On 5/17/07, Gallagher Mark George
<m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
Unrelated articles, or articles where one
wouldn't expect to be spoiled (e.g. /Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets/ in [[Anagram]]). Certainly, these spoilers shouldn't be present
in the article at
all, but if they are, I can see an argument for tagging them. That is to say, the
argument for tagging
them is stronger than that of tagging other articles.
In those kind of articles, a spoiler tag is generally an automatic
warning that the fanboys have been at work, and some cleanup is
needed. It seems to be an irresistible urge to add an example from
YOUR obsession to such; lists of examples are crap-attractors.
The general rule should be that such examples should be fairly
well-known canonical works, if an example is needed, so that the
largest proportion of readers are familiar with the example and thus
get the benefit of it. Nothing that is likely to be a 'spoiler'
should be in there in the first place.
In fact, spoiler tags are frequently a warning about un-encyclopedic
writing, or so I've found on going through removing some. Frequently
fans see fit to detail the plot so minutely that reading the work in
question becomes optional.
You need to give these people credit for the inventive ways in which the
tags are used. At [[John Wayne]] it was in a section listing the ways
in which he died in his various films.
There was an irony about its use in [[The Book of One Thousand and One
Nights]]. What could be a more classic situation than where
Scheherazade would not want to spoil the ending of her stories!
Ec