TV Tropes

TV Tropes is a wiki that collects and documents descriptions and examples of plot conventions and devices, which it refers to as tropes, within many creative works. Since its establishment in 2004, the site has shifted focus from covering various tropes to those in general media, toys, writings, and their associated fandoms, as well as some non-media subjects such as history, geography, and politics. The nature of the site as a provider of commentary on pop culture and fiction has attracted attention and criticism from several web personalities and blogs. Users of the site's community are called "Tropers", which primarily consist of 18-34 year olds. From April 2008 until July 2012, TV Tropes published free content. After that, the site modified its license to allow only non-commercial distribution of its content but continued to host the prior submissions under a new distribution license. The TV Tropes website runs on its own wiki engine software, an extremely modified version of PmWiki to the point where the PmWiki website lists that it "no longer uses PmWiki in any way; the only trace that remains is in the URL" and that "no code is in use" but is not open source. Before October 2010, it was possible to edit anonymously; however, registration is now mandatory for all other activities besides viewing the website. It has two subwikis meant to categorize the more informal tropes and is held to less rigorous standards. Darth Wiki, named after Darth Vader from Star Wars as a play on "the dark side" of TV Tropes, is a resource for more criticism-based trope examples or common ways the wiki is inappropriately edited, and Sugar Wiki is about praise-based tropes, such as funny or heartwarming moments, and is meant to be "the sweet side" of TV Tropes.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "TV Tropes", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.