[WikiEN-l] Reflections on the end of the spoiler wars

[Philip Sandifer]

Somewhere around six months ago, I made the relatively obvious point  
that spoiler warnings were unencyclopedic and silly, and furthermore  
were being used to screw up article leads and violate NPOV. This led  
to a series of events that, over the course of about two weeks, had  
spoiler tags nearly completely deprecated from Wikipedia and the  
spoiler policy heavily rewritten to no longer encourage their use.

Six months later, the spoiler debate is still carrying on with the  
same half-dozen or so people vehemently opposing their removal. These  
arguments have been presented in every forum imagineable - arbcom  
twice, an RfC, several deletion debates, the mailing list, etc. The  
number of remaining forums is growing so slim that people were, in all  
seriousness, suggesting advertising the discussion on the watchlist  
sitenotice alongside the arbcom elections. This is, obviously, beyond  
the pale. Hopefully, the debate is now in its final throws as JzG has  
deleted the spoiler template following a TfD. Obviously it's on DRV at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2007_November_14 
  (with a breathtakingly bad-faith assuming nomination), but God  
willing it will stay deleted and this discussion will finally end.

What interests me, though, is the question of how we can prevent this.  
I've been fighting with the same people over issues with reliable  
sourcing for well over a year, for instance, and yet those fights  
still continue despite, seemingly, a substantial shift in opinion away  
from the former hardline positions (things that included overbroad  
statements about blogs "never" being reliable sources). [[2004 United  
States presidential election controversy and irregularities]] has been  
in need of a dynamite enema since, well, 2004, and has been the  
subject of an arbcom case, but so far nobody has quite managed to kill  
the blasted thing and its legion of OR sub-articles.

What is surprising in all of these cases is that it has seemed, to me,  
at least, that consensus formed for a position quite quickly - spoiler  
tags were stupid, sourcing guidelines needed to have enough  
flexibility to not break articles, and the 2004 election controversy  
articles are abominations. Everybody sane who looked at the situations  
recognized that. But unfortunately, everybody sane also demonstrated a  
general lack of willingness to participate in the same debates for  
months on end. And so the actual discussions have been deadlocks as a  
handful of tenacious proponents of the losing side continue stamping  
their feet.

This is a major tarpit, and is one of the ways in which dreadfully  
stupid things are allowed to profligate. It makes policy formation and  
the engagement of remotely tricky and nuanced situations a horrid  
timesink that is unsuitable for sane conduct. So what can we do? How  
can we streamline our policy formation problems to drive away the  
policy equivalents of lunatic POV pushers? Again, noting that the  
usual problems - consensus can change, so forcibly closing debates  
doesn't work, often contributors who are totally insane on one point  
are wonderful on every other article they edit, etc. So what can we do?

-Phil