On 16/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
Personally? I'd need to see something of convincing methodology. A thread on the XKCD forums isn't it for me.
That's understandable. I did earlier back propose a general poll advertised at the top of pages for readers. Would that satisfy you?
That sort of thing would probably constitute actual data. I doubt I'd lift a finger to advocate putting a spoiler poll in the sitenotice, but if you think it can be swung ...
Well, yeah. But (as noted on said XKCD forum) people don't complain that Cliff's Notes doesn't contain spoiler warnings either. Wikipedia is far closer to Cliff's Notes in purview than IMDB.
That's a good point. David, could you possibly explain what disadvantage you see to having spoiler tags where they are suppressed unless someone chooses otherwise?
* Mainly that they're inappropriate to an encyclopedia. * Having spoiler warnings at all was warping actual article content - the issue originally raised as the reason for the original MFD for [[Template:Spoiler]]. * A plot summary warning that it contains plot elements is ridiculous.
Those are off the top of my head. The rest are in several metric tons of [[Wikipedia talk:Spoilers]].
- d.