[WikiEN-l] Deleting over 45000 items

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 06:55:52 -0700 (PDT), arromdee at rahul.net (Ken
Arromdee) wrote:

>It seems blatantly obvious to me
>that nobody's going to be able to restore 45000 spoiler warnings; deleting
>them is easy, but restoring one is impossible without reading the whole
>article to figure out where the right place for them is.

Thing is, there seems to be broad agreement that a very substantial
majority of them were redundant or absurd.  What proponents of spoiler
warnings appear to be reluctant to do is go to the Talk pages of the
articles they think should have warnings, and make a case.

I don't think anyone is going to seriously dispute the removal of
spoiler tags from classical Greek and Roman texts, Dickens,
Shakespeare, nursery rhymes and so on. 

The problem was that they appear to have been inserted pretty much
indiscriminately.  While there are a few people who think that spoiler
warnings should be in pretty much everything, and some who think they
should never be in anything, I suspect that most people would take a
more pragmatic view much as suggested on the guideline page: generally
redundant in plot or synopsis sections but defensible with a rationale
where there is agreement in the sources that a certain piece of
information is a spoiler, and where the subject is new enough that
meaningful numbers of people will not know it.  Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows is the usual example.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG