Tropedia is a zombie wiki. It is a clone of TVTropes as per 2014 which has seen little updates since then. It has all of the drawbacks that TVTropes has, little visual appeal, very little name recognition, and is poorly structurally adapted to the switch to Mediawiki.
I just did a quick page check of the wiki, checking the history of 40 random pages (chosen using Explore -> Random page; if I hit a subpage I checked the parent page if it existed). Of these 40 pages, only three had double-digit edits since 2014. In comparison, twelve pages had not received a single edit since the page was created, and a further eight had only had bot edits since the page was created. Only five pages had been created after 2014, and none of them had double-digit edits.
Being different from TVTropes should be about much more than not having FastEddie in charge, using a different license, and perhaps being a little more liberal regarding smut. Here are some ways that I think Tropedia can differentiate itself from TVTropes:
- Be genre- and media-agnostic in how it approaches troping
- TVTropes tends to be tv- och movie-first when it approaches stuff, leading to blind spots and far too often tropes that are needlessly narrow.
- Focus on good definitions
- The common trope description on TVTropes tends to be wordy, contradicts itself at times, makes sweeping generalisations, and uses a somewhat contrived and hard to follow example as the definition of the trope. The result is that the definition of many tropes tends to be both vague and overly strict at the same time.
- High-quality troping
- Identify and favour meaningful tropes rather than simpler patterns. Test if the inverse of a trope also is a trope. Have meaningful trope names. Try to avoid subjective tropes.
- Uphold and maintain standards
- TVTropes has identified some good principles, like Clear-Concise-Witty for trope names. Too often it fails to apply those principles.
- Outsource work pages
- Tropedia is uniquely placed in that it is hosted by a very large multi-fandom wiki farm. Having the works pages hosted at the wikis dedicated to the work in question is something I think should be explored and tested. It is also something that I think fandom.com would be interested in supporting, since I cannot think of a greater potential driver of trans-wiki traffice. It also can provide a pool of potential contributors.
None of this will be easy. It will require lots and lots of work. Do I think it's possible to bring this wiki back to any form of life, or at least relevance? Yes, though the chances of that are very poor. But using the current state and direction of the wiki, I'd say there is no chance at all.