to spoiler or not to spoiler: Characters.Gunnerkrigg Court

Back when I started the characters page for Gunnerkrigg Court, I put a notice at the top of the page in bold: "Expect blatant, unmarked spoilers. If you haven't read the comic first, you really should do so."

Back on Feb 4, EricDVH removed the first half of that notice, and proceeded to spoiler-tag a bunch of the stuff. For some characters (particularly the ones in the "Founders of the Court" section), the majority of the information about them has been tagged.

I'm all for the use of spoiler tags on main works pages, but I really don't see the point in this case. I have a hard time believing that someone could simultaneously care enough about this series to read in-depth analyses of the characters AND be worried about encountering spoilers AND not be caught up (It's a webcomic! If you can access TV Tropes, you can finish reading a webcomic!).

My instinct is to revert all the spoiler tags and add the warning back to the top of the page, but I feel I should get another opinion before I start throwing my weight around.

I didn't write any of that.

It strikes me that character pages are especially useful for new readers, I admit, though, I probably wasn't thorough enough in spoilering, since I now notice there are a bunch of Fangs of Summertime spoilers left. Also, I can't help issuing my reflexive disclaimer to people who complain about spoiler tags: All it takes is three clicks to disable them site-wide.

Eric,

Character pages aren't exempt from the normal spoiler guidelines. Only inherently spoilery tropes like Death Tropes and Ending Tropes get the luxury of being able to say "Unmarked spoilers ahead! Read at your own risk!"

Character sheets should respect the same spoiler guidelines as the main page. They don't get a free spoiler pass just because they're a subpage.

edited 7th Feb '11 8:38:23 PM by troacctid

Rhymes with "Protracted."

^^I'm not complaining about spoiler tags on the entire wiki. I like spoiler tags elsewhere. I feel that they're out of place on this specific page.

I'm reminded of a similar, unresolved discussion.

I didn't write any of that.

Looking through the page, I'd say that

• most of the information in spoiler tags in the section on Reynardine can be deleted completely. The point of these pages aren't to be a highly detailed recap of everything that happened, and that's what the Reynardine section reads like.
• Same thing with the Surma section.
• I'm not sure why Coyote calling Jones Wandering Eye is spoiler-worthy in an of itself...
• The paragraph that's completely spoilered out in the section on Jack can be rewritten to be less detailed as well, and there's no real point to having tropes listed for him if 19 of 28 of them are spoilered out. And really, what's spoilerish about tropes like Messy Hair, No Sense Of Personal Space, and Pet The Dog? Take out the spoilery details.
• The Ysengrim section is over spoilered as well, again, because the details that are spoilered out don't need to be there, for the most part. But why is it spoilered that he was once a wolf? Anyone looking at the picture can see that. The paragraph about him and Red and Blue is completely unnecessary.
• Geez. Rewrite the whole Jeanne section. There are 4 unspoilered sentences in 5 paragraphs. That's simply ridiculous. And then 4 of 9 tropes are also spoilered. You might as well cut it.
• "The elf" is even worse. The whole section is a spoiler. There's being careful and there's being obsessive.
• Same for Diego. Virtually the whole intro section and 4 of 5 tropes are spoilered.

Look, if you're that scared that maybe something someone reads will give away a plot point, just spoiler tag the whole damn page. It would make about as much sense as what it is now.

Seriousy, take out all the detailed descriptions and write a recap if you want to.

edited 7th Feb '11 9:24:30 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

The thing about those characters (especially everyone connected to Jean) is that EVERYTHING about them is a huge spoiler, and yet they're crucial to the story after their introduction (I do agree the amount of speculative character analysis may perhaps be somewhat excessive overall.)

This is hardly unusual, look at FMA's character page, for instance, particularly the Homonculi one.

Eric,

No. Those things are not crucial. They're interesting, but for someone who is interested in reading the story but hasn't yet, they are not crucial.

The Works and character pages are not the place for detailed recaps or analysis, which most of those are. We have Recaps and Analysis pages for that. The description on the works page and the characters page should be what you would tell someone who you were trying to interest in reading it.

And "[This other page] is worse" is not a defense.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Though I agree that this page goes over the top, and spoilers could be trimmed down at some parts, I don't thing that the above sentiment should give the standard for choosing cut material.

We are not a TV guide. It's possible that new audiences will look at us for guidance, but the wiki's mission is to categorize tropes that happen, even if they are spoilerrific.

I'm not familiar with this work, but I could imagine how some of these things could be spoilers, and character-defining events at the same time. If a character's very existence is a twist to the original set-up, it's all a spoiler. If a character was wearing a mask of false personality for half of the plot, his real personality is all a spoiler.

Cut the things that shouldn't be there even if they wouldn't be spoilers, but don't cut anything just because it is a spoier.

The thing is, though, if most of a character's section is spoilered, it's not very useful.

To get real value out of the page, they will need to highlight the spoilers anyway, so a big "unmarked spoiler" warning at the beginning of the page seems like the best solution in one of these cases.

edited 8th Feb '11 5:58:59 AM by Meeble

Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!

I think that you underestimate the number of people who use this site in ways that we can't quantify, because they don't tell us how they're using it. We serve up between a quarter and a half a million pages views a day. The Known Tropers with Troper Pages number around 6000. Perhaps as many as 1000 post regularly in the forums. Assuming that everyone uses the wiki the same way the people who post in the forums do is folly. Assuming that most people use the site the way you do is greater folly.

Look at the thread Series You Discovered Through The Wiki if you want evidence that there are a fair number of people who use works and character pages to find out if they want to give a work a try.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I'm not denying that there are people using it that way, and it's ok if we are pandering to these people as much as we can, but cutting tropabe content is beyond that.

If you are rewording a paragraph that needlessly brings up a spoiler, so it can later be unmarked, you are doing it right.

If you delete a paragraph of needless information, whether or not it's spoiler, you are doing it right.

If you delete a paragraph because it is spoiler, without even considering it's role, as you suggested with Jeanne's section, you are doing it wrong.

There were actually legit suggestions in your "looking through" list, like how Messy Hair, No Sense of Personal Space, and Pet the Dog are not spoiler titles on their own, so we could just remove tags. The page can be made more black with rational editing.

My first statement about the Jeanne section is Rewrite it. Then I said, if you have virtually the whole thing spoilered out, you might as well cut it — because it's useless as explanation or example.

edited 8th Feb '11 12:04:51 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

But for someone refreshing their memory on them, they are. Deleting spoileriffic characters from a character page is silly.

I agree that's what a work's main page is for, but I feel that a work's character page serves three purposes:

1. As you're experiencing something, to keep track of the cast and break down individual characters into tropes.
2. When you're getting back into later installments of something you've been into for a long time, to help recall who's who and what was going on.
3. Like you said, so prospective consumers can gauge a work.

I wasn't saying it's worse, I'm just saying it's a perfectly normal thing for continuity-heavy fiction.

None of those applied until after he was possessed, ditto the descriptive text for all three, so I just tagged the whole thing.

I think this is probably the main problem, as the page is incredibly long overall, has multi-paragraph recaps of their plot above the line at each character's description, and an awful lot of text in many of the trope examples.

Eric,

edited 8th Feb '11 4:39:10 PM by EricDVH

The character pages are not the place for detailed recaps. The Recap namespace exists for recaps.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Synopses and dramatis personæ aren't the same thing, which is why we have both, right?

Eric,

Considering how much of GC's plot involves revelations that force the reader to reinterpret previous chapters, a synopsis would end up rather non-linear. The descriptions on the character pages are very linear.

As for having long descriptions in addition to trope lists, I was following the precedent set by Characters.Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was the original character page.

edited 8th Feb '11 7:18:41 PM by MetaFour

I didn't write any of that.

As someone who doesn't care about spoilers and has not read the webcomic before, I'd say that unless simply knowing that stuff happened is a spoiler, a lot of the overy-tagged stuff can be rewritten- for instance, on the Jack section:

• Messy Hair: His hair's been getting steadily messier since Zimmingham, although it doesn't look unusually messy except by comparison to his old self.

Could be rewritten to be

• Messy Hair: His hair's been getting steadily messier since Zimmingham, although it doesn't look unusually messy except by comparison to his old self.

That way, people who do care won't know what caused his hair to be messy, which is presumably more important that that it is.

edited 9th Feb '11 7:32:03 AM by Wulf

They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?

Bump because we never got any consensus.

I didn't write any of that.

The long descriptions on the NGE page strike me as horribly pretentious. I don't think they should be imitated.

Currently taking a break from the site. See my user page for more information.

News here: I took care of the whole spoiler thing. I hope to have solved the problem.

Looks like a decent compromise.

I didn't write any of that.