe me when I say that even 50 votes is a stretch for most TRS proposals), it's very hard to be certain that the decision you're making is going to be one that the userbase as a whole will accept. And while such a thing is not guaranteed even with the requirement of a supermajority, having two thirds of the participants all voting the same way is a good deal more decisive than simple majority is, and less likely to be prone to statistical error.
2.) The Inherent "Cost" Of Change. Any time a change from the status quo is proposed, there are costs associated with it... some obvious, some less so.
An obvious cost is the manpower required to enact the change, as it doesn't go through by magic. If you're talking about a page image change, the cost is negligible: someone can make the switch in a few seconds, and if it is determined later that the original switch was a mistake, undo it just as quickly. However when you talk about renaming a trope, the cost steadily climbs... the new article must be created, which is generally a pretty fast process, but then someone has to go about fixing all of the wicks and indices that tie to that article, which can number in the hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands. And in some cases it's not just a simple find and replace... you must read the context of the wick itself to verify whether or not rewording is necessary to make the new title fit.
A less obvious, but arguably far more important cost, is that of the patience of our readership. Our readers are accustomed to the status quo since that's all they've had a chance to be familiar with. Any change to that requires the readers to re-learn the new way of doing things. Now, you could argue that changing Nakama to True Companions isn't asking too much of the readers, and you'd be right.
However, if next week we decide it would OBVIOUSLY be better to change True Companions to Band Of Brothers, then the week after that a cadre of Lord of the Rings fans join together to push through a change to The Fellowship, and a month later anime fans rally to change the name back to Nakama... well, the readers would probably assume that we're in the business of yanking their chains, and you'd be hard pressed to argue that they weren't right in practice. Now, take the hypothetical Nakama example and duplicate it with 100 trope articles per month, and TV Tropes would come off as an exceedingly schizophrenic and increasingly unreadable site that doesn't allow readers to achieve familiarity with anything.
These are just two examples of costs associated with making a change, and the list is far from comprehensive. The bottom line is that since changing things too lightly is inherently risky, change should come at an inherent disadvantage when it comes to voting. After all, if a change is truly necessary, those proposing it should be able to sway that extra number of voters through the strength of their arguments.
The guideline of looking for a 2:1 ratio in crowners is a good way of satisfying both of the above points: a 2/3rd's majority is easier to accept as being representative of the userbase as a whole, and it greatly reduces the number of "on a whim" changes that would only have to be reverted or changed further later on. For those reasons, the guideline is more often than not a good one to have.
Now, where this all falls apart is when you have a highly publicized change that has high voter turnout. While a difference of 5-10 votes falling just short of the 2:1 ratio is easy to write off as not having enough community support, a difference of 200 votes in a 700 vote crowner is a clear sign that the majority of contributors feel that a change is necessary. This is where the saying that "guidelines are not a straight jacket" comes into play, as the low voter turnout the brought about the need for the 2:1 ratio is no longer in effect, and thus we shouldn't hold ourselves strictly to such a guideline in defiance of a decisive outcome.
Another reason why we must sometimes make an exception to the supermajority guideline is the habits of some TRS regulars dogmatically sticking to certain positions, which forces otherwise needed changes into permanent deadlocks. That's another issue that brings about a whole new set of problems, however the root of the issue can be traced directly back to the extremely low community participation we commonly see in the Trope Repair Shop.
Re back earlier in thread: That's an interesting idea: using this forum as a way to develop the Analysis namespace.
However, people won't always agree with you, and the issues are not always clear cut... in fact, those that disagree with you may even have official guidelines to fall back on that support their case, just as you have guidelines that support yours. Moreover, while you may not simply be pushing to fit your preferences, a lot of people do, and many frivolous and unnecessary changes are proposed.
The supermajority is meant to handle those situations so that an unnecessary change doesn't get pushed through simply by getting a handful more votes than the opposing side, and in the majority of cases it works well. The cases where it most often doesn't work as well are either due to being one of the few proposals that get massive amounts of votes (like Troper Tales and Nakama, most recently), or in cases where there are multiple conflicting guidelines that some favor over others. (Like The Libby and The Mario.)
For the former, mod discretion is needed to make the final call and declare the side that has a clear majority the winner. The latter is indicative that the current guidelines may need revisiting, so that the site's priorities can be clarified.
What the supermajority OUGHT to be viewed as, is a proxy to confirm the existence of a solid majority consensus.