Recap Cleanup

Plagiarism, as we all know, is a very serious offense on this wiki if that's what is happening. You might want to find out who made the page and report them on ATT if that's the case.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Apr 26th 2021 at 6:03:17 AM

Check the individual Recap pages' history. It's mostly Ethan-Partington.

Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 26th 2021 at 6:00:28 AM

Looks like you 'd me; I was about to correct that.

Anyway, made the ATT report.

Recap.Only Fools And Horses is being misused, as rather than creating separate recap pages for the individual episodes, tropes are just being dumped on to the page. This was brought up over in Ask The Tropers, over three months ago but nothing appears to have been done about it.

I've been working on some Lost recaps, and I'm wondering which is the correct style to use. For the first few, I copied the style of the ones that were already done, but after reading this thread I think the plot summaries were too long, and I've been trying to keep them shorter. So is it better to do this or this?

Edited by Hfxjfrvnn on May 14th 2021 at 5:21:26 AM

This thread was linked to me via War Jay, so I guess I'll pose my question here.

I made an ATT query about the page for Amphibia's "True Colors" and the summary being way too long, and I also just foundv another one involving a different Amphibia episode. Both summaries were expanded by the same troper.

The problem is that I'm not quite sure how to proceed. From what I understand, recap pages are not suppose to have giant summaries of everything on them, but there doesn't appear to be any consensus on that point.

On the other hand, I don't want to just revert the summaries back to what they were before and risk getting into an Edit War.

Recap.Chinatown is word for word its plot summary from the Wikipedia page.

It was created by William Shakesman. I will bring it to ATT.

The episode plot summaries on Recap.Are You Afraid Of The Dark are absurdly detailed; many of them feature multiple extensive dialogue quotes or otherwise give a nearly blow-by-blow summary of the episode in question, such that they're six or eight times as long as the trope lists. The fact that they have trope lists makes them salvageable, but the plot summaries need to cut down substantially.

It appears that Existing 87 created/expanded most, if not all, of those.

Okay, seems the ridiculously detailed plot summaries aren't the pages' only problems either; there are a lot of trope entries out of order alphabetically, single second-level bullets, and spoiler tags (which, not that I need to remind anyone in this thread, are verboten on Recap/ pages). I'm not sure I'm qualified to pare down the plot summaries (I haven't seen any episodes of AYAotD? in many years), but I can probably handle the other problems.

(EDITED TO ADD: Okay, the pages have been stripped of spoiler tags and the alphabetisation and indentation errors have been fixed. It strikes me as ironic that they have such unnecessarily detailed plot summaries and still blanket the trope lists with spoiler tags.

EDITED AGAIN TO ADD: I've pared down a few plot summaries, but the problems run still deeper; there are a lot of mistakes in the trope lists. Copious spelling and grammar errors, examples bloated by Word Cruft, and more besides. For example, Recap.Are You Afraid Of The Dark Season 2 The Tale Of The Magicians Assistant originally referred to protagonist Todd as "Dean" in the second half of the plot summary and most of the trope examples; there's no character named Dean, and even the actor isn't called Dean, so the mistake makes no sense.)

Edited by mlsmithca on Jun 20th 2021 at 3:03:59 PM

Zombie Land Saga E01

A couple of folks, myself included, have been filling out recap pages for Zombie Land Saga, and the format we've kinda settled on is a fully-detailed recap, a tropes list, and a main image and quotes that add flair to the page.

Recap.The Nostalgia Critic S 5 E 30 is formatted differently than the other pages. It's much longer and the troper who wrote the recap credited themselves, which I've never seen before — it seems to be based on another website's format.

To start, I removed the entire floatbox.

Dream SMP is also a massive issue. I haven't checked a lot of the subpages of the Recap subpage, but I'm pretty sure a lot (hell, maybe even all of them) are straight-up copy-pasted from the Dream Team Wiki. Seems like user Tropers/hahaboi is to blame. The pages haven't been edited in months, though. Should I PM the person who created the pages, or is it okay if I just cut all the pages entirely?

So is there any consensus over how long plot summaries should be?

Pursuant to the above: is there a consensus on what the purpose of a Recap page is? We don't want plot summaries — and I admit that I'm probably guilty of creating a number of such pages. That said, my feeling is that we should avoid Zero-Context Examples... And that sometimes you need the further detail of a "Recap" page to provide that context. The problem is that, in that case, you can't really impose an arbitrary "this many words" or "this many paragraphs" limit, because the context of any trope is dependent on what the trope is, how it's being used, etc. (As a really simple example, any recap of The Usual Suspects needs to be fairly expansive, because fundamentally there aren't a lot of details that aren't pertinent to The Usual Suspects Ending.)

In addition and/or conjunction to a Style Guide, I think it would be beneficial to establish a mission statement for the entire Recap namespace. How do we use this to trope?

My thought is that it's just like Characters/, in that its primary purpose is nothing more complicated than just another way to keep pages from being overly long.

Recap/ pages are work pages for specific episodes. I think their use for synopsis stems from the IMO ill-advised decision to merge the Synopsis/ namespace into Recap/ many years ago.

So in that case, a plot summary should be something similar to a TV guide synopsis?

With apologies for intruding on the philosophical discussion of what the Recap/ namespace should actually be, I've posted an ATT query following on from my previous posts to this thread about Recap.Are You Afraid Of The Dark; Existing 87 has reverted my condensations of the plot summaries with an edit reason claiming that they think their versions are "more readable". I don't want to get stuck in pointless edit wars, so does anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed?

EDITED TO ADD: Existing87 has been suspended for edit warring, but crazysamaritan suggested I get another editor to either confirm my condensed versions or write their own rather than reverting them myself (as that would also constitute edit warring). To that end, is there anyone here willing to take a look at the shortened plot summaries on the pages for "The Tale of the Lonely Ghost" and "The Tale of Laughing in the Dark"? (Including paring down the plot summaries further if it seems appropriate to do so.)

Edited by mlsmithca on Jul 14th 2021 at 11:32:16 AM

There may need to be a grammar cleanup on subpages for The Mask. A TRS effort brought me to The Mask S 2 E 21 Cool Hand Mask, and to be honest, it's impossible to follow.

Edit: Legacies has index markup, but the markup does not work.

Edited by Berrenta on Jul 18th 2021 at 12:00:07 PM

The recap for The Crystal Empire, which I dunno how to wikiword, is way too long.

Courtesy link.

All the MLP:FIM recaps are a bit long, unsurprisingly.

Part 2 is a bit overlong, but Part 1 seems okay.