Philip Sandifer wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Crying_Game&oldid=288389
Created by The Cunctator during the first debate on spoilers, back in 2001, when people kept citing [[The Crying Game]] as an article that should have a spoiler warning despite the article not existing at the time.
(He did similar entries for The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and Psycho, all equally funny. Fight Club is actually probably my favorite of them, though it takes some digging to find, as it's in the history of an abandoned redirect at present.)
Don't you miss the good old days when our articles got straight to the point?
In similar retro fashion, we have the long-departed [[User:CGS]] realizing this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Wikipedia_talk:Warn_readers_about_spoilers&diff=1075454&oldid=1075 451
Isn't it great when people are prescient?
And for those who are particularly interested in wiki-history, the major justification for spoiler warnings in the first place was that people wouldn't know that Wikipedia was an encyclopedia and so would be surprised by the spoilers. Which is probably a moot issue by now.
You can also find out such great information as that the spoiler warning's first supporter, [[User:Koyaanis Qatsi]], felt that they were overused back in 2003. That Larry Sanger liked spoiler warnings back in the day.
The mindset of some people is such that telling them that Sanger supported them could result in more opposition to the warnings. ;-)
And that [[User:Eclecticology]]'s position on spoilers has not changed in five years: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Warn_readers_about_... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Pol...
I guess I do need to apologize for my inconsistency in the spelling of "market(t)ing" :-[
Wow!! I hadn't imagined that this subject would inspire such a wave of nostalgia.
Ec