Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
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 ...
I'm very busy now, but I'll try to bring it up after the new year. In the meantime, I think I'm going to stop discussing this in detail until we have something resembling data (or until it becomes clear that we aren't going to get more data).
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.
This is an argument I find less than compelling. Are schools not encyclopedic? Is having articles on every two-bit band that meets [[WP:MUSIC]] appropriate to an encyclopedia? We all have our different intuitions about what an encyclopedia should have in it. One thing is clear: Wikipedia is not a traditional 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]].
Yes, people dividing articles into sections with and without spoiler warnings makes content harder to follow and leads to sections which are just plot regurgitation and other sections with little or no mention of plot. This is not a good thing.
- A plot summary warning that it contains plot elements is ridiculous.
Well, to me and you yes, but if the warnings are only visible as a matter of choice I don't see what we lose by letting people be a bit ridiculous.
Those are off the top of my head. The rest are in several metric tons of [[Wikipedia talk:Spoilers]].
I've never seen other than the above concerns and a few other concerns discussed in this thread (such as the OR issue) any explanation of why spoiler tags would be bad if they were as a default turned off.