Matthew Brown wrote:
On 5/17/07, Gallagher Mark George m.g.gallagher@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