Forum:Removal of spoiler templates

Disagreeing
Sorry to not have said anything before when this was ongoing, but I still disagree. I guess I'll just expand my argument from earlier, since I certainly haven't seen it countered here.

There are two absolutes neither of which can be true.

One: Spoiler warnings must be able to completely protect a reader from any inadvertent spoilers.

Two: Readers not wanting spoilers on something, anything, will or should avoid sources like Wikis entirely.

The first is presumably why spoiler warnings are resisted, as seen in the first post above. It's an unreasonable demand. You can't write the Wiki like that. But really, why ask for that? In fact, minimizing down to a single spoiler warning on the front page is simply an extreme application of the principle that spoiler warnings should cover everything; just cover the whole Wiki and be done with it.

As for the second point, it's overreacting. There will be a lot in a Wiki someone will want to read even if they mind spoilers. You might want to read about something you think you know everything about... and then it turns out it has further ties to something else you had no idea about. I argue people will do this, they will read what they think is safe. I've done it myself. Heck, if we take the idea seriously that if you really want to avoid spoilers about something, you should just stay away from the Wiki, I should stop editing it, because I have not read/played/whatever every single FR product covered here and I might want to later on. What I do is take an intentional risk - but I don't want to maximise it. As an example of spoilers that jump up on you, take Imoen. You'll not know it for the whole of the first game that she (spoiler removed upon further thought, see article if you don't mind it), and it's supposed to be a major revelation, but if you so much as look at the character infobox or the second sentence of the article, you'll see it immediately. And if someone reading this cared about spoilers for those games, how would you feel if I had just posted that information there where you least expected it? I've been spoiled similarly and worse at another Wiki, when looking at the very beginning of the plot of another game, and I've very much regretted its spoiling what may have been the best surprise in any story I've encountered. In retrospect, I should have known better than to look at even the beginning of a plot synopsis for just this reason, but the point of the whole thing was that what I found out was something so completely unexpected I had no way of foreseeing it. And I can only speak thus in retrospect because I have already learnt this lesson in a very unpleasant manner I should like to have avoided.

At the very least, then, we should instead of a simple spoiler warning have some doomy text warning people that spoilers can be anywhere in an encyclopedia, not just a disclaimer of responsibility for them. But I don't see why it has to be such a big either-or thing. While spoiler warnings can never cover everything (other than in the disclaimer sense), they can sometimes be placed just where they're helpful, and can do some good, making the Wiki more readable. Of course, if we're going to have an incomplete system of spoiler warnings, we should notify people of that too. For example, as for Drizzt mentioned above, if you can't do any better, it would help to have a single warning at the top similar to the front page one saying there won't be individual warnings. (Of course, that would partly face the same problems, but it would be more specific and at the very least allow for putting more specific warnings on pages wher they can be.) We have gained absolutely nothing by removing the warnings from the pages where they worked unproblematically. They had a purpose there and were helpful. The view that there should be none anywhere leads to nothing useful, unless it's contrasted in a false dilemma with the idea of covering everything. We should inform people that they're browsing at their own risk since we can't warn about everything, but since they will read anyway (and if they didn't, that would also decrease the value of this Wiki considerably), we can make warnings where we can.

Maybe I'm wrong here... but I don't think anyone in this debate has ever given any reason how having no spoiler warnings anywhere makes the Wiki better than if it has a system of spoiler warnings that can't cover everything. I've only seen the "false dilemma" and the "why should we care" arguments. And I do believe we should care about how this Wiki is for the people reading it, too.

Ville V. Kokko 11:55, 11 January 2009 (UTC)