On 13 June 2012 22:02, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: > On 13 June 2012 21:56, Nathan <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Earliest I have it on a Wikimedia list is from WikiEn-L on 2/11/08 from Ian >> Woollard (written as principle of least surprise), in the context of a >> Muhammad images thread started by Jimbo -- but my logs only go back to the >> summer of 07. > > > Bingo - and he specifically invoked it to "minimise offence". >
Sure, but it also applies to getting back what you expect. A male heterosexual friend of mine typed in the word "Boobs" into Commons search engine a while back and came back with the page "Boobs on Bikes". It's not a matter of minimising offence, it's simply that if you type in one thing and get something else and rather surprising, that's a problem. That a subset of that surprise happens to be involve people getting offended doesn't mean that avoiding unnecessary surprise isn't a laudable goal. There's surprise in the "reading a book and learning something new" sense, then there is surprise in the "being told that the book is on this shelf, but instead it's on a different shelf" sense. The two are rather different, and I fear some conflation is going on. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
