All The Tropes:There Is No Such Thing as Notability

This is not Wikipedia. You will see these words written in many places on the website. One of the main ways we are different from them is our take on "notability."

All works are Notable

Wikipedia tries in many regards to be the opposite of what we are. We want to be fun, interesting and a cool place to sink hours of time performing original research into what makes storytelling tick. Wikipedia wants to be a compilation of previously published facts that are verifiable in reliable sources with no conflicts of interest. Serious Business. Presented with a choice between serious and fun, we went with fun.

Much of our wiki relies on the "Examples" section, where we pull our many articles together. Every now and then you might see a Wikipedia Updater who will delete your example with no reason. A small Edit War of delete/restore will start, before someone on the discussion page brings up "notability." This page is your response.

If it fits the trope description, then it can be put in. All it requires is someone to put it in there. Simple as that. It could be a multi-million viewer ABC Sitcom, or an all-but-forgotten Japanese videogame, or a Sprite Comic about EarthBound that died after seven strips. Every published story is notable.

We have examples ranging from media as diverse as Film to Fan Fiction and everything in between. Removing tropes, examples... anything... because of "notability" stifles the wiki. It can intimidate new writers who wanted to put in an example they liked and had it shot down. Hell, tropes are defined by their examples—a trope without an example is just "A thing that happened".

This is a double-edged sword. Someone could add an example they made up and there is really nothing you could do to stop them. If the discussion finds an example to be a purely fiction then it might get deleted, might. That's the way of things. But remember, we're here to have fun. Don't let this stuff burn you out.

... Except works that aren't available

This page title is kind of a misnomer, because of ATT:UNPUB. Any work that exists in the wild is fair game for All The Tropes, but if a work is not yet published, the notability requirement kicks in. People can keep anything they want on a personal, unpublished work in their user space -- anything that's a subpage of your user page, like your sandbox. If you want to talk about it in the main wiki, though, it needs to be something that other people are aware of. Anything that's caught the attention of a fan site or industry trade publication is likely okay. If it's been discussed in the general media, like the latest superhero movie, then definitely feel free to create a page based on trailers. (The trailers should provide enough information for a stub page... but keep in mind that Trailers Always Lie.) We'll be needing it soon enough … probably.

Another kind of work that's unavailable is something that once was available but now no longer exists -- like a fanfic that disappeared when the author's website did, or a video taken down from YouTube -- and for which there is no copy stored in the Wayback Machine. It's impossible to write a proper work page for a work you can't read, listen to, or watch; please don't do it. The only exception to this guideline would be certain works of antiquity which are only known by references to them in other works that survived where they did not. These can be documented to the extent that formal scholars have.

Oh, and if a disappeared work had a page created here while it still existed, that's okay. Just mark it with the {{MIA}} template if it doesn't have it already. This will warn the reader that the work no longer can be found anywhere on the Net.

... And works that don't really exist

There's another kind of work that's unavailable -- something someone made up which never existed in the first place. TV Tropes was rife with them, jokes and homages and just-for-fun things like Walt Disney's Anne Frank. We here at All The Tropes have tried to eliminate a lot of them, because if you weren't in on the joke to begin with, you might not realize it's fake, and they kind of dilute the work we've put in on the real stuff. There are a few examples that are still around, because they're generally part of another work -- like Inspector Spacetime, which is a Show Within a Show on Community. But in general, if it doesn't exist, neither should a page for it.

By, For, and About Fans

The TV Tropes Wiki and, subsequently, All The Tropes were both started by fans. People, that is, who like stuff. You will see that articles work better here when they are about something you like. This is a little bit of a shock to folks that are used to cynicism about the media. It takes a minute or two to get used to.

People who come looking for a place to bash stuff and rant about how dumb this or that is are in for some disappointment. Here, anyway. There are plenty of places on the 'Net to bash stuff. Shouldn't be too hard to find one.

This doesn't mean, of course, that every article is all sweetness and light, just that the articles trend more toward constructive criticisms than toward cynical bashing. More toward what does work, and how it works, than what didn't work and why it didn't.

If you really must vent, we have a Reviews section, and a forum. The main articles aren't for that.

Other than that, all we ask is that the examples fit the trope. Go on, have fun.

Just Because It's Notable Doesn't Mean It's On Topic

We consider every work notable. But this wiki is about storytelling, and the tropes therein. The annual Federal Budget may be a highly anticipated doorstopper every year, but it's surprisingly short on tropes. If you can't actually think of five tropes for your work (looking at you, Porn Without Plot), maybe you should reconsider posting it.

Examples of a trope being averted are often unremarkable. The opposite is true of Omnipresent Tropes that are played straight.

And finally, tropes for which Real Life examples have been problematic can have Real Life examples only in the context of how a particular work portrays a person or event. This is perhaps the closest parallel to Wikipedia's idea of notability that All The Tropes has.