Petition to change "Walking Spoiler" to "Active Spoiling Agent"

Because Walking Spoiler starts with W, which your average Troper is going to see pretty far down the list of tropes. Notify them that this is a spoiler, and fast, by simply changing the first letter of the Trope name to A.

Alternatively, I have noticed a tendency of making character pages spoiler-off entirely when a Walking Spoiler is present as they usually affect entries all over the page.

Edited by eroock on Nov 1st 2018 at 12:08:28 PM

Walking Spoiler has 3,000+ wicks and 10,000+ inbound links. That alone makes a change highly unlikely.

While I'm all for making spoilers more avoidable, I don't think this would have much effect. If you're on a character page and reading about such a character, you'll see a high concentration of spoiler markup on the character. That's something you'll notice before any individual trope. If you don't see that, you're on a spoilers off page, which means you don't care about spoilers. Also, in all cases I've seen of those characters, it's one that appears late in the character list, which makes it harder to accidentally view them.

Spoilers are the very nature of recounting the events of a story. We try to be sensitive about those types of things, but at a certain point the burden falls on the reader in order to not be spoiled. As such anyone getting upset about being spoiled while cruising around media pages designed to recap the media in question is hypocritical and it is self-defeating for the wiki itself. Changing Walking Spoiler to something that starts higher in the alphabet to stem off a potential premature spoiler doesn't make sense, because we tend to spoiler-tag examples of Walking Spoiler and that means the reader is reading the spoiler tags anyway.

I actually came across the Twist Ending to Split while reading the M. Night Shyamalan page (under Stealth Sequel), which 'pissed me off because I was deliberately avoiding spoilers for that movie, but I knew I really only had myself to blame.

Putting a "spoiler warning" at the top of the character description (or the folder, if it uses one) is much simpler.

It's not just much simpler, it's also what you're supposed to do. All Walking Spoilers must have their own folder (or a shared folder for all of them) which is clearly marked as such, and doesn't contain any spoiler tags.

Walking Spoiler is ofren misused as "a character that's involved in a plot twist" when it's actually "a character whose entire role in the story is a spoiler". If there is a good amount of non-spoilery stuff to say about them, they're not this trope.