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. > It can also be rather hard to talk about a book/film/legend without > one. > They also appear to be expected of encyclopedia 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. > There is a further lack of accessible sources but that is a fairly > universal problem. However experience shows us that wikipedians are > for the most part able to write things that both the majority of > wikipedians and our general readership are prepared to accept as > reasonable summaries of the plots of the work in question. This being > the case it is perfectly acceptable to allow them to continue doing > so. 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." 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. -Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
