On 16/05/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I've just done [[All Quiet on the Western Front]] and [[The Birth of a Nation]] (1915 movie). It all makes me wonder. On a site where there is so much concern about marketting and spam it seems completely contrary to have spoiler warnings. Spoiler warnings are a _marketting_ tool; they want to make people curious enough to see the movie, watch the programme, read the book.
This seems like a pretty ridiculous supposition of bad faith. Are you seriously alleging that Wikipedia is being spammed by people who have a financial interest in promoting sales of the novel _All Quiet on the Western Front_ (published 1929), rather than by editors who in good faith think (even if wrongly) that the information is better presented with spoiler tags?
No, it's a statement (an erroneous one, IMO, but anyway) of what spoiler tags are for - not an assumption of bad faith.
I like the de:wp policy, which Babelfish and I roughly translate:
When discussing creative works, e.g. books, music, computer games, TV series or films, then an encyclopedia's task is to give a summary of the work and its place in the overall field. Thus, it is natural that the action of a book or a film will be described and discussed in full.
Many books or films lose their attraction, however, if too many details or the ending are revealed before they are read or seen. So it became common on the Internet to put before such descriptions a spoiler warning.
In encyclopedias, however, this is rare. In the German language Wikipedia, after long discussions, consensus developed not to include spoiler warnings, and to remove existing ones. The section which contains a description of the plot should, however, always be clearly denoted, for example by the heading ==Plot summary== or ==Synopsis==.
- d.