John Lee wrote:
On 5/21/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I like a related idea someone else brought up but was dismissed, though - find a way to mark information as spoilers, and display this information unless the user sets his preferences otherwise. (Or, alternatively, we could make the default of your proposal to display spoiler tags, and to hide them only if a user edits her settings accordingly.)
There is a reason this was dismissed. Once you do it for this kind of thing, then we might as well do it for images with nudity since "we already have the system." Let's also put some tag around all profanity, because some people might not appreciate that.
Wikipedia is a place to get information. It's not a babysitting service, and it's not our job to decide what might offend or upset our readers and what might not.
I can think of a few policies that could be read to both reject this user-preferences notion and having the tags altogether.
* [[WP:NOT]] censored. We don't remove information from articles because people don't like it, and this includes removing information by default despite some setting that could be used to show it.
* [[WP:NOR]]. Whether something is or isn't a spoiler is purely original research. Sure it's a clerical tag. But who decides what is a spoiler and what isn't? There's no source we can really point to on that topic. (Yes, I know, common sense and all...)
And as a side note, we don't have a disclaimer on all of the medical articles stating that information might be inaccurate. From a reader's perspective I would much rather be warned about possible medical inaccuracies than be warned about spoilers. Our medical disclaimer is less prominent than spoiler disclaimers. What does that say?
If we're going for self-censorship of the project, at least let's do it right. Disclaimers on medical articles and hidden-by-default nudity.
Or we could not censor the project at all. You know, like policy says.