Steve Summit wrote:
d. wrote:
(As one of those whose phone number seems to have become Wikipedia's phone number, I get people calling and complaining about their *login not working* (wtf) as well as every *other* content issue under the sun. I have *never* had a complaint that we spoilt a work of fiction for someone. I await a single piece of evidence, not conjecture.)
That's a good point, but it's not the sort of thing I can imagine people complaining about. (And in any case: we *do* generally have the warnings! "See how good it works?" This isn't a case of elephants in cherry trees.)
Yeah, they function a bit like phylacteries hung about the article to ward off the devil.
Conjecture isn't necessarily fallacious.
But in the realm of formal logic false can imply true. "Conjecture" can be viewed as another word for "hypothesis". The conjecture that God made the world in seven days has yet to be proven, but the number of people that believe it is significant.
We are all, most of us, readers as well as editors. The people who like spoiler warnings and argue for their retention are all, presumably, people who appreciate spoiler warnings in the text they read. The set of people who appreciate them (and would mourn their passing) is clearly not empty.
The thread inspired me to review a few passages from that most reverential piece of literary criticism, Miguel de Unamuno's"Our Lord Don Quixote".
"But the canon, a stiff-necked man stuffed with a vast amount of the crudest good sense, like all 'ergo-tists' who are more or less canons, gave vent to simple-minded arguments to the effect that there could be no doubt that the Cid had existed, as had [[Bernardo del Carpio]], though there might be some doubts as to whether they performed the feats assigned them. This canon was apparently one of those poor men who use criticism like a sieve, and who argue the point, note cards in hand, as to whether such an event happened in the way it is related, without ever noticing that the past exists no longer and the only thing which really exists now is that which acts, and that one of those so-called legends, when it moves men to action, lighting up their hearts or consoling their lives, is a thousand times more real than the account of any transaction whatever rotting in some archive. (Princeton University Press edition, 1967, pp 154-5)
In other words, if all there is to these stories is these spoiled plots, there's not much in the story worth spoiling. What I found great about some of the "Star Trek" series was the way that characters dealt with the moral dilemmas that they encountered. A dry retelling of the plot of a story cannot possibly capture that, and thus spoils nothing..
Ec