On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
On Sun, 8 Feb 2009, xaosflux wrote:
While YOU may use the
article as a movie review to see if you want to watch the movie,
other readers may use them for many other purposes.
This statement is trivially true no matter what phrase you substitute in.
*Any* purpose for using an article is one that only a minority of readers
will have. If it's wrong to put something in because only a minority of
readers will use or need it, then we shouldn't even have articles.
Besides, the reader who wishes to use the article for other purposes just has
to ignore the spoiler warning. It's not like it prevents other readers from
using the article the way they want.
Would you read
any of our other articles just to see if you want to read their
references?
This is about an article which has a work as a *subject*, and only secondarily
if at all as a reference. I wouldn't read our article about potatoes to
decide if I want to read a particular book about potatoes, but that's because
the book really is just a reference; the subject of the article is potatoes,
not potato books.
Though we do have articles on research areas and the books in them.
More usually categories, though.
I couldn't rule out looking to see if a book had an article on
Wikipedia before buying it, or more likely, reading about the author.
But I would, admittedly, be more likely to read a review somewhere,
though I *might* come to Wikipedia to find a review through the
article.
Carcharoth