2008/12/17 Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
On Dec 17, 2008, at 2:09 PM, geni wrote:
It's very pragmatic. People in general seem to want plot summaries
Pandering to popular opinion is a dodgy proposition. We regularly ignore what people in general seem to want on fiction articles. This is largely our invention - Britannica has relatively few plot summaries. Now, mind you, I agree we should include them, but we should recognize that they are not the traditional focus of encyclopedic coverage of fiction.
Depends if you are considering a general encyclopedia or a specialist encyclopedia.
Sure. The issue is, there are other things that are as obvious and easy to do as plot summaries, that are vital parts of the traditional conception of how to encyclopedically describe literature, that we do not allow, and in fact explicitly forbid for reasons that are not the pragmatic "the customer demands it" argument you present, but rather because they are "interpretation" and not "description."
Strawman.
I'd prefer a pragmatic approach comparable to what we do to solve the "we don't want citations for obvious statements" problem on WP:V - a hedge like "material challenged or likely to be challenged." That's a pragmatic approach.
What we have now is not.
Blanket denial without at least a line of reasoning behind it is not a helpful approach to debate.