Políticas de Abertura na wiki TV Tropes : práticas e negociações entre fãs e plataformas

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to analyze, from the negotiations and disputes in moments of controversy, how the politics of openness from the TV Tropes wiki are constituted. Created in 2004, TV Tropes is a multifandom platform in which thousands of collaborators gather with the objective of identifying and cataloging tropes, a term that in the wiki refers to as “a device or convention” (TV TROPES, 2004, s/p) present in any type of narrative. Governed by rules and policies agreed upon by the members of its community, TV Tropes is investigated in this work with an emphasis on its moments of instability. From a theoretical point of view, we start from a broader discussion on openness (KELTY, 2008; TKACZ, 2015) and narrate stories that help us to locate and understand the transformations that this concept went through. We built a intersection between Fan Studies (JENKINS, 1992; HILLS, 2002; BENNETT, 2014) and Platform Studies (GILLESPIE, 2010; VAN DIJCK, 2013; D’ANDRÉA, 2020) and based on José van Dijck's (2013) proposal to dismantle these online ambiences we explored some problems that usually emerge in relations between fandoms and platforms. With the support of Cartography of Controversies (VENTURINI, 2010; VENTURINI; MUNK, 2022) and Digital Methods (ROGERS, 2019), we developed a methodological approach in order to understand quanti and quali the negotiation dynamics of TV Tropes. More specifically, we used a python script to collect discussions held in a forum in the “Content Violations” category. Known as the P5 Forum, it was conceived as a space for a five-person board to review pages that were reported as possible violations of the wiki's Content Policy. In our analysis, with the support of the Voyant Tools software, we resumed controversies that occurred in the year of creation of the P5 Forum (2012) and we observed how this forum ended up becoming a space of dispute in which different actor-networks negotiated broader questions about the project politics of openness, such as its commercial relationship with infrastructural platforms (specifically with Google AdSense), the limits of categories such as “pornography” and “explicit content”, the policing of inter and intra-fan borders (BUSSE, 2013) and the idea of objectionable content. From this, we propose to discuss how the notion of openness tensions the policies of TV Tropes, it occurred as a type of frame that seems to involve the ideas of collaboration, participation and inclusion associated with the proposal of a multifandom wiki.