On 6/22/07, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)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