Use the TV Tropes Site in the Same Way As Wikipedia
Wikipedia is good for telling cold, hard facts about things, but it often reads like a computer wrote it. Capturing the “atmosphere” of an object can be difficult. Try TV Tropes instead. While this specialized wiki focuses primarily on entertainment such as movies, TV shows, and video games, it also collects “helpful notes” about real people, places, and phenomena.
For example, here’s a line from the Wikipedia page about the Byzantine Empire :
Its citizens continued to call their empire the Roman Empire.
And here is the TV Tropes version :
For the people living there, it was the Roman Empire.
If you appreciate the subtle difference between Wikipedia’s aloof wording and the TV Tropes perspective, you will find it helpful to read the helpful notes.
The Useful Notes pages also include lists of tropes that the topic illustrates or inspires. Basically these are storytelling concepts that apply to real life. For example, the Byzantine Empire is the prototype of the “rudimentary empire” trail of dying kingdoms. (According to TV Tropes, this is a bit unfair to the Byzantines, who survived the Western Roman Empire by a thousand years.)
TV Tropes are less organized than Wikipedia, so information about the topic will be scattered across several pages. Let’s say you want to learn about evangelical Christianity; google “evangelical TV trails” and you will find TV pages about Christianity , American churches (including mega-churches), and “acceptable religious purposes.” This last page will help you understand that different Christian denominations tend to think about each other. Here’s a line you’ll never find on Wikipedia:
Sometimes in countries with a Catholic majority, such as Latin America, there is a perception that all Protestant denominations, especially in the United States, are made up of slightly backward people who are usually very dramatic and willing to give all their money to TV evangelists. in exchange for salvation.
Most major cities have a useful notes page that I go through weekly when I write the weekly Lifehacker Hack Your City column. (I even took a few direct quotes this week.) There are also pages with historical figures, national militaries, sports leagues, and just about every famous artist. (Artists, writers, and entertainers are particularly well covered since TV Tropes is essentially a media and storytelling site.)
Other interesting pages with helpful notes also cover phenomena that you might not even have guessed about. Here are some great ones:
- Cultural disadvantage : what every country hates about itself
- IQ Testing : Debunking IQ Test Myths
- Constellation : Guided Tour of the Night Sky
- Snow Means Cold : Explains why snow is less likely to fall in very cold weather.
- Political ideologies : the collapse of liberalism, nationalism, socialism, fascism, etc.
- Trigger : An explanation of how mental triggers work, which corrects some of the misconceptions about trigger warnings.
Remember this is a random entertainment site, not an encyclopedia, so don’t trust it as a reputable source. Unlike Wikipedia, TV Tropes does not require citations or references to sources. But use it when Wikipedia seems incomprehensible, when you need opinions more than facts, or when you’ve finished a Wikipedia page and now you need juicy pieces, hard-to-confirm snippets that Wikipedia doesn’t share.
Useful Notes | TV Trails