When is an image caption too obvious?

[CrowsNest]

Evidently, using the unfunny joke redirect CAPTIONOBVIOUS (OBVIOUS CAPTION being the more obviously useful redirect, obviously), the Wikipedians would very much like you not to state the obvious in image captions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:CAPTIONOBVIOUS

A few things that were immediately obvious to me from their gallery of examples....

1. The inherently faulty assumptions made about the likely readers of Wikipedia, who will obviously not all be fully functioning Western adults who are fluent in English. It is always especially surprising what children do not immediately appreciate as obvious.

2. The likely problems caused due to the average Wikipedian's notorious ignorance of what the ALT parameter is for (and when a sufficiently complete caption simply duplicates it).

3. The fact this appears to be yet another pointless appeal for every Wikipedia editor to stop doing what almost every editor is doing, always, all the time.

4. Basic human function. Strip a caption too far, and you merely halt a reader's natural flow while they stop and waste higher brain function time making the same deductions that go into formulating the supposed time saving reduced caption in the first place (this being why they still just look weird, even though you 100% understand why the bits taken out were taken out, putting aside the above points).

What we have here basically is a case of certain elitist Wikipediots doing what they do best, showing off that they think they're really clever, when in reality they are pretty dumb when it comes to considering what is best for the reader (because there is a world of difference between what they do, and what a professional writer does, and indeed what most amateurs do without even thinking about why they do it).

And of course yet another example of how the same usual Wikipediots love to find stupid shit to fight over (I was alerted to this nonsense after seeing Beyond My Ken having a classic BMK spaz-out over this exact issue, and eat a 48 hour edit warring block for it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Beyond_My_Ken&oldid=884204740#BEN_SHAPIRO

Maybe not a major issue, but indicative of what they spend their time worrying about, and illustrative of how they can't even get a simple thing (for the pro's) like this right. As is normal, several man hours were wasted on BMK's inability to be a mature and sensible adult, not remotely made up for by all the hilarity in seeing him format the living shit out of his posts. Mental bastard that he is.