[WikiEN-l] Workable spoiler solution?

[John Lee]

On 5/21/07, Chris Howie <cdhowie at nerdshack.com> wrote:
>
> John Lee wrote:
> > On 5/21/07, Steve Summit <scs at 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