User blog comment:Felicitations/Structure proposal/@comment-24775284-20140404202229/@comment-24775284-20140404230612

I understand what you are saying and partially even agree with you. TVTropes’ collection is huge, and while that’s what makes it  useful, it would also be a mess if you included every applicable trope as a category, when some stories have lists like this.

On the other hand, however, this wiki is intended as a cataloguing device, and tropes can be very useful in that. I concede that incorporating them into the story template is not the best solution, but maybe there can be some other way to make use of them? For instance—dedicate a subsection on story pages for listing all the relevant tropes as it is currently done on TVTropes?

>We already have the themed lists in place, so I feel like adding tropes to the template would be redundant and confusing -- where do you draw the line between a trope and a theme, you know?

Well, the themes could be to tropes what this wiki is in comparison to TVTropes—a more flexible collection of categorization tools. In other words, if a relevant trope exists—we could use that, and if it does not, we could create themes.

And it’s not even necessary to complicate things now by trying to import everything at once. It’s just that, as you said, Wikis have a tendency to become increasingly confusing if their organic growth is not controlled in some manner, and tropes can serve as such a control mechanism.

This is only a suggestion, of course—I just saw the “Theme: Harry in an Alternate Universe” article and decided to suggest an improvement. My concern was that when users started creating their themes, there would arise both misunderstandings about the created tropes and conflicts between them. TVtropes has already went through all that, and usually it’s rather easy to “get” for a particular trope what it encapsulates, what it does not, and what alternatives there are for it.