[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia committee member"

[William Beutler]

Now that you mention it, I've avoided the article in the exact same way.
Without the spoiler talk, I probably would have visited already. Although
it's something like an irritable mental gesture... it's not like I have any
plans to see the play anytime in the foreseeable future, and I haven't read
any Agatha Christie since I was a teenager.

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> 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
>
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