On 6/20/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
The correct place for them is not in an article. We are a free-content encyclopedia above all else, and should remain encyclopedic. A spoiler warning is a rather juvenile artifact of culture. I could see it on usenet or forums, but if someone came to an encyclopedia, then they should expect information. We are not here to coddle people, we are here to be useful.
A great many people would hold it to be "useful" for them to be able to read an article about a film/play/story which they haven't seen/read without having plot twists revealed to them. Calling that expectation "juvenile" is putting a lot of pretention behind the word "encyclopedic". Maybe "spoiler warning" isn't exactly the way to write it, but it's obvious that premtively making such a sweeping change isn't the way to go. We need to come up with a Wiki-wide policy (or policies, if we determine that different types of works need different approaches) and THEN implement it. If there's anything that's juvenile here, it's the "I dare you to revert me" BOLDness of making controversial changes without prior discussions.