On 5/21/07, Chris Howie cdhowie@nerdshack.com wrote:
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.
Well, what's wrong with that? Such metainformation is the whole point of having the semantic web - marking information as such-and-such is a service to our readers. The important thing is to avoid hiding information by default, or structuring our articles so as to make it easier to hide such information. If our article looks crappy because someone set their browser or user preferences to hide all sentences tagged as spoilers, it's not our problem.
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.
Exactly. But what is wrong with metainformation?
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.
Absolutely. That's why I said *don't* hide this information by default. I've made a similar argument before when it comes to nudity and other controversial images.
* [[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...)
This is what I said, and this is why I lean against having spoiler tags in the first place. (At the same time, I don't want them eradicated because they have a purpose in particular situations.) But when there is a source - as I vehemently argued in the RfC - that has to be taken into account when deciding whether we mark something as a spoiler.
Johnleemk