QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 20th September 2010, 10:00am)
Ultimately, the reason they're so intransigent in defense of the new policy against spoiler warnings has nothing whatsoever to do with "NPOV"; they're simply dead-set against acknowledging the legitimate interests of their users, interests which might impose some independent constraints on how they do their work.
Legitimate interests of their
readers, is what I suspect you meant to say there...
We should note that Mr. Cyclopia is clearly somewhat of an extremist on issues like this (i.e., he thinks of "inclusionism" as a legitimate content-management philosophy rather than a red herring meant to legitimize the "information must be free" quasi-libertarian approach to website building). His point seems to be that you'd expect to find spoiler warnings, rollups, and non-inclusion on a review site or maybe even a news site, but not an encyclopedia, where you (in his opinion)
expect to see everything, untrammeled.
It strikes me that this sort of attitude may be a result of having people like me constantly saying things like "it's not a real encyclopedia, it's just an encyclopedia-like website," or worse (it's a "big lake of shit," for example). So their reaction is
we must be as much like a real encyclopedia as possible, even to the point of not improving
on a real encyclopedia's way of doing things.In other words, this issue could be just as easily be interpreted the other way: Spoiler rollups would be an improvement over the way something like this would be handled in a paper encyclopedia, but if implemented, Wikipedia would be less like a paper encyclopedia,
therefore it must not be implemented. The same holds true for popouts, popups, colored text, and extra tags for content-filtering in general.
And yet, time and time again, we see how "controversial" sections of articles are "off-loaded" to subpages. This is almost exactly the same thing, and yet there's no problem with doing that, in most cases.
Just as a personal disclaimer, one of the reasons I'm interested in this issue is because of something that happened on Uncyclopedia in 2006. There was (and still is) and article called "Euroipods" that one of the administrators thought was such a ridiculously obvious and stupid spam attempt that it was funny purely on that basis, and he decided it should be featured on the main page - which caused a huge fuss, because at least half of the users didn't have that reaction and thought it should be deleted, not featured. As a side-effect, the fuss caused the article to be
lengthened to an absurd extent, causing it to lose even its original dubious humor value (i.e., one of the reasons it was funny was because it was so short). It also began to be used by certain admins as a means of getting revenge on users they disliked, by including their user names in the article against their wishes.
I saw fairly quickly that since the admins weren't going to relent without a way to save face, a rollup was the common-sense compromise solution to practically the whole situation. So, I lobbied to have the rollup extension installed, and once it was working, I made almost all but the original article a rollup - and it turned out that I was right. The fuss died down, pretty much everyone backed off, and the rollup is still there, to this day, four years later.
Anyhoo, I guess all I'm saying is that people invent things like rollups for a reason - and Wikipedia should
embrace things like rollups, not reject them for being "non-encyclopedic." And FWIW, I can essentially guarantee that the reasons people say WP isn't a real encyclopedia have nothing to do with the presence (or lack) of rollups.
QUOTE(A Horse With No Name @ Mon 20th September 2010, 10:35am)
Indeed, he gets the top-line blurb link for that one. Congrats, Doc! (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 20th September 2010, 11:11am)
...Wikipedians, who (like this alleged Cambridge man) fancy themselves committed to the unvarnished truth, are above such piddling conventions. They prove their superiority by flouting the convention, just like any adolescent nonconformist.
Another good way of putting it. It's an example of mass narcissism in action, really -
those rules and conventions don't apply to us, we're an encyclopedia is basically the same "not our fault" mode of thinking as, "it's the parent's responsibilty to filter inappropriate content" or "if the person doesn't want his personal details to be anonymously edited by anyone whatsoever, he/she shouldn't have become 'notable' in the first place."
Wikipedia ruins "The Mousetrap" by giving away the ending...., ...and gets a mention on French Radio tonight....
