On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 06:55:52 -0700 (PDT), arromdee@rahul.net (Ken Arromdee) wrote:
It seems blatantly obvious to me that nobody's going to be able to restore 45000 spoiler warnings; deleting them is easy, but restoring one is impossible without reading the whole article to figure out where the right place for them is.
Thing is, there seems to be broad agreement that a very substantial majority of them were redundant or absurd. What proponents of spoiler warnings appear to be reluctant to do is go to the Talk pages of the articles they think should have warnings, and make a case.
I don't think anyone is going to seriously dispute the removal of spoiler tags from classical Greek and Roman texts, Dickens, Shakespeare, nursery rhymes and so on.
The problem was that they appear to have been inserted pretty much indiscriminately. While there are a few people who think that spoiler warnings should be in pretty much everything, and some who think they should never be in anything, I suspect that most people would take a more pragmatic view much as suggested on the guideline page: generally redundant in plot or synopsis sections but defensible with a rationale where there is agreement in the sources that a certain piece of information is a spoiler, and where the subject is new enough that meaningful numbers of people will not know it. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the usual example.
Guy (JzG)