[WikiEN-l] Workable spoiler solution?

[Steve Summit]

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.