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

[David Goodman]

Perhaps a certain amount of inconsistency and even nonsense is a sign
that this is in fact an encyclopedia that everyone can edit. Who would
realistically expect to find such a project producing a perfectly
clean work?

On 11/14/07, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.