Wikipedia


"At three in the morning I looked at my clock and thought, 'Good god! What on earth have I been doing for four hours?!' I looked at my screen. 'Plot summaries of Power Rangers episodes.' Damn."
Anonymous Wikipedia addict

The Other Wiki. The wiki that most people are familiar with. The one that isn't us.

Wikipedia is the most famous wiki out there, and is mostly responsible for inspiring the creation of other wikis (although it was not the first). It presents its information as an encyclopaedia and focuses mainly on real-life information.

Given Wikipedia's role as a central information source, you can probably gain more info on the "what" of (for example) Star Trek from it than you can from actually watching the show, and that's nice. Here?

Here, you can get a glimmering of why the show is like that.

Here at All The Tropes, we only care about how things apply to fiction. Don't just tell us the facts; tell us the memes, tell us the archetypes, tell us the catchy ideas and symbolic roles that get planted in people's heads. Got the kernel of an idea bouncing about your head? Throw it down here and see what grows. If we're lucky, our Neologism for it will catch on. (And quite a few have already.)

Wikipedia has an entry on itself and its history, for further reading.

Wikipedia also has an entry about the original TV Tropes wiki, but not one on All The Tropes. Yet. It also lists ATT in its directory of alternatives, encouraging people to record their trope knowledge here instead of (or as well as) there. See the We Are Not Alone Index for tropes that have Wikipedia articles.


Tropes used in Wikipedia include:
Unfortunately, besides the serial deleters, there's also a phenomenon of 'page hoarders' who will sit on a certain page and revert and delete any changes made to it, and will spend all day arguing about it until the admins give in to them. Forget Wiki Vandals, these guys are Wikipedia's biggest problem. Counter-Vandalism Unit, seriously, just... take a look at what they made up.
They have a phrase for this: Systemic bias. It's not a problem limited only to English Wikipedia articles on North America, Great Britain, and Australia. Any sufficiently developed country with widespread use of English will have a significantly larger group of contributors than its non-English speaking neighbors. Hong Kong, Singapore and India being notable examples
  • Weasel Words: They hate it when it shows up.
  • Wiki Magic: Sometimes played straight, sometimes inverted with an editor's pet page. Inversions of this have rapidly become a common criticism as Wikipedia's tendency to focus on cutting as much content as possible, instead of adding new content, has increased.
  • Wiki Vandal: Overt vandalization is reverted rapidly - but subtle vandalization has been known to last months on less-travelled pages. One of the common complaints about accuracy aimed at Wikipedia. Some really outrageous claims in articles are often supported by nothing but the "citation" tag.[citation needed]
  • Wiki Walk: See Archive Binge above.
  • Wikipedia Syntaxer: The original and trope namer.
  • Wikipedia Updater
  • Xenofiction: Well, except the "fiction" bit. The Human article reads as though it was written by alien scientists observing us. It even lists the conservation status according to the IUCN red list: "least concern".
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