On 15/11/2007, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Who was threatened with edit-war bans over this?
Actually, I don't know. Searching gives me a lot of references to people supposedly edit-warring by putting back spoiler tags, but specific punishments are rarely mentioned. But accusations of edit-warring carry the implicit threat of punishment.
But whether it's being banned or blocked, it's pretty much the same problem: users *cannot* put spoiler warnings back in because they could be punished for edit-warring and contradicting consensus, when at the same time the fact that nobody puts them back is used to *prove* consensus, which is a classic catch-22.
Not to mention that users really can't restore 45000 warnings manually, and it's much easier to automate the removal than it is to automate the restoration.
(And let's not mention such incidents as getting the AWB complaint summarily dismissed, or all attempts to take polls getting closed because the poll might prove there isn't consensus.)
Spoiler warnings were removed by abuse of power, abuse of the rules, and abuse of logistics. Of *course* users are going to be mad about this for longer than they're going to be mad about standard Wikipedia administrative actions. This shouldn't be surprising at all; in fact, the very fact that users are unaccepting for an unusually long time should be a clue that there's something different about this case.