Building A Better Wiki Part 1: TV Tropes

Wikipedia and wikis in general are a topic for this week, and while Wikipedia is the gold standard of the social media, it has several drawbacks. Apart from the editing and reliability issues, Wikipedia is also insistent on maintaining a dry, purely informative tone. There are a couple of very successful wikis on the net that are able to more engagingly present information through humor or at least a relaxed atmosphere.

TV Tropes is one of the fastest-growing and most commonly-cited wikis. It catalogs tropes--repeating themes and concepts across media--and applies tropes to everything from movies to role-playing video games to real life. I've contributed a lot to TV Tropes over the years; one page that I started is called "Gender Equals Breed", in which the children of couples tend to be identical to one of their parents.

One of TV Tropes' best features is something called "You Know, That Thing Where...", a crowdsourcing process which is required to be used before starting a new trope page. Once the initial trope idea is proposed, other commenters provide examples or point out that it might be too close or identical to a current trope. My initial examples when starting the "Gender Equals Breed" page were from "Little Shop of Horrors" and more strongly "The Muppet Christmas Carol", wherein all the male children of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy were frogs and all the female children were pigs.

This quickly snowballed as more users added examples, like the King's family from Burger King commercials and the puppies at the end of "Lady and the Tramp" despite that not making any genetic sense. By their nature, tropes are patterns, so new examples are added frequently and links are made to similar concepts, expanding and interlinking different parts of the wiki. It's a well-known saying on the Internet that "TV Tropes will ruin your life" because once you start reading an article, you'll end up going from page to page for hours.