Somewhere around six months ago, I made the relatively obvious point
that spoiler warnings were unencyclopedic and silly, and furthermore
were being used to screw up article leads and violate NPOV. This led
to a series of events that, over the course of about two weeks, had
spoiler tags nearly completely deprecated from Wikipedia and the
spoiler policy heavily rewritten to no longer encourage their use.
Six months later, the spoiler debate is still carrying on with the
same half-dozen or so people vehemently opposing their removal. These
arguments have been presented in every forum imagineable - arbcom
twice, an RfC, several deletion debates, the mailing list, etc. The
number of remaining forums is growing so slim that people were, in all
seriousness, suggesting advertising the discussion on the watchlist
sitenotice alongside the arbcom elections. This is, obviously, beyond
the pale. Hopefully, the debate is now in its final throws as JzG has
deleted the spoiler template following a TfD. Obviously it's on DRV at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2007_November_14
(with a breathtakingly bad-faith assuming nomination), but God
willing it will stay deleted and this discussion will finally end.
What interests me, though, is the question of how we can prevent this.
I've been fighting with the same people over issues with reliable
sourcing for well over a year, for instance, and yet those fights
still continue despite, seemingly, a substantial shift in opinion away
from the former hardline positions (things that included overbroad
statements about blogs "never" being reliable sources). [[2004 United
States presidential election controversy and irregularities]] has been
in need of a dynamite enema since, well, 2004, and has been the
subject of an arbcom case, but so far nobody has quite managed to kill
the blasted thing and its legion of OR sub-articles.
What is surprising in all of these cases is that it has seemed, to me,
at least, that consensus formed for a position quite quickly - spoiler
tags were stupid, sourcing guidelines needed to have enough
flexibility to not break articles, and the 2004 election controversy
articles are abominations. Everybody sane who looked at the situations
recognized that. But unfortunately, everybody sane also demonstrated a
general lack of willingness to participate in the same debates for
months on end. And so the actual discussions have been deadlocks as a
handful of tenacious proponents of the losing side continue stamping
their feet.
This is a major tarpit, and is one of the ways in which dreadfully
stupid things are allowed to profligate. It makes policy formation and
the engagement of remotely tricky and nuanced situations a horrid
timesink that is unsuitable for sane conduct. So what can we do? How
can we streamline our policy formation problems to drive away the
policy equivalents of lunatic POV pushers? Again, noting that the
usual problems - consensus can change, so forcibly closing debates
doesn't work, often contributors who are totally insane on one point
are wonderful on every other article they edit, etc. So what can we do?
-Phil