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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Ninety-nine percent of the wiki are not looking for a fight. (And probably not you, either.)

You're editing an article, perhaps on, say, the pop-culture assessment of America. On seeing a description of the negative stereotypes that pop up, you decide to add a past President as an example of where those stereotypes come from.

Five minutes later that example is gone. It vanished as fast as spam. Why did it happen?

It happened because of The Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment. You stepped on the toes of the vast majority of the wiki, the people who really want to avoid flamewars. This doesn't mean that 99% of the wikians agree or disagree with your opinion on the past President. It just means that 99% do not care for side-issue battles.

Wikis are open to editing from all sides, which makes them self-correcting. For the most part (trolls aside), people want to maintain a peaceful environment. This means that anything that rubs a little too harshly will be wiped away.

While this wiki is built upon being relaxed and carefree, it is still not a forum.

When something is posted that stands firmly on one side of a hot-button debate (political bickering being the huge one, followed closely by religion, with interpretations of Mind Screws running a close third), the editing machine will grind it back down or even kill it outright.

If your example was outright deleted instead of whittled away, maybe there is another method of getting your point across without stepping on anyone's toes. Wording is everything. It goes both ways, too: please do not use the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement as an excuse to remove a viewpoint that merely goes against your personal beliefs.

The rule applies to examples in fiction as well as Real Life. However, there are some tropes that should not have any Real Life examples at all, no matter how carefully worded. For these particular tropes, the rule is very simple indeed: No Real Life Examples, Please.

See also: Internet Backdraft, Ban on Politics, Flame Bait and Flame War.

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