This is something festering in my mind for the past week or two; a blog post that can hardly be considered "hackery". It's really a shame that I've sidelined myself into blogging solely about British political minutae. I've got more things to blog about than just how awesome and cool Nick Clegg is.
I'm pretty sure we know what a wiki is: a community-edited resource of information, usually open to pretty much everyone (sometimes registration is required). TV Tropes is a wiki geared, obviously, to tropes (storytelling devices) in television. It's not an accurate description, really; its remit has ballooned from television to all media, and some real life examples; and it's not a good example of a wiki.
You see, creating a wiki requires that you open up a large part of how it's run to a wider community, unlike a blog, which is controlled solely by the people who write the posts. And when people contribute to a wiki they want to see a return on their "investment". This is the way Wikipedia went over the past ten years; gradually, Jimbo Wales has relinquished most of his power to pretty much all kinds of people: most policy discussion and implementation is done by the public, actions are taken by the administrators, complex dispute resolution by the Arbitration Committee, and sorting the legal and public side of it to the Foundation. This has served Wales well; even with little non-delegated power, he is still seen as the "head" of Wikipedia and his opinions carry a lot of weight; essentially, he is the Wikipedia equivalent of Queen Elizabeth II. In theory.
On TV Tropes, however, this is not the case. The main administrator and site owner, Fast Eddie, doesn't seem to have got what a wiki is about. Wikis by their very nature have a very egalitarian, anarchic structure "on the ground". Sure, the Wikimedia Foundation has a clear power structure, but that's partially for legal reasons. TVTropes is mostly at a level that doesn't need legal structures to keep it afloat. Anarchy on the web at its most, huh?
Not exactly. You see, Fast Eddie runs a tight ship on TV Tropes. As tight as Andrew Schlafly, infamous control freak at large owner of the far-right blog "trusworthy" wiki Conservapedia. It can be excused, to a point, by saying "well, he owns the site". But as I've said, wikis need to have some sort of democracy, or at the very least, consultation with editors, to survive. FE doesn't do this, though. He's widely known by his administrative fiat decisions which seem to go relatively uncriticised by the editors. Sure, getting rid of things such as the Fetish Fuel index was the best thing for the site, but where Jimbo Wales would use his reserve powers in an emergency, Eddie has more active powers, to the point of an absolute monarchy of the type seen in pre-Revolutionary France.
Fast Eddie also locks pages that he sees as "troll magnets", but the criteria aren't really defined properly. The result is permanently static pages because he just forgets about them. Contrast with Wikipedia, which says that permanent full protection is a last resort only. The moderators have a warped sense of priorities too. When I came across the Troper Tales page for Rape as Comedy and tried to get it deleted, I encountered significant resistance despite the obvious inherent problem with the page.
And, of course, the pièce de résistance: the great subjective trope cull. Now, I'm no fan of pages on TV Tropes that are unduly positive or negative, but the cull on these tropes really goes too far. Wikipedia has the right idea when it comes to neutrality: present facts, and present the facts of opinions, but try to find a balance between those opinions. But we can't even say if a work is good or bad, even if most people believe it's bad, because it'll somehow upset the people who think it's good. Now, when it's something like a recent Hollywood film, the chances are that there are a sizeable amount of people in that second column. But surely we can make judgements like saying that the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man was completely terrible, can't we? I mean, a game that was partially responsible for the Great Video Game Crash of 1983?
Wrong. Apparently, saying that is "subjective". And herein lies the problem with TV Tropes. Opinions about a work don't exist completely outside the work itself. Take a look at the film Lady in the Water, where the character of a obnoxious film critic was M. Night Shyamalan's response to critics who lambasted The Village. Or, indeed, television series where unpopular characters are written out because the people hate them: Nikki and Paulo from Lost, for example. In all works other than one-and-done works, critical reception is essential for furthering a work. And indeed, there is a trope for characters such as Nikki and Paulo: it's called "The Poochie", after the fictional dog from the industry-mocking Simpsons episode "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show". Luckily, it's not a subjective trope, yet.
But it doesn't stop there. One of the most overreaching and stupid policies of the site is the whole "if you can't say anything nice" guideline that pervades even writing. This, however, makes for incomplete coverage. To explain why, say, Seltzer and Friedberg aren't making spoof movies any more, we have to explain that Disaster Movie and Vampires Suck were bad and they bombed at the box office. To explain why Rob Reiner fell from an award-winning producer of The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and This is Spinal Tap to the joke seen in the South Park episode "Butt Out", we have to look at North, and why the film was so bad Roger Ebert famously said "I hated hated hated this movie". But none of this matters there. The problem is so endemic that real-life examples of a "People's Republic of Tyranny" was deleted for being "rude".
Which brings me onto another short point: Fast Eddie has encouraged the removal of real life sections because it doesn't fit the remit of the site. But any evaluation of real life exposes this argument as bare. People use tropes all the time: for example, the "suspiciously specific denial" gets used in politics: for example, "I'm not being racist, but", followed by a racist remark, or as I pointed out six weeks ago, "a fair impartial debate" between two people of one viewpoint. Tropes can easily describe Real Life too: take the example of the Orwellian Editor, which, like most of Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a not so veiled slight at Josef Stalin, the undisputed king of that kind of censorship.
And finally, the otaku nature of the community. No greater example can be found than the Nakama page. Nakama is, as the page describes, a Japanese word for a close-knit group of friends or characters. So why use "Nakama" rather than the alternate titles of "Fellowship", "Comrades", "Coterie", or even "Ohana" (which, as any person growing up at the turn of the millenium, knows means "family, and family means no-one gets left behind or forgotten")? Well, it's solely because of an outrage by animé loving tropers when an attempt to move it to a more helpful title happened. This smarts particularly when some tropes named after western media (e.g. "Encyclopedia Browned" to "Conviction by Counterfactual Clue") got changed for being "obscure" and "confusing". And, as people have come to expect of the otaku, they tend to be socially stunted shut-ins who try to hide behind fake diagnoses of mental illness, which, of course, belittles genuine suffers. But I digress.
There is a point to Fast Eddie's changes: it's to increase the reputation of the site. But the damage has been done. From a control freak administrator to missing the entire mission of the wiki (and not as Fast Eddie repeatedly changes it) multiple times, and its userbase, making small changes like a ghettoising "subjective tropes" is all full of sound and fury that signifies nothing. Reputational change will only come when the site treats itself seriously, instead of the clusterfuck it currently is.
As someone who used to visit and contribute (as a normal editor, not a mod or anything like that), I'd like to point out that this didn't actually start until around mid-2010 or so…however, yes, it did indeed become as bad as you say, if not worse, and it's one of the reasons I gave up and left in November, never to return.
To be honest, I can still enjoy some of the pages on the site, but it has lost the plot from what it intended to do, but personally, I don't see why they should care about reputation at this point, because no amount of edits will change anyone's mind.
You may want to know that Fast Eddie is trying to bolster the site's reputation by calling tropers to write positive reviews on Alexia.com
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13108589930A01580100
Hello,
I've been a troper for a years, and I discovered this article while googling for data about the engine TV Tropes runs on. I’ll have to say, this title did catch my curious eye — kuddos on that.
I don't know how much of a control freak Fast Eddie actually is (and, honestly, I don't really have time to investigate on that), but as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t necessarily a problem. The only thing that really does matter is the evolution of the wiki (the actions) — the motivations behind this evolution aren’t relevant.
And as a troper, most of the recent major changes (last two years) on TV Tropes felt sad but right — sad, because they took part of the fun away, but right, because I nearly always felt they’d make the site better in the long run.
To take an actual example, creating the “Subjective tropes” category did take part of the fun away from pages such as Dethroning Moment Of Suck, making them harder to find (by removing them from works’ page)… but TV Tropes’ goal is first and foremost to celebrate fiction — in other words, to help it shine. When searching for data about a fandom I enjoy (let’s say, Evangelion), I don’t necessarily want to read about why its haters hate it — that’d take the shine away.
In the same way, protecting frequent troll subjects does present the benefit of diminishing the troll frequency, which in turn helps make things look a little brighter.
In a word, TV Tropes is a positive wiki, whereas Wikipedia, for instance, is a neutral wiki (it theoretically doesn’t try to make stuff look good or bad).
So, yeah. Everything isn’t perfect, and the fun does get reduced, but I still think the global result is positive.
There are a few things I can’t accept in your article, though.
Firstly, your assertion that “creating a wiki requires”.
By saying that, you suppose a wiki is supposed to comply with a model that is considered to be good, desirable and, to be blunt, absolute.
I don’t think someone who is internet– (or even media-) savvy would expect anything absolute from a website just because of a “wiki” tag, but that’s exactly what you’re doing here.
Tags are just that — words to help people grasp an entity from an external point of view. A website labelled as a wiki will probably contain information about something, and it will probably be edited by a community.
However, once you’ve decided to get “in”, to “enter” the entity, the tags don’t mean anything anymore. You may discover only trusted editors can edit some pages, for instance — and that wouldn’t necessarily mean the wiki isn’t any good.
My point being, use tags to find what you’re looking for (an information cluster), not to criticize it. Wiki never are egalitarian by nature (ah, nature, an interesting word that is disturbingly easy to deconstruct); they frequently are egalitarian by choice.
TV Tropes may not be like Wikipedia, but from TV Tropes’ point of view, that’s a pretty good thing (the reverse may be true, and both are probably right — don’t forget, they don’t have the same goal in the first place!).
Secondly, comparing Wikipedia and TV Tropes’ heads to Queen Elizabeth II and pre-Revolutionary French monarchs feels inadequate.
There’s an important difference between internet communities and the Great Britain and French kingdoms — people come to internet communities, whereas they usually don’t choose to be French or English.
Because of this difference, what can usually be considered to be wrong for monarchies isn’t necessarily wrong for internet communities — it’s a different values system, since people can just leave. Furthermore, internet communities that don’t have an efficient decision making system usually end up dying, so having a monarch can be better than not having one for the sake of the community. Equality is a beautiful word, but it isn’t always a good thing on the internet (think Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, for instance — that being said, newbies are another good reason to limit rights).
Lastly, I’d like to know why having an otaku community is a problem.
TV Tropes celebrates fiction; glancing at the creation streams, one can easily spot Japan as being an huge fiction works nest. Its animé and drama industry can quite easily compete with the American TV industry, and that’s not even taking the manga industry in account — this one far outclasses the American comics industry if one only looks at numbers. Not gonna talk about video games and visual novels, things would get ridiculous.
Because of this special position Japan is in, the proportion of Japanese fiction among TV Tropes pages isn’t exactly a surprise… so why would a big proportion of Japanese culture enthusiasts be strange or problematic? This whole paragraph about otaku looks like either a troll or a genuine otaku hate rant to me. Either way, distasteful.
Hum… Nothing to add for now, I think.
Thanks for writing this article — it was an interesting read nonetheless.
If the comment above is typical of the site's users I'm not surprised it's a dump. The pages I have seen generally start with a huge block of examples drawn from Japanese cartoons — overwhelmingly formulaic overlong rubbish — followed by tropes drawn from the same tiny pool of other media. It's like DeviantArt, in the sense that it'll probably be around forever, bumping along at its current level, unable to effectively monetise itself — unlike for example KnowYourMeme, which overlaps with TVTropes in certain respects, or the CheezBurger network. I'm sure TVTropes' owner would love that kind of money, and he really needs to sit down and work out how he's going to get it. Not like this.
My 2011 New Years resolution was to leave that site and never come back. Since then, my writing style's improved, I come up with stories regularly, I speak more fluently, I generally avoid shounen animé, and I'm more social. Still a nerd, but less so.
All that site will ever do for you is make you miss the forest for the trees. That would be fine if it hadn't been gradually declining since Chris-Chan. To be honest, though maybe it's just my nostalgia kicking in, I liked the anarchic, sexual forum-in-disguise it once was.
Ashley Pomeroy: Sadly, the average person on that site is much worse.
Hey, found your site by Googling to see if anyone thought Tvtropes was a f***ed up as I did.
Never been a mod or contribute, just stumbled on the TvTropes site as part of my Movies interest. I thought Hey, neat! A wiki about the cliches and formulas of films and tv, this oughta be fun. Spent about four hours on there, never going back. I also had the misfortune of reading a page of Troper Tales; my soul has been blackened. And I've stumbled unwittingly into sites like Rotten and Encyclopedia Dramatica.
I'm PO'd they have the gall to call that site TvTropes — it should be called ten popular geek Shows/Films and every Animé/Cartoon tropes. Most of the articles are named from inside jokes in Japanese terms or other obscure things. Some phenomenal and classic movies/films/books have ten trope examples. Any animé or cartoon, no matter how obscure or old, will invariably have 40+. The only literature examples are from books everyone's been made to read in high school English or exclusively from a few of the following; Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight, Animorphs or Anita Blake or some Fantasy title that anyone who is over twelve and still reads has never heard of.
I would be embarrassed if that was my site — and I'd have already wiped it clean and started it over, with my foot on the (Proverbial) throat of these overly sensitive, deluded women and man childs that have apparently flooded the site with their mind boggling infatuations with children's media. Not a site for film and television buffs. False f***ing advertising.
[…] lot has changed since my first TV Tropes blog post, which I notice is consistently the most popular post on my blog (to my dismay, actually). I was […]
I completely agree and actually googled 'tv tropes changed' to see if anyone thought the way I did. Glad to see that this is the case.
An issue I saw with the site is how, once, an admin (or Fast Eddie) put a trope up for deletion or renaming or something along those lines. A list was in the very first post as an example of 'what not to say' regarding the issue. It essentially listed all of the possible arguments one could have against this removal/renaming, and underneath these possible arguments made bullshit responses as to why they thought that argument was pointless. But in fact, a lot of the arguments listed were good reason for NOT removing/renaming said trope. I was furious. However, the admins (and the users who were wannabe admins and were kissing Fast Eddie's ass) did not care, did not listen to reason. They did it and they did it their way without caring about the userbase. That is when I stopped visiting my once-beloved site.
TV Tropes is (or rather, was) not known for being an informative well-respected wiki as it was for its jovial editing atmosphere. It used to be an incredible amount of fun for me. I used to visit it every single god damn day, without fail. But with the realizations that the admins are running an authoritarian ship that brushes off the opinion of its users with an overwhelming air of smugness? Well, in my eyes, at least, this once-colourful beetle is on its back and in its death throes.
…I haven't noticed much about the animé section yet.But I'm sure you are all just overreacting now.There are alot more literature like Terry Prachett and James Patterson(not as much Dean Koontz though sadly)and the large variety of movies can get really obscure.The so much animé is there because animé is getting alot more popular now.Even though,I am noticing a tightlipped and snooty theme in the How to pages.
Oh goooood it's not just me!! *weeps*
It has become dreadful. I haven't spent a week's worth of TV Trope trawling for about a year. They removed all the best bits…and they give no help the Wiki who's desperate to save all the (good) Troper Tales, especially of Hello, Insert Name Here which was always fantastic…
All I do on this site now is update a small web original thing I help with…
[…] movies. As of today, I've finished Hornet's Nest (the novel). It's relevant, I promise. My first post delved into the ideas of "subjectivity" on the wiki, and my second about the community. In […]