[WikiEN-l] Reflections on the end of the spoiler wars

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:07:05 +0000, "Ian Woollard"
<ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

>Seems to me removal of the spoilers was non consensus and is a
>position only being maintained by technical difficulties of reverting
>and threats. This is so not good.

It's not clear to me that including them was consensus either. There
were so many, and in so many patently absurd places, that it does
look rather as if someone or group of people originally set out to
do what David and Phil did, only in reverse.

I mean, who in their right mind would include spoiler tags when
writing an article about a Shakespeare play, the Iliad or Dickens?
The kinds of editors who write those articles are typically not the
kind of people who would even think about a spoiler warning, in my
view.

In any event, the result is better for the encyclopaedia: a
{{current fiction}} template is objectively verifiable in a way that
the concept of a spoiler is not.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG