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

[Ken Arromdee]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2007, Philip Sandifer wrote:
> 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.

The way you can prevent this is to stop abusing the system to delete spoiler
tags.  Admins have closed polls, ran what were de-facto bots, used circular
reasoning, and generally not gone through any reasonable process in order
to delete spoiler warnings.  Your own claim that there is consensus is part
of the problem--"consensus" gained by people not reverting thousands of
partly automatic edits manually (and being threatened with bans for
edit-warring if they do) manually is not consensus.