On 6/22/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
If you just want the background, all you need to do is not read the summary. But if you are looking for a critical discussion, that would presuppose knowledge of the plot.
Precisely. The onus is on the reader to limit their exposure; we may facilitate this, but not at the expense of other issues. Spoiler tags can often cause articles to be organised around them; shoving all spoilers into one section rarely makes for good writing. This is why often the whole plot summary section is surrounded by spoiler tags, but this means causing readers to miss out on basic elements of the plot which are not spoilers. (Not to mention that defining what constitutes a spoiler, unless one relies on a source - IIRC the BBC had a spoiler warning for its coverage of Hillary Clinton's announcement of her campaign song because the announcement spoofed the ending of the Sopranos - would probably be original research.)
I think demarcating what is a spoiler using, say, HTML tags, would make sense - it's the reason why the semantic web exists. The user can then set their client to hide those parts of the page. (I also supported a similar policy for dealing with controversial images, but that's another story...and my position here is a bit of a fringe one anyway.)
There is not always a tradeoff between spoiler tags and good writing, but quite often, there is, especially when it comes to the critical discussion encyclopaedia articles are meant to give. If you don't want to read spoilers, don't read a critical discussion of the work. I myself don't look beyond the main iMDB page of a movie - not even at the trivia or goofs sections - to avoid spoilers when I want to see the movie freshly.
Johnleemk