User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Help!/@comment-43874324-20200702151414/@comment-6032121-20200702230130

This is a big issue I've thought about repeatedly and extensively; I'm glad the community has finally, and of its own accord, begun thinking about this problem. Unfortunately, this means my long-simmering thoughts would have been a veritable wall of text if I'd just posted them as a stream of consciousness, so please bear with me through a structured pseudo-blog-post of a reply.

(Just to be on the safe side, do remember that I'm just a user presenting my views in an unusually lengthy and structured manner. I am not an expert, admin, or any other type of authority "laying down the law.")

Approaching the issue

Why we have a problem

I think all this talk of the word "unbiased" is barking up the wrong tree. "Unbiased" — that is to say, cold, neutral reporting of what the DWU sources tell us about Sensitive Subject XYZ — is already what we're doing. It is clearly making a lot of people uncomfortable, not just new users here, but also readers who then toddle off to Twitter to tell all their friends about how horrible and bigoted Tardis Wiki is.

We have a problem, and simply being "unbiased" is not the way to solve it. User:Jack "BtR" Saxon speaks of "factual and inoffensive" coverage, but the thing is, those two don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. Right now, we are factual. But objectively speaking, if a bunch of people report that they feel offended, then we're not being inoffensive.

Why we should keep the pages

However, I also maintain that these pages should be retained. We could live without the page about the N-word, but as User:Shambala108 said, the problem is that it's very hard to draw a line in the sand about what words would be too awful to repeat here. I can see making an exception to our "every noun gets a page" rule for the N-word, but do we keep "Poof"? Do we keep "Idiot"? How far do we go with this?

My proposal

On "triggers" and subjectivity

User:DiSoRiEnTeD1 complains, upthread, that just about anything can be branded "offensive" and "triggering" these days even though in his personal experience, at least one word some decry as offensive… fails to offend him.

Now, "offensive" is a bit of a different kettle of fish, but let's take a moment and consider the other adjective — "triggering". 'Cause a "trigger" in the psychological sense that makes people demand "trigger warnings", as Wikipedia will inform you, isn't meant to apply to everybody. Something is "triggering" to someone if it prompts an abnormal mental reaction due to a preexisting trauma or condition. If that preexisting trauma isn't present in you, then… great!

Trigger warnings aren't about saying "you should feel bad when you see this content", it's a gesture of kindness to those who would feel bad. You're no more obligated to feel bad about "triggering", or offensive, content yourself, than a person in possession of functional legs is obligated to use a wheelchair ramp instead of the stairs. Saying "but I don't mind it" is as much of a nonsequitur in a discuss of triggering content as saying "but I can use ordinary stairs" when discussing the problem of public spaces not being designed with wheelchair-users in mind.

Yes, I am going somewhere with this.

The Trigger Warning Templates

Namely, I propose that we introduce a new class of tophat-type templates, not unlike our "Spoilers" templates. In fact, the cases are very similar; most people on this Wiki don't give a fig about "spoilers" in the sense of general info about stories-yet-unreleased, but there are people who do, and out of respect for those people, Template:Spoiler adorns pages about upcoming seasons or anthologies. Interested readers are not prevented from looking past those templates in any way; I don't think anyone ever advocated for the removal of these templates.

So… the wording would have to be studied carefully. But I think the best way forward is a tophat template summarizing Tardis Wiki's stance from a real world perspective.

For pages about slurs, it might read something like…

This page describes the term and its usage as they have been depicted inside the fictional Doctor Who universe. Bear in mind that the term unfortunately exists in the real world as well, and is offensive to many real people and groups.

and we could adapt the same basic concept to pages about potentially-triggering subjects such rape, murder, Nazis, etc.

Coda: broadening the issue

In fact, we could even broaden the idea to encompass stories which are known to contain offensive and/or triggering content.

e.g., it feels as though we might want to let people know what they're getting into with The Talons of Weng-Chiang without requiring that they read the BTS section all the way through — let's not forget a lot of people routinely skim our Wiki's pages to get an idea of a story they want to watch/read/hear, but will deliberately not read the entire plot summary or suchlike, for fear of spoiling the experience completely.

But this also goes for stories which no one is arguing were bigoted in and of themselves — just stories which might trigger traumatic response in some readers for well-documented reasons. We've had complaints on the talk page of Arachnids in the UK from people suffering from arachnophobia about our ghoulish infobox image. It's easy to imagine a survivor of child abuse being triggered, in the full psychological sense of the term, by the flashbacks to Sardwick Snr.'s treatment of Kazran in A Christmas Carol, even though it certainly doesn't endorse the relatively tame violence being displayed.