With all the arguing (and of course this is hardly the first time it has come up), it seems the main arguments still boil down to:
Some people really like spoiler-warning tags, and think they're a nice service.
Some people really hate spoiler-warning tags, and think they're unencyclopedic.
Personally, I suspect that the vast majority don't much care one way or the other. (Me, I'm not a fanatic about not getting spoiled, but I don't even notice the templates, excessive though some claim they are -- they just slide on by, beneath the radar, as I'm reading.)
The last time this came up, I thought we'd tentatively decided to try rigging up a way so spoiler warnings could be dismissed by people who don't want to see them (much like the WMF announcement du jour in the page header). That seems like a pretty ideal compromise. Did that idea fall by the wayside, or what?
On 5/21/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
With all the arguing (and of course this is hardly the first time it has come up), it seems the main arguments still boil down to:
Some people really like spoiler-warning tags, and think they're a nice service. Some people really hate spoiler-warning tags, and think they're unencyclopedic.Personally, I suspect that the vast majority don't much care one way or the other. (Me, I'm not a fanatic about not getting spoiled, but I don't even notice the templates, excessive though some claim they are -- they just slide on by, beneath the radar, as I'm reading.)
The last time this came up, I thought we'd tentatively decided to try rigging up a way so spoiler warnings could be dismissed by people who don't want to see them (much like the WMF announcement du jour in the page header). That seems like a pretty ideal compromise. Did that idea fall by the wayside, or what?
The problem is:
1. How do we define a spoiler without any point of reference for what constitutes a sufficient surprise to warrant a warning? 2. What do we do when people start structuring articles around spoilers, even when the normal course of writing an encyclopaedia would structure the information differently?
These objections cannot easily be resolved by this proposal; personally, I couldn't care less about spoiler tags, if not for these two issues.
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.)
Johnleemk
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.
Chris Howie wrote:
John Lee 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.)
That's exactly what I was talking about. The thing to be hidden is the spoiler warning tag, not the spoiler information itself. (And, yes, the default would be to display the spoiler warning tag.)
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."
See below.
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.
Sure it is. There's no hard line between "babysitting service" and normal human politeness. Some people -- even some of the people who edit here -- use the word "fuckin" in speech as often as others use "um" and "y'know". So if it's not our job to decide what might offend or upset our readers and what might not, there's no reason we shouldn't use "fuckin" and "um" and "y'know" liberally in our articles.
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 yet you're arguing for removing spoiler warnings because some people don't like them.
and this includes removing information by default despite some setting that could be used to show it.
Nobody's talking about having the default flipped that way.
- [[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...)
Exactly. Common sense and all.
NOR and RS are very nice tools for getting rid of stuff we don't like, but they don't apply to *everything*. As Ken Arromdee was just pointing out in another thread, "Original research has nothing to do with meta decisions about article content."
And as a side note, we don't have a disclaimer on all of the medical articles stating that information might be inaccurate.
Well, if you want to sling precedents, WP:WAX.
On Sun, 20 May 2007, Steve Summit wrote:
NOR and RS are very nice tools for getting rid of stuff we don't like, but they don't apply to *everything*. As Ken Arromdee was just pointing out in another thread, "Original research has nothing to do with meta decisions about article content."
Hey, I get quoted by having my name taken in vain.
But seriously, something else along these lines just occurred to me:
Anyone who *really* believes that spoiler warnings are original research can't accept them at all. There's no point trying to compromise. There's certainly no point in saying "you can have your spoiler warnings if it's less than two months". If spoiler warnings are original research, we can't have them even at the two months level, since allowing just a little bit of original research isn't an option.
Yet so far I've seen nobody say "spoiler warnings are original research, so we must not have them at any level, and that is utterly nonnegotiable. Original research is completely prohibited."
This makes me wonder how sincere the original research objection really is. It seems like the anti-spoiler people are just throwing a lot of objections against the wall in the hope that at least one sticks and escapes people's notice because there are so many of them to argue against at the same time. That's almost happened in several cases already; as far as I know I was the only person who bothered to argue against "spoilers don't go in a plot section since it's obvious that those contain spoilers".
Steve Summit wrote:
Chris Howie wrote:
John Lee 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.)
That's exactly what I was talking about. The thing to be hidden is the spoiler warning tag, not the spoiler information itself. (And, yes, the default would be to display the spoiler warning tag.)
The text that I was replying to (see above) would permit hiding of the actual information. Not by default, but still.
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.
Sure it is. There's no hard line between "babysitting service" and normal human politeness. Some people -- even some of the people who edit here -- use the word "fuckin" in speech as often as others use "um" and "y'know". So if it's not our job to decide what might offend or upset our readers and what might not, there's no reason we shouldn't use "fuckin" and "um" and "y'know" liberally in our articles.
Well that's somewhat of a stretch. Hiding of information (as in the message I replied to, not your proposal) seems quite different to me than simply not using gratuitous profanity.
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 yet you're arguing for removing spoiler warnings because some people don't like them.
Information, not meta-information that can be used by people to censor the content themselves. Sure they could make a copy of the document and edit it out themselves but we'd basically be making it easy for people to censor a certain type of information in their own browser. Of course we still provide the information, so the project isn't being censored exactly, but it's pretty close in my mind. Censoring content and providing a simple avenue for people to do so for themselves is not that different, and it borders on editorializing.
and this includes removing information by default despite some setting that could be used to show it.
Nobody's talking about having the default flipped that way.
Fair enough, but even having it available seems wrong to me, as per the last paragraph.
- [[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...)
Exactly. Common sense and all.
NOR and RS are very nice tools for getting rid of stuff we don't like, but they don't apply to *everything*. As Ken Arromdee was just pointing out in another thread, "Original research has nothing to do with meta decisions about article content."
When the meta-information being added has the strong potential of appearing to be an editorial, that seems to me to fall into the bounds of original research. Who's to say what might be a spoiler... I mean some things not in spoiler tags might upset some readers, but other tags readers might think are stupid to even be in the article.
I guess what I'm saying is that even having spoiler tags around is going to create many edit wars, especially with people removing them right now (which I'm not exactly against, but I've been holding back on doing so myself for now). I'm wondering how much of this drama it will take before enough people concede that these tags aren't worth the fuss.
And as a side note, we don't have a disclaimer on all of the medical articles stating that information might be inaccurate.
Well, if you want to sling precedents, WP:WAX.
I thought these policies didn't apply to meta-discussions. :P
But seriously, I'm just asking where our priorities are. Averting people's eyes from the juicy plot twist or not having people drinking the stuff under the kitchen sink because some vandal at [[Flu treatment]] said it would cure it.
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
On 5/20/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
With all the arguing (and of course this is hardly the first time it has come up), it seems the main arguments still boil down to:
Some people really like spoiler-warning tags, and think they're a nice service. Some people really hate spoiler-warning tags, and think they're unencyclopedic.Personally, I suspect that the vast majority don't much care one way or the other. (Me, I'm not a fanatic about not getting spoiled, but I don't even notice the templates, excessive though some claim they are -- they just slide on by, beneath the radar, as I'm reading.)
The last time this came up, I thought we'd tentatively decided to try rigging up a way so spoiler warnings could be dismissed by people who don't want to see them (much like the WMF announcement du jour in the page header). That seems like a pretty ideal compromise. Did that idea fall by the wayside, or what?
As far as I understand, it's a simple matter of putting one line in your user CSS file. What that line is, I don't know, but I'm sure someone else does. ~~~~
On Sun, 20 May 2007, Steve Summit wrote:
The last time this came up, I thought we'd tentatively decided to try rigging up a way so spoiler warnings could be dismissed by people who don't want to see them (much like the WMF announcement du jour in the page header). That seems like a pretty ideal compromise. Did that idea fall by the wayside, or what?
This does seem like a good compromose, and someone in the discussion said that it already exists. If not, we could add it.