On 13 May 2014 21:08, Wil Sinclair wllm@wllm.com wrote:
I've never heard "Principle of Least Astonishment" used this way. I've only heard it used in the context of software design- specifically user experience- and never to describe content. WP seems to agree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment Certain terms seem to have special significance in the WP community; is this one of those cases?
FWIW, I'm not taken aback by words like "fuck," but in my experience it always undermines serious arguments that it is used in.
This is grand historic debate :-)
POLA got thrown around a lot in the c. 2011 debates about whether WP should support/enable/allow/contemplate some kind of image filtering - it was used in the Board resolution which more or less kicked the whole thing off.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content
The sense here seems to be that you might expect nudity on a medical or sexuality-related page, but you wouldn't expect random nudity in an article about a bridge.* But then, what level of nudity? Click-to-view? How graphic? etc. It's a good principle but relies on individual editorial common sense, which of course is very difficult to scale and very vulnerable to deliberate disruption.
We had a few months of yelling, lots of grumbling and accusations of bad faith, and the whole thing eventually ground to a halt in late 2011 with very little actually done. The resolution is still out there, though...
Andrew.
* today's surprising fact: a particularly odd contributor tried to argue for this, at great length, in ~2005. I forget which article on enwiki it was.