On Mon, 30 Aug 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
Actually, I'd like to read the article about the
play without finding
out the ending. Is that an unreasonable thing to ask? (And yes, I know
this is a completely different argument to the one I used before).
With other things, I just read the articles anyway, and don't care
about knowing the ending in advance (or I avoid them, as I did when
the last Harry Potter book came out). But for some reason, here I find
myself (as a reader of Wikipedia) wanting to be able to read the other
parts of the article and would likely have read the article after
reading the newspaper story if I hadn't found out in advance (from the
newspaper story) that the article contained a spoiler. Put it this
way: my finding out that this article contains a spoiler means I have
avoided reading it - how many other people have avoided reading it for
the same reasons? If that is a feature and not a bug, fair enough, but
I find it strange that what articles I read on Wikipedia is being
decided by what a newspaper article has to say about them.
To put it bluntly, Wikipedia used to have spoiler warnings but they were
removed by a massive abuse of process (and exploiting of loopholes in the
process), compounded by silence from the few people able to fix it.
I complained at the time, but essentially nobody else did, so it was forced
through.