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

[Ken Arromdee]

On Sun, 20 May 2007, David Gerard wrote:
> Er ... The more I think about your message, the less sense it makes.
> 
> Surely one would expect ==Plot summary== to contain plot elements in
> an encyclopedic manner.
> 
> It's entirely unclear how a fear of knowledge suits editing an encyclopedia.

First of all, not every plot element is a spoiler.

Second, not every plot element appears in a "plot summary" section.

Third, there's a user interface consistency argument to be made for plot
summaries.  I made an analogy on the discussion page: If you look at a
calendar, it has columns for Monday and Tuesday.  But everyone knows that
Tuesday comes after Monday.  If you only want to avoid redundancy, you should
remove the Tuesday.

But if you want the user to be able to always find a day of the week by looking
at the top of the column, rather than by looking at the top of the column and
then making a couple of deductions if the top isn't there, you label
every column even though some of them don't really provide any information.
Putting spoiler warnings in all types of sections that contain spoilers--even
if the user could figure out that some of them have spoilers anyway--
simplifies the user interface.