On 5/31/07, Slowking Man <slowkingman(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's alright, you can tell him now that you've warned him beforehand.

On 5/31/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> Net outcome: If your article needs {{spoiler}}, it's defective enough > it may as well be tagged {{cleanup}}.

Is that a change to the guideline, or just your reading of the apparent consensus on the talk page? I'd obviously rather remove my own toenails than read the entire discussion, but I don't want to be totally ignorant.

It's a real pity that I feel so strongly at odds with consensus. That hasn't happened for me with Wikipedia before. I do feel that there is a place for spoiler warning tags on most articles about fictional subjects, and I don't accept that "a plot summary inherently contains spoilers so don't read it if you don't want the spoilers".

Perhaps Project Gutenberg should be encouraged to add spoiler warnings on all its fictional content. :-)

On 6/1/07, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This is so simple. Read the back of a DVD cover. Read a movie review in the paper. Read the blurb of a book. All contain a rough outline of the plot. They don't mention: a) What the outcome of the major plot climax is. b) Any secrets that change your understanding of the story, but that are only revealed at the end. c) The deaths of any major characters that take place late in the story. What's hard to get about that? Now, I'm not even suggesting that Wikipedia avoid mentioning these. But it's so incredibly easy to use spoiler tags judiciously. This wilful ignorance to understand is quite annoying. Example: ==Plot summary== In the story, John marries Susan, but they are separated as he is sent to war.<more plot describing his antics in the war, the adventures he gets up to etc > {{spoiler}} Ultimately, John's leg is blown off and he returns an amputee, only to find that Susan has married his brother. {{end-spoiler}} ==Some other section== It's not complicated. It's not a slippery slope. Can we drop the childish attitude please? Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Now, I'm not even suggesting that Wikipedia avoid mentioning these. But it's so incredibly easy to use spoiler tags judiciously. This wilful ignorance to understand is quite annoying.

It's not wilful ignorance on my part. The spoiler tags are demeaning and insulting,

they're eyesores,

they make us look like some poxy fan site,

and if used as you suggest they impost artificial constraints on the article body and make it impossible to write a proper article lead.

If there are *any* advantages to have these, it seems to be that they coddle people who are stupid to tell the difference between a DVD box cover and an encyclopedia article.

Is that a change to the guideline, or just your reading of the apparent consensus on the talk page? I'd obviously rather remove my own toenails than read the entire discussion, but I don't want to be totally ignorant. It's a real pity that I feel so strongly at odds with consensus. That hasn't happened for me with Wikipedia before. I do feel that there is a place for spoiler warning tags on most articles about fictional subjects, and I don't accept that "a plot summary inherently contains spoilers so don't read it if you don't want the spoilers".

As it stands, there seems to be broad support for the idea that spoiler tags are redundant in plot / synopsis sections, absurd in articles on older and especially classic works, a substitute for {{original research}} in articles on future or forthcoming films, and possibly defensible in a small number of cases for new releases where knowing the plot twist is identified by external sources as a spoiler for the subject.

Yes, I've tried this, with mixed success. I think my rewrite of the plot of the first ever Doctor Who story is still up, and I successfully restored Phil Sandifer's rewrite of the plot of the second story (The Daleks), which had been reverted a while back. Writing decent plot summaries for more recent episodes is more problematic. I've successfully introduced a much shorter, more readable form of writing, which seems to be popular, but writing about Martha's character development has had a less enthusiastic reception. Of course much of this is due to the fact that anything I write on the subject will be tinged with original research because there are no reliable sources on this yet.

Did anyone ever experiment with the idea of dismissable spoiler warning tags?