On Mon, 30 Aug 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
Actually, I'd like to read the article about the play without finding out the ending. Is that an unreasonable thing to ask? (And yes, I know this is a completely different argument to the one I used before). With other things, I just read the articles anyway, and don't care about knowing the ending in advance (or I avoid them, as I did when the last Harry Potter book came out). But for some reason, here I find myself (as a reader of Wikipedia) wanting to be able to read the other parts of the article and would likely have read the article after reading the newspaper story if I hadn't found out in advance (from the newspaper story) that the article contained a spoiler. Put it this way: my finding out that this article contains a spoiler means I have avoided reading it - how many other people have avoided reading it for the same reasons? If that is a feature and not a bug, fair enough, but I find it strange that what articles I read on Wikipedia is being decided by what a newspaper article has to say about them.
To put it bluntly, Wikipedia used to have spoiler warnings but they were removed by a massive abuse of process (and exploiting of loopholes in the process), compounded by silence from the few people able to fix it.
I complained at the time, but essentially nobody else did, so it was forced through.