TVTropes Ideation Network: Trope Launch Pad Data and Citation Network (May 2020 - April 2022)

The research context is TVTropes.org, an ideation wiki website where users create and share tropes used in a wide range of creative works such as television, films, literature, and comics. Tropes, which are descriptions and instances of plot conventions and devices, serve as tools that creators use to convey their ideas to the audience in storytelling. They facilitate guiding the audience through the story in a familiar and comprehensible manner. For instance, the trope “Hero’s Journey” is commonly employed as an archetypal story pattern in adventure stories like Star Wars, describing a hero who embarks on an adventure, overcomes a crisis, and returns home transformed.

This website uses a subwiki, the Trope Launch Pad (TLP), for new trope ideas (henceforth referred to as TLP tropes) to be proposed and evaluated by the wiki community. For each TLP trope, there is a working title, synopsis, and a description of the idea usually containing hyperlinks to launched tropes for references. These hyperlinks underscore the existing launched tropes connected to the new TLP trope. They enable users to directly access related tropes, facilitating immediate browsing and deeper engagement with the content of the TLP trope. On the TLP trope page, users can comment in the discussion section, edit the trope content, and cast anonymous positive or negative votes. When positive votes exceed negative votes by at least five, the TLP trope can be launched. TLP tropes without sufficient positive votes will be discarded eventually.

Using a Python scraper, data were collected for TLP tropes proposed between 14th May 2020 and 1st April 2022, including their daily votes, edits, and comments. Employing snowball sampling, the launched tropes cited by TLPs and their cited tropes were recursively collected to construct the TLP citation network. This resulted in a total of 2,541 TLP tropes and 32,614 launched tropes. Among the sample of 2,541 TLP tropes, 1,466 were launched, 720 were discarded, and 355 remained proposed at the end of the observation period.