Content warnings for books?

[tastytea]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I'd like to have a field for content warnings in the book pages.

Describe the solution you'd like An array or a text field on the edit book page, shown as text below the description on book pages. It should apply to the work, not the edition.

Maybe something like this:

Describe alternatives you've considered I've put the warning into the description but that is edition-specific.

Additional context Related: #740

[mouse-reeve]

I like this! I wonder if it makes sense of a content warning to be metadata on the book, which would make it shared across instances and situates it as more objective, or instance-specific, so that it depends on the local norms and situates it as more subjective.

The advantage of having it as metadata is that the whole community benefits from the curatorial work of whoever adds warnings, but the disadvantage is that different instances might have different norms or expectations around content warnings that conflict. I really don't know how divergent people's ideas of what should have a content warning are though, assuming everyone is acting in good faith, so that might not be much of an issue.

[tastytea]

I assume people who don't need a content warning will just ignore it? I mean, it doesn't get in the way like on Mastodon etc., where you have to click on the CW, it's just a paragraph you can skip.

Or do you mean a warning can have different meanings? Like “violence” could include verbal insults or not? 🤔

[mouse-reeve]

I mostly mean the latter - like if people are using content warnings in a different ways or with different expectations about what gets warned about. But I'm really just speculating, this is probably a non-issue or a small enough issue that it's resolvable by regular human interaction

[wizzwizz4]

I came here to ask for content warnings on quotes and comments, but this is already implemented (#660 shows the current UI).

If it would be useful for people to be able to filter by CWs and look up “other books in this category”, would it make sense to combine the content warning and tagging systems? Cross-instance de-duplicated tags and cross-instance de-duplicated content warnings don't seem all that intrinsically different, to me; they've got all the same “how do we federate? how do we deal with different philosophies of use?” problems and seem like those problems have the same solutions. (If it wouldn't be useful, collections are good enough for categories, and much simpler.)

[hughrun]

Thinking about @wizzwizz4's comment, it would be kinda nice if we could create some way to also filter/mute by CWs, related to #2848