On 4/15/05, Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com> wrote:
Chad Perrin said:
1. Tony Sidaway supports the idea that Wikipedia should be
technically effective, and to heck with social factors that
interfere with that in any way.
More or less correct in this case, but only because the problem is not
a technical one but a social one and my social solution is geared
towards minimizing technical kludges. Only the end-user can possibly
know what he does and does not want to see. If he visits an
encyclopedia article about a PG13 movie he should expect it to contain
PG13 illustrations, and if he is likely to have a problem with images
from the movies he may want to read about he should certainly take
appropriate precautions.
I wasn't aware that social enginearing was the aim of this project.
Nor I. There are social considerations implicit in the design of a
website, but ultimately one should seek to leave all decisions with the
user. Commercial websites seldom adopt this stance, but it's an essential
element of good design.