[WikiEN-l] Workable spoiler solution?

[John Lee]

On 5/21/07, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> With all the arguing (and of course this is hardly the first time
> it has come up), it seems the main arguments still boil down to:
>
>         Some people really like spoiler-warning tags, and think
>         they're a nice service.
>
>         Some people really hate spoiler-warning tags, and think
>         they're unencyclopedic.
>
> Personally, I suspect that the vast majority don't much care
> one way or the other.  (Me, I'm not a fanatic about not getting
> spoiled, but I don't even notice the templates, excessive though
> some claim they are -- they just slide on by, beneath the radar,
> as I'm reading.)
>
> The last time this came up, I thought we'd tentatively decided
> to try rigging up a way so spoiler warnings could be dismissed by
> people who don't want to see them (much like the WMF announcement
> du jour in the page header).  That seems like a pretty ideal
> compromise.  Did that idea fall by the wayside, or what?


The problem is:

1. How do we define a spoiler without any point of reference for what
constitutes a sufficient surprise to warrant a warning?
2. What do we do when people start structuring articles around spoilers,
even when the normal course of writing an encyclopaedia would structure the
information differently?

These objections cannot easily be resolved by this proposal; personally, I
couldn't care less about spoiler tags, if not for these two issues.

I like a related idea someone else brought up but was dismissed, though -
find a way to mark information as spoilers, and display this information
unless the user sets his preferences otherwise. (Or, alternatively, we could
make the default of your proposal to display spoiler tags, and to hide them
only if a user edits her settings accordingly.)

Johnleemk