On 5/31/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/05/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
The "recent releases" question is a tricky one - what counts as a "recent release"? - but, for example, Tony Sidaway removed spoiler tags from all episodes of [[Doctor Who]] before 2005. No complaint.
Actually since then some of the articles on more recent Doctor Who episodes have had their spoiler tags removed by someone using AWB (you, for instance!) and there hasn't been any complaint. I'm not going to put them back if nobody else does.
A lot of the problem with spoiler-tagged plot summaries is that they're badly-written plot summaries. A simple blow-by-blow recitation of events will do the job, but it is often not as clear as a more thoughtful synopsis which mentions important allusions to past and future episodes, real world happenings and so forth.
So the real cure for spoiler tags is better writing.
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.