On 6/23/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/24/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
The dichotomy of "editors" not being "users" is false. We're a subset of readership. We should not use our judgement to assume what readers want arbitrarily, but using common sense is different. Spoiler
Of course we should. We're here to write an encyclopaedia. For readers. Who will never tell us what they want. We have to make thousands of assumptions in that process. What fonts to use? Unicode or ASCII? Should [[Georgia]] be about the US state or the country? Or neither? Are photos or diagrams better? Should we use thumbnails or larger images?
A bit of intuition, discussion, and yes, common sense, go a long way in answering these quetsions.
We're linguistically haggling over where we define "arbitrary" and "common sense", not a substantiative disagreement, Steve.
If no other internet communications medium used spoiler warnings, and some editor came up with them out of the blue, and started tagging articles with them, that would be arbitrary.
Them being in use "everywhere" and commonly accepted practice, and their use in WP being subject to ongoing positive discussions, makes them common sense. By definition, pretty much - they're already common enough that their use can't be considered arbitrary.
Chosing not to use them is a perfectly valid point of discussion, and could be a valid end choice on a policy basis if an argument and consensus were reached. But using them now is common sense.