On Thu, 6 Sep 2007, Matthew Brown wrote:
Since obviously my point wasn't clear enough, let me explain: deleting templates shows how easy it is to use automated peocedures to make a big, Wikipedia-wide change that cannot be reversed by people restoring each one manually, regardless of the actual merit of the change.
I think you over-estimate how much of the removal of the spoiler templates was done in an automated manner. I know that a fairly good proportion were done with a simple tabbed browser.
Regardless of technicalities about exactly how spoiler warnings are removed, it's possible to remove them en masse, but it's not possible to restore them en masse with similar ease. The same goes for any other sort of template; you can remove a trivia section template in a tabbed browser too.