On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sun, 8 Feb 2009, xaosflux wrote:
While YOU may use the article as a movie review to see if you want to watch the movie, other readers may use them for many other purposes.
This statement is trivially true no matter what phrase you substitute in. *Any* purpose for using an article is one that only a minority of readers will have. If it's wrong to put something in because only a minority of readers will use or need it, then we shouldn't even have articles.
Besides, the reader who wishes to use the article for other purposes just has to ignore the spoiler warning. It's not like it prevents other readers from using the article the way they want.
Would you read any of our other articles just to see if you want to read their references?
This is about an article which has a work as a *subject*, and only secondarily if at all as a reference. I wouldn't read our article about potatoes to decide if I want to read a particular book about potatoes, but that's because the book really is just a reference; the subject of the article is potatoes, not potato books.
Though we do have articles on research areas and the books in them. More usually categories, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shakespearean_scholarship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_Politics_(book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Shakespeare_criticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Books_by_topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:History_books
Some are very specific:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Books_about_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hir... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Holocaust_books
I couldn't rule out looking to see if a book had an article on Wikipedia before buying it, or more likely, reading about the author. But I would, admittedly, be more likely to read a review somewhere, though I *might* come to Wikipedia to find a review through the article.
Carcharoth