[WikiEN-l] Spoiler Boilerplates

Sun Jun 25 13:03:38 UTC 2006

On 6/25/06, Garion1000 <garion1000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> It makes sense to me. When an article is bad (or not complete enough, too
> technical, whatever), a reader should be warned. But when a reader looks up
> something 'obscene', he shouldn't be surprised to see something 'obscene',

I would be very much surprised to see explicit pornography if I looked
up "hard-core pornography". We're an encyclopaedia, after all - not
normally the sort of place one expects to find porn.

> or when a reader looks up a movie, he shouldn't  be surprised to find a plot
> summary there. To me a warning in those cases seems unnecessary.

Seems to be a common problem that "spoiler" is confused with "plot
summary". Consider a movie review in the paper. You'll usually get a
decent plot summary of the first two-thirds of the film. You would
never see anything like the surprise twist at the end revealed. Now, I
think we can go a little further than that, but when it comes to
revealing that twist, we should be careful to respect our readers, who
may be reading the article in order to decide whether the film is
worth seeing or not.

Has anyone trialed using javascript hide/show buttons to hide/show the
spoiler? One benefit is it would force judicious labelling of the
"spoiler" - in most cases, it should only be a sentence or two.

Steve