Now that you mention it, I've avoided the article in the exact same way. Without the spoiler talk, I probably would have visited already. Although it's something like an irritable mental gesture... it's not like I have any plans to see the play anytime in the foreseeable future, and I haven't read any Agatha Christie since I was a teenager.
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.comwrote:
On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 6:34 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:
Carcharoth wrote:
Surely if the ending is still described in the article (as I was careful to say), NPOV wouldn't be affected? All I'm saying is that if there was a specific OTRS request that could be verified to be from the relevant people, then it could be acted on. Requests from Wikipedia editors and readers to add spoiler notices wouldn't count. It would have to be a specific request from the "subject" of the spoiler.
You've noted that "requests from Wikipedia editors and readers to add spoiler notices wouldn't count," and this only accentuates the problem. How would providing special treatment to a representative of an article's subject constitute a neutral approach?
You referred to this as a "BLP-like exception," but I see nothing analogous. We address legitimate complaints by ensuring that biographies of living persons comply with our normal content standards. We don't honor requests to include special text (such as a warning that the article includes material that its subject dislikes).
Actually, I'd like to read the article about the play without finding out the ending. Is that an unreasonable thing to ask? (And yes, I know this is a completely different argument to the one I used before). With other things, I just read the articles anyway, and don't care about knowing the ending in advance (or I avoid them, as I did when the last Harry Potter book came out). But for some reason, here I find myself (as a reader of Wikipedia) wanting to be able to read the other parts of the article and would likely have read the article after reading the newspaper story if I hadn't found out in advance (from the newspaper story) that the article contained a spoiler. Put it this way: my finding out that this article contains a spoiler means I have avoided reading it - how many other people have avoided reading it for the same reasons? If that is a feature and not a bug, fair enough, but I find it strange that what articles I read on Wikipedia is being decided by what a newspaper article has to say about them.
Carcharoth
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