My opinion on "ItWasHisSled"-esque spoilers

OH COME ON I HAVEN'T SEEN EPISODE III YET, IT'S ONLY BEEN TEN YEARS

Arriving a bit late to this discussion, but I have been firmly of the belief that character pages should have the absolutely lightest use of spoilers if at all for a while now. By putting tropes in character folders you're already attributing a degree of spoiler-ness to them that main pages don't see, and on top of that when you get into problems with walking spoilers and secret identities and the like it just turns into a mess.

Rocks fall, everyone miraculously survives.

I'm still in favor of de-spoilering Character sheets. Maybe implementing an automatic page-tag thing that says spoiler-tagging is not allowed, spoilers off, have a nice day. Not sure if there's a way to automagically remove spoiler tags, but it could be an LTP.

edited 18th Feb '15 10:27:01 AM by SolipSchism

It can, but is not guaranteed to.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I was more surprised that it was supposed to be a twist then by the actual twist itself. It's actually not so much that it is It Was His Sled as it is a prime example of Captain Obvious Reveal and The Un-Twist mish-mashed with Idiot Plot.

Could we possibly do a crowner here, or is that only allowed the repair shop.

edited 18th Feb '15 12:29:43 PM by SatoshiBakura

One time, my flat mate and I met a guy from United Arab Emirates who knew absolutely nothing about Star Wars but wanted to find out what the big deal was. So we watched all six of the movies, in original release order, over the course of a week or so.

The reveal that Chancellor Palpatine, Darth Sideous, and The Emperor were all the same person took him totally by surprise.

See, the funny thing is, at no point in the original trilogy does anyone refer to Palpatine by name—he's just "The Emperor". It's because of the advertising, and the Expanded Universe, and Popcultural Osmosis, that "everyone knows" the big bad of the original trilogy was Emperor Palpatine. If you manage to go into the prequel trilogy without knowing the Emperor's last name, as that guy from UAE did, then all the "obvious" foreshadowing of Chancellor Palpatine's turn is suddenly a lot less obvious.

I didn't write any of that.

It's one of those things (like the name of Coruscant) that sneaked in from the EU, although I think the name Palpatine was originally in the ghostwritten novelisation of the first film in 1977.

@49: Just because you wouldn't read character pages before knowing all the spoilers in a spoiler-heavy work doesn't automatically mean others wouldn't as well, Fighteer. Not everyone shares your mindset.

Then they voluntarily take on the risk of encountering spoilers. This isn't hard.

edited 22nd Feb '15 5:52:21 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Staying away from the pages isn't what the problem is, but rather the Fridge Logic about why we would have spoiler tags on the character pages in the first place if we are advised to stay away from them anyway.

edited 22nd Feb '15 6:30:27 PM by SatoshiBakura

I've said this before and I'll say it again. The purpose of a wiki article is to convey information to the reader. Spoiler tags obstruct that purpose. We allow them as a courtesy, but you read a wiki article for a work you haven't finished yet at your own risk, always.

The onus is always on the reader to avoid articles that they might find themselves upset to be spoiled by.

edited 22nd Feb '15 8:04:36 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Seems like there's a trend here in favor of character pages being spoiler tag free. Should we make a crowner to vote on whether this is a move we want to motion into reality?

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.

I can see logic of the arguments against it, but honestly I don't find them very compelling. I'd vote in favor of character sheets being Spoilers Off.

I don't see the point of a blanket ban on spoiler tags on Characters pages. You can still obscure the details of a plot point without concealing the tropes themselves. We might also want to be stricter about keeping plot tropes off of those subpages.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Blanket bans are bad, especially when no ban works on a great number of character pages. Even on spoiler-heavy pages it's still possible to raise the bar of what needs to be hidden. On the other hand, that would require people to think a little and make a judgement, so it probably wouldn't work. Still, there's no reason to ban spoilers on a light Slice of Life gag series with little continuity just because there are other works with lots of spoilers.

Check out my fanfiction!

Another thought brought on by the Scooby-Doo pages: Character pages are more likely to turn into Self-Fulfilling Spoilers, since you already have the added context of the character it's applied to.

edited 26th Feb '15 8:37:26 AM by Darksilverhawk

Rocks fall, everyone miraculously survives.

All the more reason for the ban of spoiler tags on character pages.

I will make a crowner now.

Still not the right thread for this.

If a mod closed a thread about it and directed the poster here, then I don't see how it could be the wrong thread.

Still waiting on that crowner even though I made it yesterday.

There have been objections in moderator Skype, hence I haven't hooked it yet.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Several of the mods are hesitant about the wisdom of establishing a precedent that wiki-wide policy of this order is made in a forum thread, by a minuscule number of posters compared to the number of people who will be affected by it.

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

I see. Is there anything that can be done to attract more attention or something?

Even with a link to this thread on the Main Page, the number of people who would vote on the crowner would be a small fraction of TVT readers.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

I don't see it as significantly different from any of the other votes on sweeping changes that took place after the discussion of only a few members that only got publicized in the headlines several days after the vote had started.

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.