[WikiEN-l] Have we ever had a reader complaint of a lack of spoiler tags?

[Ray Saintonge]

Steve Summit wrote:

>d. wrote:
>  
>
>>(As one of those whose phone number seems to have become Wikipedia's
>>phone number, I get people calling and complaining about their *login
>>not working* (wtf) as well as every *other* content issue under the
>>sun. I have *never* had a complaint that we spoilt a work of fiction
>>for someone. I await a single piece of evidence, not conjecture.)
>>    
>>
>That's a good point, but it's not the sort of thing I can imagine
>people complaining about.  (And in any case: we *do* generally
>have the warnings!  "See how good it works?"  This isn't a case
>of elephants in cherry trees.)
>
Yeah, they function a bit like phylacteries hung about the article to 
ward off the devil.

>Conjecture isn't necessarily fallacious.  
>
But in the realm of formal logic false can imply true.  "Conjecture" can 
be viewed as another word for "hypothesis".  The conjecture that God 
made the world in seven days has yet to be proven, but the number of 
people that believe it is significant.

>We are all, most of us,
>readers as well as editors.  The people who like spoiler warnings
>and argue for their retention are all, presumably, people who
>appreciate spoiler warnings in the text they read.  The set of
>people who appreciate them (and would mourn their passing) is
>clearly not empty.
>
The thread inspired me to review a few passages from that most 
reverential piece of literary criticism, Miguel de Unamuno's"Our Lord 
Don Quixote". 

    "But the canon, a stiff-necked man stuffed with a vast amount of the
    crudest good sense, like all 'ergo-tists' who are more or less
    canons, gave vent to simple-minded arguments to the effect that
    there could be no doubt that the Cid had existed, as had [[Bernardo
    del Carpio]], though there might be some doubts as to whether they
    performed the feats assigned them.  This canon was apparently one of
    those poor men who use criticism like a sieve, and who argue the
    point, note cards in hand, as to whether such an event happened in
    the way it is related, without ever noticing that the past exists no
    longer and the only thing which really exists now is that which
    acts, and that one of those so-called legends, when it moves men to
    action, lighting up their hearts or consoling their lives, is a
    thousand times more real than the account of any transaction
    whatever rotting in some archive. (Princeton University Press
    edition, 1967, pp 154-5)

In other words, if all there is to these stories is these spoiled plots, 
there's not much in the story worth spoiling.  What I found great about 
some of the "Star Trek" series was the way that characters dealt with 
the moral dilemmas that they encountered.  A dry retelling of the plot 
of a story cannot possibly capture that, and thus spoils nothing.. 

Ec