Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is not TV Tropes

Should this be moved to Wikipedia: space?

@Piotrus: since you're the inspiration behind this: is this one ready for prime time a la WP:HAMMER? Or should it stay in my user space yet? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 19:17, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

It looks good, but for 3O I pinged User:TompaDompa who may want to add an example or two? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:42, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

There are quite a few examples we could add. Most of these are articles where I'm the one who converted them from list to prose format, so I am of course rather partial.

• Asteroids in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes
• Battle of Thermopylae in popular culture: bad, good, TV Tropes – though the TV Tropes article has a somewhat broader scope than our article does.
• Black holes in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes
• Comets in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes – though in this case the scope of the TV Tropes article is limited to one aspect of comets in fiction, namely as portents of doom.
• Dyson spheres in popular culture: bad, good, TV Tropes
• Immortality in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes – I'm particularly happy about this one as an example of how a good article on a topic like this should look (it is indeed a WP:Good article, and I hope to be able to eventually turn it into a WP:Featured article—see the ongoing peer review). The TV Tropes article is mostly a list of links to more specific subtopics.
• Jupiter in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes
• Mars in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes – I'm currently working on this one. It should probably be possible to turn it into a WP:Good article.
• Mercury in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes
• Moon in science fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes – another of my WP:Good articles, though in this case the "bad" version was copied to List of appearances of the Moon in fiction and so remains (with some alterations that have been made since).
• Pluto in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes
• Saturn in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes
• Stars and planetary systems in fiction: bad, good, no clear counterpart on TV Tropes – this is a case where the "bad" version is the one that is currently live, since some editors objected to my rewrite on the talk page.
• United Nations in popular culture: bad (deleted, but viewable at en.everybodywiki.com/United_Nations_in_popular_culture), good, TV Tropes – this is one I haven't worked on myself, so I can't vouch for the quality of the "good" version (would need to read both the article and the sources and compare them first), but it illustrates the concept of using prose rather than a list format very well.
• Uranus in fiction: bad, good, TV Tropes

It's worth noting that the "Useful Notes" articles on TV Tropes are typically much closer to what we want on Wikipedia than regular TV Tropes articles, even if they typically (but not always, see e.g. their article on black holes) also include a list section that we do not want to emulate here.

We could also use Planets in science fiction (before, after removing TV Tropes-style list, after converting to a proper list) as an example of how a list format can be properly used—as a purely navigational list that helps readers get to the articles they want to find.

I'm not entirely happy about WP:NOTTVTROPES being redirected here instead of to WP:NOT as it initially was, since I made a couple of comments before it was retargeted (see e.g. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tonfa in popular culture and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of fictional impostors) that now seem to be referencing an essay that didn't exist when those comments were made. I was thinking that if the core part of MOS:POPCULT is incorporated into WP:NOT as I suggested at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Trivia sections, WP:NOTTVTROPES should lead there. TompaDompa (talk) 20:38, 26 April 2022 (UTC)