On 6/25/06, Garion1000 garion1000@gmail.com wrote:
It makes sense to me. When an article is bad (or not complete enough, too technical, whatever), a reader should be warned. But when a reader looks up something 'obscene', he shouldn't be surprised to see something 'obscene',
I would be very much surprised to see explicit pornography if I looked up "hard-core pornography". We're an encyclopaedia, after all - not normally the sort of place one expects to find porn.
or when a reader looks up a movie, he shouldn't be surprised to find a plot summary there. To me a warning in those cases seems unnecessary.
Seems to be a common problem that "spoiler" is confused with "plot summary". Consider a movie review in the paper. You'll usually get a decent plot summary of the first two-thirds of the film. You would never see anything like the surprise twist at the end revealed. Now, I think we can go a little further than that, but when it comes to revealing that twist, we should be careful to respect our readers, who may be reading the article in order to decide whether the film is worth seeing or not.
Has anyone trialed using javascript hide/show buttons to hide/show the spoiler? One benefit is it would force judicious labelling of the "spoiler" - in most cases, it should only be a sentence or two.
Steve