[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia committee member"

[Brock Weller]

I can't believe this idea is being seriously presented. We are an
Encyclopedia. That is one of the Five Pillars ([[WP:5P]]). The job of a
comprehensive encyclopedia is to facilitate access to information in an
efficient manner. Putting extra barriers in front of that means you aren't
looking at it as a comprehensive encyclopedia, which we are, but as TV Guide
(or Playbill, in this case) which we are decidedly not. You want a teaser?
You want a hook? Go read a preview. You want to read an encyclopedic article
about the subject/play/episode/whatever? Congratulations, you've come to the
right place.

We aren't here to protect you from the big bad world, we're here to present
information. If that information is made harder to get, then someone clearly
made a mistake.

-Brock


On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 8:58 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> That is very helpful. I wonder if there is room to suggest this in
> some guideline somewhere on how editors should set up the titles of
> sections in articles to aid not just readers reading through the
> article from beginning to end, but to aid readers looking at the
> contents and selecting (or omitting) bits they don't want to read. You
> could even (though this is a bit silly) provide the option for people
> to "hide" sections and then read the whole page and not have to beware
> of scrolling down too far. It wouldn't be a default option, I don't
> think, but people could have some optional overlay that would give
> them the option to select (or omit) bits of the article to create a
> customised article for them to read.
>
> Carcharoth
>
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Shane Simmons <avicennasis at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Actually, I'd like to read the article about the play without finding
> >> out the ending. Is that an unreasonable thing to ask?
> >
> > Reading the article as it appeared on 26 July 2010, [1] there is an
> > entire section called "Identity of the murderer"... If I did not want
> > to learn the identity of the murderer, I would have skipped over this
> > section.* That's what I did for years before I became an editor. If I
> > suspected a section would contain spoilers, I skipped it. When looking
> > up books I plan to read, I still do this.
> >
> > That's one of the reasons for sections - they can allow readers to
> > quickly find just the info they are looking for. I can look up Harry
> > Potter and the Deathly Hallows [2], and if I didn't want a spoiler but
> > wanted to read about pricing problems, there is a section in the Table
> > of Contents, right at the top, called "Price wars and other
> > controversies". This allows me to bypass the  "Synopsis" section,
> > including the subsections "Plot introduction" and "Plot summary".
> >
> > Perhaps this is not the way everyone reads, but I think context clues
> > can give their own warning to the reader.
> >
> > I'm also not sure if there are any articles out there that have
> > spoilers under a section you might not expect them to be. For example,
> > I wouldn't expect to find a spoiler under the "Release date" section.
> > But I also can't think of a good reason why it would be there anyways,
> > and it should probably be moved to the plot section(s).
> >
> > Just my two cents. :)
> > -User:Avicennasis
> >
> > [1]
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Mousetrap&oldid=375574290#Identity_of_the_murderer
> > [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Deathly_Hallows
> >
> > *A quick glance did not show this information to be listed in any
> > other section, however I did not read the whole article word for word
> > to double-check.
> >
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