Here's a quote from Spoilers Off: "If the copyright has expired, or if it predates the very concept of copyright, it's probably free to spoil. In the vast majority of countries, this roughly coincides with anything Older Than Radio. The cat is out of the bag for all of William Shakespeare's plays." That doesn't really make sense to me, for these reasons.

1. A murder mystery shouldn't be spoiled regardless of how old it is. This applies equally to any work with a Twist Ending. This is equally true regardless of the work's age. Even if the copyright on Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels expired last week, spoilers should be on. That's basic tact.

2. That something is 2,000 years old doesn't mean anyone's had 2,000 years to read it. I've had no more time to read any play by Aristophanes than I've had to read John Grisham's A Time to Kill.

3. Some old works have permeated the public consciousness, but most classics haven't and are completely obscure. To return to Shakespeare, at least 98% of people know nothing (or close-to-nothing) about Cymbeline, Love's Labour's Lost or All's Well that End's Well, and those plays are usually not even mentioned in literature class. The same is true for the vast majority of old books.

4. Conversely, the twists in the copyrighted movies The Empire Strikes Back, The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense are much more famous than the twists in, well, in any classic murder mystery, so if we're going by what people can be expected to know about already, those movies should be fairer game for spoiling.

5. In many cases, a work being old means people have had less of a chance to read it already. The newest Dan Brown novel is very easy to get access to, and I haven't read it only because I didn't feel like it. When it comes to very old books, though, finding out that they exist is much harder, let alone getting ahold of a translation into modern English (or any other language you speak).

In short: The idea that a work's age determines how okay it is to spoil the work just doesn't make much sense in practice. We need to adjust that idea. The impression I get is that whoever wrote that might have written about old works but actually meant famous classics specifically, which most old novels and movies just aren't. The obscure ones vastly outnumber the famous ones.

Therefore, I think we need to at least limit the spoilers-off policy on very old works to stuff that's actually famous, or at least to stuff that has no real twists, like Huckleberry Finn and Don Quixote.

Thoughts?

Edited by MichaelKatsuro on Nov 27th 2019 at 9:09:35 PM

I agree.

As I said in the ATT thread, I personally keep spoilers un-hidden. I'd rather be spoiled on a work I don't know, than see every page as a block of blank text. But that's just me, and I know a lot of other people would prefer to not be spoiled on a work they haven't seen yet.

Why should these people get spoiled on the ending of, say, Antigone, just because it's old and well-known? If we wouldn't spoil the ending to The Empire Strikes Back, why can't we treat other works the same way, and let people who want to protect themselves from spoilers protect themselves from spoilers? It only seems fair, and would only mean we'd have to hide the biggest spoilers.

I mean, it just seems a bit arbitrary. Either all potential spoilers should be treated the same way (with the obvious exception of those found on Spoilers-Off pages, in which case everyone had their warning already), or we shouldn't have spoiler-tags at all.

Yeah. It's just... If people dislike spoilers, they don't regard it as more okay to spoil a book that they're reading—and knew nothing about beforehand—just because it's an old book.

The question of whether your's okay with spoilers or not has to do with personality, or with what genre the book is, and not with how old the book is.

Edited by MichaelKatsuro on Nov 27th 2019 at 9:48:48 PM

I have seen some people seriously suggest that there be no spoiler tags at all anywhere, but I tend to not agree with that idea, as the message that would send is "if you don't want to be spoiled about absolutely every work ever, don't even look at this site." Though, that's already the case with regard to editing (since it's plaintext).

This actually reminds me of a discussion from a little ways back about... some Pop-Cultural Osmosis trope. Mainstream Obscurity I think?

We realized that, while in the 80s or 90s, it was perhaps possible to reasonably catch up on all the "classic films", the number of "classic films" is increasing every year and that's never going to stop (barring some apocalypse). At some point, if it isn't true already, it would be physically impossible to catch up on all "classic" pop culture in a lifetime. Just look at the statistics of how much content is uploaded to Youtube every day. Even taking into account Sturgeon's Law, that's a lot of stuff to catch up on.

In other words, yeah, it's utterly impossible to expect that people are familiar with any given work, and that window is narrowing every moment. It doesn't matter how old it is. Like you said, just because something is 2000 years old doesn't mean that anyone has had 2000 years to read it.

Any given mention of something can be someone's first exposure to it, so it seems sensible to always give the benefit of the doubt to spoilers. You can always choose to spoil yourself. You can't choose to unspoil.

Edited by Jokubas on Nov 27th 2019 at 12:35:29 PM

In my opinion, all spoilers should be unmarked throughout the entire wiki and, much like the strikethrough markup, we should have spoiler markup be forcibly limited to forums.

Why do I say this? Here's why:

• You're on a website discussing fiction. Obviously, you will run into plot details. It's inevitable and unavoidable here.
• Relevant sections are already labeled as containing plot details. Lists of examples, especially those under folder markup or subpages, are already described in such a way that makes it clear that plot details will be disclosed. Attempting to hide such details are thus redundant to them already being hidden.
• Calling things spoilers is subjective. The fact that It Was His Sled is a thing proves this: this requires that we use our own opinions in order to determine what details should or should not be spoiled, lest they impact our enjoyment of the work going in. While there are some things we may be able to reach general consensus on, there are also plenty of things that I imagine would either be tagged or untagged at various points on the wiki.

I'm willing to explain myself further, but I'd be much happier without all the invisible text. Of course, I always make sure to have Show Spoilers enabled.

Edited by Brainulator9 on Nov 27th 2019 at 4:11:46 AM

I'm conflicted about that, myself. I completely sympathize with people who want to protect themselves from spoiling a work they're interested in by accident (such as when reading a random, non-Spoilers-Off trope page). I also completely agree that in general people are way too overzealous about what should and shouldn't be considered a spoiler, going overboard in their attempts to protect people from knowing anything that may be considered a slight twist in the plot.

I also understand your point, about how on a site about cataloging and analyzing media, people should expect works to be spoiled- but as established, we have a lot of people who care very much about whether or not something is ruined for themselves or others.

In that case, I believe the best course of action is to stop lurking here and look at the work first, then come back.

Note that I'd permit the spoiler markup on forums, and I wouldn't change how spoilers are prohibited within page quotes, images, or descriptions. Combined with all examples being in folders or subpages, the risk of accidental spoiling should be relatively low, even with all the [[spoiler:]] markup gone.

To be fair, though, I don't think age or copyright status should matter in this regard, given that copyright statuses vary by country and that age =/= exposure.

Edited by Brainulator9 on Nov 27th 2019 at 4:56:28 AM

Thanks, both of you. So getting back to my original point: this far, all three of us who've posted have agreed that spoiler policy for works shouldn't be determined by the work's age.

Edited by MichaelKatsuro on Nov 27th 2019 at 11:21:06 AM

I disagree. For public-domain works, you can just look up the ending. For example here is an article to the ending of Ulysses, which is in the public domain.

You can also go and look up the ending right now to Frozen II or Spiderman Homecoming. That doesn't mean those movies should be spoiled for everyone. I mean, seriously. Just because someone has the ability to go and look up the ending to a work doesn't mean people who don't want to know how that work ends should have it spoiled for them.

Public domain or not, the spoiler policy shouldn't draw lines based solely on how old a work happens to be.

Wait. Surely you know that you can look up the ending of pretty much any famous work of fiction, new or old?

If we retain public domains works' automatic spoilers-off policy, then I think having a warning would be nice (more so as a suggestion than an actual rule), since not all readers are going to be familiar with that policy (since not all readers are editors, and readers who don't edit probably don't bother reading Administrivia pages unless they end up making an account).

I think the warning 𝕋𝕒𝕓𝕤 suggested in the ATT thread works:

As for whether the ending can be looked up, public domain works go further than that. For public domain works, it's perfectly legal to have the whole thing online, free of charge. Wikisource does that with public domain literature.

I do agree with the opening post that public domain works shouldn't automatically have spoilers-off status, but if that policy has to stay, then I think the warning I quoted works as a compromise.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 27th 2019 at 5:12:57 AM

I meant that you can look up the text and read the ending. Here, for example is the last chapter of Moby Dick.

That still doesn't explain why the ending should be spoiled for people who don't want to know it.

Yes, you can look it up online. Why is that a reason to spoil it for the people who'd prefer not to look it up?

I feel it's a bit muddleheaded to suggest removing spoilers on the wiki while keeping them on the forums. Most threads are about a particular work and come with the expectation that you have caught up. There are exceptions, but mostly the arguments against spoilers apply just as well to the forums.

I also think that the criterion of "how old the work is" is wrong. It seems to be applied because of the oldest stories we have, like myths and folklore, are never given spoiler warnings, and people extrapolate from there. However this is more because anything from oral tradition cannot have twists the way modern fiction can; even Oedipus Rex ran on the audience knowing all along. Oral storytelling relied on retelling what the audience already knew, adding without changing the overall structure, and tended to have either simple plots guided by theme more than narrative logic, or the Random Events Plot where things were piled on as needed. In this context, spoilers are usually pointless.

But from at least the seventeenth century onwards, we get novels that can set up surprises for the reader. And we can't go "It's old, you should have read it"; most people have not read all of Agatha Christie's novels, never mind those of lesser known authors. Popular knowledge, not age, should be used, hence why nobody puts spoiler warnings on Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. (By the way: It Was His Sled is misnamed, there isn't much knowledge of that particular reveal in Europe at least.)

Where spoilers are really needed on the wiki is in trope example entries. We can't expect a reader to have seen every work a trope may have appeared in. I can see a case for keeping them off work pages, but then some things can take a while to get through. Short and easily accessible things can be safely unspoilered, like Doki Doki Literature Club!.

I have come across more than one twist in my time here, and I accept it as coming with the territory. Revealing secrets is unavoidable, but we can still minimise them.

Edited by Reymma on Nov 27th 2019 at 11:49:20 AM

I think my argument for leaving it on the forums is that forum posts are authored by one person whereas the wiki is authored by many people. The rules against saying This Troper don't apply so much on the forums as they do on the wiki.

I agree. I'd also like to comment that the orally told stories you mentioned are mostly known to modern audiences via written archives, so even their plots can't be expected to be universally known.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 27th 2019 at 6:17:35 AM

I believe that a work page (i.e. Literature/X) should be spoiler-free and with a warning before the examples. Trope pages, however, should be spoiler marked. I don't want to see a spoiler on a film I'm planning to see soon just because I stumbled into it while reading, say, Badass Boast.

That's a good point. Using an automatic spoilers-off policy for public domain works isn't as ideal when information about them is on the same page as information for copyrighted works, even if we go with having a warning on the public domain works' own pages.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 27th 2019 at 6:21:04 AM

That's actually a really good compromise. If you're on a work's page, you're exposing yourself to spoilers just by going there. You are choosing to read the page. But on a trope page, it's a lot more likely to get spoiled by accident. Of course, for some tropes (like Death Tropes), they should still be spoilers-off.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 27th 2019 at 7:20:21 AM

If everything's within subpages or folder markup, does that still not count as hidden, though?

I don't think so. You could just be curious to see how, say, Films use the Jerk with a Heart of Gold trope, and then run into a spoiler about a character from a movie you were hoping to watch.

That’s not a fair comparison. Just because I’m okay seeing a spoiler for Super Mario Galaxy doesn’t mean I’d be okay seeing a spoiler for Super Mario Odyssey, but they’d be grouped together in any folder or subpage.

Also,

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Nov 27th 2019 at 8:37:48 AM

This thread is getting out of hand very quickly. It's supposed to just be about the public domain spoiler policy, not literally all spoilers. I have some stuff I'd like to say on that topic, but I won't, because it would be a dick move for me to say "here's my opinion, now drop the topic."

Anyway, onto the public domain spoilers question: The idea is that anything sufficiently old is well-known, and therefore not worth tagging for spoilers. As noted, that doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, so I am onboard with allowing to tag spoilers for older works.

However, there are things that are so famous that they're part of public consciousness; The Bible, of course, is the big one. The problem is that due to Fan Myopia, it's hard to tell what is genuinely well-known or not.