Tropedia

  • Before making a single edit, Tropedia EXPECTS our site policy and manual of style to be followed. Failure to do so may result in deletion of contributions and blocks of users who refuse to learn to do so. Our policies can be reviewed here.
  • All images MUST now have proper attribution, those who neglect to assign at least the "fair use" licensing to an image may have it deleted. All new pages should use the preloadable templates feature on the edit page to add the appropriate basic page markup. Pages that don't do this will be subject to deletion, with or without explanation.
  • All new trope pages will be made with the "Trope Workshop" found on the "Troper Tools" menu and worked on until they have at least three examples. The Trope workshop specific templates can then be removed and it will be regarded as a regular trope page after being moved to the Main namespace. THIS SHOULD BE WORKING NOW, REPORT ANY ISSUES TO Janna2000, SelfCloak or RRabbit42. DON'T MAKE PAGES MANUALLY UNLESS A TEMPLATE IS BROKEN, AND REPORT IT THAT IS THE CASE. PAGES WILL BE DELETED OTHERWISE IF THEY ARE MISSING BASIC MARKUP.

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Cquote1
"TV Tropes is immortal. TV Tropes does not know time. Terms such as 'recently' are meaningless to TV Tropes."
Sonic Lover, from the original YKTTW of this page on TVT
Cquote2


In short, Tropedia is not static.

A common mistake made by many well-intentioned tropers is to often use the words "recent", "newest", "latest" or something synonymous to describe something within their examples or article (Trope or work pages) descriptions. This is usually after some change that shakes the foundation of the work or character. In their zeal, the troper will excitedly state that this is a very recent development, cluing other tropers that the new status is going on right this very minute.

For instance:

Unfortunately, this is not a good practice.

A form of Fan Myopia, this practice assumes that everyone who reads this will automatically be aware of how long ago "recently" was. There are still some examples which describe films, episodes, issues, or volumes from four or more years ago as "recent", but if you're not a fan of said work, how will you know whether it's true or not? For all the uninitiated person would know, Captain America "recently" died or Burn Notice is still the "hottest new show on USA Network".[1]

It only creates more trouble for other tropers when they have to remove mentions of the word "recent" after it isn't recent anymore. Or worse, the next troper will add an indented bullet point adding an even more recent update for the situation. So for everyone's sake, please avoid using the word "recent" or anything synonymous in writing your examples. Although Tropedia is open for anyone to edit, it should not be required for anyone to come behind another troper and fix their entry.

If it helps, try and pretend that every work, ever, was written all on the same date at some point in the vague past. Don't actually put this in your edits, of course, but use it to help you refrain from slipping in a "recent" without noticing.

A related phenomenon can occur when linking to websites with constantly changing content, such as webcomics, news sites or blogs. Make sure the URL actually points to the specific item you're referring to, not to the site's main page.[2]

No Examples, please. Especially no "recent" ones.

  1. FYI, the death of Captain America and the debut of Burn Notice both occurred in 2007.
  2. Some sites have annoying auto-redirection that makes the "next page" link point to the front page when on the currently second-to-last page. This can make digging up the actual URL a bit tricky.
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