Spoilers Off for old works?

Related posts: [1], [2].

Older Than Radio (before 1890) and public domain works are automatically Spoilers Off. Should we keep it this way or no?

My hat is in the "age shouldn't matter" pile regardless of what else is done here. Same with public domain.

Not sure if arguments about particularly famous works and cancelling the spoiler formatting period suit this thread, but will note that these were raised.

Edited by Amonimus on May 8th 2023 at 11:59:21 AM

Yep, my hat remains in "age doesn't matter, treat all works the same, on a case-by-case basis".

I agree that we should be more begginer friendly and that means being more thoughtful that people wont just immediately know everything.

I'd say limit this to what Spoilers Off lists as "mythology, legend, and religion". Automatically spoilers-off Older Than Radio stuff should also overlap with School Study Media like Romeo and Juliet, where people are likely to already know about twists if they have to learn about it in school.

Edited by Piterpicher on May 8th 2023 at 11:47:20 AM

But what about shorts? I think they should be spoilers off due to the short length and ease of accessibility.

That's unrelated to age.

I don’t mind keeping an age cutoff (spoiler tagging the Gospels or Romeo and Juliet seems kind of unnecessary), but “the last 200 or so years” is a little young. I could agree with bumping it up a couple notches on the Older Than… scale.

Edited by Synchronicity on May 8th 2023 at 10:50:35 AM

If we keep some form of "OK to not spoiler tag old works", we could at least modify the phrasing on that Spoilers Off entry to not tie to copyright expiration, and say such stories qualify for Spoilers Off but you may bring in other considerations.

I don't have a strong view either way on the current cut-off point, but to follow/combine my comments on the other threads:

• Any rule based on age or other considerations will never be perfect and I think we'll want exceptions, as well as a mechanism to establish/review them.

• In line with the recent discussions about Characters pages, I believe spoiler policy on a particular page shouldn't be changed unilaterally.

• If we decide a particular page for a very old work should keep tagged spoilers despite its age, I'm strongly in favour of a comment to tell editors that it's already been discussed, ideally with a link to a thread where they can read the posts and revisit this if they wish.

• If we decide a particular page should be Spoilers Off, I strongly believe it should have a top-of-page warning to tell readers there are unmarked spoilers and, ideally, why that decision was made (e.g. age and/or It Was His Sled considerations). Again, ideally this should be accompanied by a comment so editors can see where/how the decision was made and revisit it if need be.

If we do move the cut-off or change policy in other ways, I'm conscious we also have lots of pages that already have unmarked spoilers (often with no visible warning) and we may want some sort of cleanup, if only to add a Spoilers Off "we've not discussed this one since the policy changed" note.

Edited by Mrph1 on May 8th 2023 at 6:07:57 PM

Personally I would take the opposite view and say that all work pages should be Spoilers Off, but then I am the sort of person who reads the last couple of pages of a book before finishing the first chapter.

Beyond that I feel the current rules are fine.

Given that profile settings can be set to automatically show spoilers, I think we cater to that approach without actually needing to change the pages, though?

The only overhead is for editors to add the tagging for those who don't want to see them.

Edited by Mrph1 on May 8th 2023 at 6:24:01 PM

Ah right. I always forget about that function for some reason.

On one of the older threads about this topic, I argued equally passionately for the idea of all works being spoiler free as I did for all works being allowed to have spoiler tags. This is mostly because my main concern is consistency in our rules, where either we want to prevent spoilers, or we don't.

Of course, I don't actually agree with making every work page spoilers off — I'd much prefer we just allow even "old" works to be spoiler tagged if there's a good case for it. If there are twists to spoil, we can't simply assume every reader is up to date with every work made 200+ years ago. That's simply a ridiculous thing to claim. As time passes, more and more works fall into the public domain, and that makes it a very arbitrary cut off- why is it okay one year to hide spoilers, but not the next?

Think about all the old mystery stories that you'd automatically set to spoiler-off

Personally, I think the only things that really make sense to never have spoilers on are the ones where even the original audience was expected to know the outcome going in. Religious texts. Myths. Legends. The odd story that's so ubiquitous that it's often dragged into other stories when they need a play or something—the well-known stories by the Brothers Grimm or Andersen, Romeo and Juliet. But not 'every single fairy tale and work by Shakespeare just because they're old'.

Edited by RainehDaze on May 8th 2023 at 7:02:53 PM

I'd be tempted to include Shakespeare's history plays (and those by his contemporaries etc.) in any spoilers off ruling as well,

Richard II might not be the best-known play, for example, but there are few spoilers in the king's downfall and I think they're all in history books anyway.

There's also an argument that things like Troilus and Cressida, as a retelling of the Trojan War, or The Two Noble Kinsmen (from Chaucer's 14th century The Canterbury Tales) aren't worth tagging if the originals aren't tagged.

Edited by Mrph1 on May 8th 2023 at 7:12:15 PM

I dunno, some of those plays only have a loose relationship with actual history. Kind of iffy; take macbeth for instance.

I mean, I feel like a lot of people only know Macbeth as "that Shakespeare villain" and not "a real life king" anyway.

Now, whether we tag these works or not, eh, I'm sort of ambivalent on. I never really know where the line should be drawn for spoilers anyway so I'll mostly leave Shakespeare up to consensus.

What is considered to be spoilers is inconsistent. So is what works are old and famous enough to not need spoiler tagging. And how much tagging in an entry is necessary. So there will never be consistency in rules. 5 The age thing mentioned on Spoilers Off works better the older the work is (2000 years old v. 200 years old), but for younger items, I think "exactly how many years old is this media?" isn't a good thing to consider alone. Or maybe at all.

Edited by Tabs on May 8th 2023 at 11:22:07 AM

Well, by consistency I didn't mean that we needed a one consistent ruling on when and how we apply spoiler tags. Mostly that I don't think we should exclude centuries of works from being tagged solely on the basis of their age. Basically, we shouldn't arbitrarily change the rule just because of something as random as when the work was published, especially as more and more works would have to be spoiler stripped as time passes.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 8th 2023 at 2:24:14 PM

It's basically a question of trying to guess what works are old and famous enough that It Was His Sled applies to the entire thing, and aside from the fairy tales and the like that just feature in other stories all the time without explanation, there's not really all that many things that seem like they'd qualify.

And that's where the judgment calls and consensus come in. Macbeth, as mentioned, is far more distanced from real history than most of the historical plays. And that's before you get to the witches and ghost.

The ones about British kings are frequently distorted by a bit of propaganda, but they stay close to the real outcomes even when characters are twisted a bit towards heroism or villainy.

Edited by Mrph1 on May 8th 2023 at 7:27:23 PM

Well their is the bible of course. I'd also add Greek and Norse mythology since both are often used in media.

Edited by miraculous on May 8th 2023 at 11:27:30 AM

Even with the Bible...

Jesus, yes, pretty well known. Genesis, Moses and the plagues, maybe Samson, David and Goliath and John the Baptist. Job, maybe.

But once you get past that, I'm not sure It Was His Sled applies to Jeremiah, Ezekiel or many of the other old testament figures and stories. There is a lot of content in there.

Edited by Mrph1 on May 8th 2023 at 7:34:55 PM

Obviously, I'm in agreement with everyone who supports treating this matter on a case-by-case basis.

For the sake of clarification, though, is this "spoilers off" "rule" supposed to be applied to works Older Than Radio in addition to works in the Public Domain or works in the Public Domain that are Older Than Radio? I only ask because while works Older Than Radio may be in the Public Domain, not all works in the Public Domain are Older Than Radio, such as awesome feature films like D.O.A. (1949), Charade (1963), Death Rides a Horse (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Edited by SeanMurrayI on May 8th 2023 at 11:35:57 AM

I argued about the Bible on the last thread. Specifically, that it isn't a work designed to have spoilers. It's weird to go in and spoiler tag parts of a religious text, as though the people reading the page would really care one way or another to be "spoiled" on the events of a book like that.