[WikiEN-l] Actual data on spoiler warning uses by the public

[Peter Ansell]

On 16/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu <joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu> wrote:
> Quoting Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com>:
>
> > On 16/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu <joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu> wrote:
> >> See http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6424&p=147306#p147306
> >>
> >> In retrospect I'm not sure why no one did this before. The sample isn't
> >> exactly
> >> representative (since it is xkcd fora). But one interesting thing
> >> seems clear;
> >> the public prefers spoiler warnings on Wikipedia and uses them.
> >
> > Well... thirty people on an internet forum prefer spoiler warnings and
> > use them. I'm not entirely sure we can generalise from that to "the
> > public" with any degree of confidence.
>
> That's true. The sample size is very small. But considering that one argument
> made in favor of spoiler removal was that the spoiler-removal was favored by
> the public this preliminary data doesn't seem to back that up at all and if
> anything shows the other direction.
>

Is there anyway to avoid having always visible spoiler warnings, while
allowing users who care about such things to either set a preference
to collapse spoiler sections or to be able to set a user.css or
user.js function to hide those sections?

There does seem to be a few compromise positions available.

Peter