[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia committee member"

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 6:34 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair at gmail.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>
>> Surely if the ending is still described in the article (as I was
>> careful to say), NPOV wouldn't be affected? All I'm saying is that if
>> there was a specific OTRS request that could be verified to be from
>> the relevant people, then it could be acted on. Requests from
>> Wikipedia editors and readers to add spoiler notices wouldn't count.
>> It would have to be a specific request from the "subject" of the
>> spoiler.
>
> You've noted that "requests from Wikipedia editors and readers to add
> spoiler notices wouldn't count," and this only accentuates the
> problem.  How would providing special treatment to a representative of
> an article's subject constitute a neutral approach?
>
> You referred to this as a "BLP-like exception," but I see nothing
> analogous.  We address legitimate complaints by ensuring that
> biographies of living persons comply with our normal content
> standards.  We don't honor requests to include special text (such as a
> warning that the article includes material that its subject dislikes).

Actually, I'd like to read the article about the play without finding
out the ending. Is that an unreasonable thing to ask? (And yes, I know
this is a completely different argument to the one I used before).
With other things, I just read the articles anyway, and don't care
about knowing the ending in advance (or I avoid them, as I did when
the last Harry Potter book came out). But for some reason, here I find
myself (as a reader of Wikipedia) wanting to be able to read the other
parts of the article and would likely have read the article after
reading the newspaper story if I hadn't found out in advance (from the
newspaper story) that the article contained a spoiler. Put it this
way: my finding out that this article contains a spoiler means I have
avoided reading it - how many other people have avoided reading it for
the same reasons? If that is a feature and not a bug, fair enough, but
I find it strange that what articles I read on Wikipedia is being
decided by what a newspaper article has to say about them.

Carcharoth