[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia committee member"

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 6:50 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:

> A likely edge case would be "'Rosebud' is the name of the
> childhood sled of Kane."

I'd disagree. The whole Rosebud thing is rather a MacGuffin [1]. The
mystery of Kane's final word is just a hook that motivates the
journalist to review Kane's life story. The revelation at the end is
marvellous but if you knew what was coming the journey would arguably
not be greatly spoiled.

Contrast that with the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense (albeit an
inferior film to Kane) where the twist causes you to review everything
you have seen before and allows you to view the film again, with the
new knowledge of what you're witnessing, in a totally different light.
A spoiler for Sixth Sense effectively wipes out one distinct viewing
experience. That's not nearly so true with Kane.

But perhaps we should not discuss individual spoilers; we'll end up
upsetting people inadvertently.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin