On 16/05/07, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> I've just done [[All Quiet on the
Western Front]] and [[The Birth of a
> Nation]] (1915 movie). It all makes me wonder. On a site where there
> is so much concern about marketting and spam it seems completely
> contrary to have spoiler warnings. Spoiler warnings are a
_marketting_
> tool; they want to make people curious
enough to see the movie, watch
> the programme, read the book.
This seems like a pretty ridiculous supposition
of bad faith. Are you
seriously alleging that Wikipedia is being spammed by people who have a
financial interest in promoting sales of the novel _All Quiet on the
Western Front_ (published 1929), rather than by editors who in good
faith think (even if wrongly) that the information is better presented
with spoiler tags?
No, it's a statement (an erroneous one, IMO, but anyway) of what
spoiler tags are for - not an assumption of bad faith.
I like the de:wp policy, which Babelfish and I roughly translate:
When discussing creative works, e.g. books, music, computer games,
TV series or films, then an encyclopedia's task is to give a summary
of the work and its place in the overall field. Thus, it is natural
that the action of a book or a film will be described and discussed in
full.
Many books or films lose their attraction, however, if too many
details or the ending are revealed before they are read or seen. So it
became common on the Internet to put before such descriptions a
spoiler warning.
In encyclopedias, however, this is rare. In the German language
Wikipedia, after long discussions, consensus developed not to include
spoiler warnings, and to remove existing ones. The section which
contains a description of the plot should, however, always be clearly
denoted, for example by the heading ==Plot summary== or ==Synopsis==.
What do they do about spoiling plot details that need to be discussed for
full coverage of the subject in de Wikipedia?
Mgm