2008/12/17 Phil Sandifer <[email protected]>: > > 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. > 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.
Depends if you are considering a general encyclopedia or a specialist encyclopedia. > 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." Strawman. > 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. Blanket denial without at least a line of reasoning behind it is not a helpful approach to debate. -- geni _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
