On 16/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
I guess I lied slightly when I said my last message was going to be my last on the topic. The point I was trying to make was the in general notions of what are appropriate to a traditional encyclopedia don't in general sit well with Wikipedia. (A traditional encyclopedia isn't editable by random people and doesn't have a history of every edit and an associated talk page etc.). And given that one thing we certainly do have is more detail about plots and such than a traditional encyclopedia. And as I see it at least, if we are going to have more content than a traditional encyclopedia all the more so we shouldn't be bound by the standard stylistic conventions and in fact we are not.
True.
For example, what standard encyclopedia has banner warnings about neutrality or {{fact}} tags.
Not a good example IMO - those are symptomatic of the fact that en.wikipedia.org is at any moment a live working draft, rather than a finished product. (Note that the Veropedia process is for an editor to go to Wikipedia and resolve all such concerns in the original Wikipedia version, i.e. fixing it, so that it's ready for their use.) Spoiler warnings aren't the same sort of thing.
We should care about what will work best and what will help the project the most, not what EB or anyone else would do in this situation. We're beating EB by being Wikipedia. There's no need to handicap ourselves by slavishly imitating our predecessors.
We do, however, aspire to be a reference work. Britannica doesn't have spoiler warnings because it's a reference work (species encyclopedia). Cliff's Notes doesn't have spoiler warnings because it's a reference work. I think that's more what I mean by saying spoiler warnings are unsuitable to an encyclopedia.
- d.