2008/12/17 Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
On Dec 17, 2008, at 1:48 PM, geni wrote:
And this is one of the reasons why wikipedia policy is what it is. This fight has been done by others and they have done it better ( eg http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html ). Wikipedia policy is a pragmatic approach to the situation.
Usually, yes. The passage in question, however, is not pragmatic in the least.
-Phil
It's very pragmatic. People in general seem to want plot summaries. It can also be rather hard to talk about a book/film/legend without one. They also appear to be expected of encyclopedia articles. So pragmatically we need to produce something the majority of people will accept as plot summaries. Unfortunately for less prominent works there tends to be a lack of secondary sources for such summaries to be based on. There is a further lack of accessible sources but that is a fairly universal problem. However experience shows us that wikipedians are for the most part able to write things that both the majority of wikipedians and our general readership are prepared to accept as reasonable summaries of the plots of the work in question. This being the case it is perfectly acceptable to allow them to continue doing so.