logic[]
The hold it! page has no spoliers, so we should take down the warning. Apollojustice4all (talk) 20:25, May 13, 2014 (UTC)
Music tracks[]
Since I'm currently planning on working on pages for individual music tracks, I thought now would be the time to address this. The policy page says, and I quote:
- "Other mainspace articles such as articles about games or music are probably written in an out-of-universe style and are not likely to contain spoilers. Nonetheless, the reader is still advised to exercise caution; for example, Pursuit contains what many people may consider a spoiler."
Should we continue to abide by this policy? After all, when you start creating individual pages for music tracks, it becomes difficult to write a significantly long description of practically any of them without including at least some spoilers. I've done what I can to avoid them by using masked links or intentionally vague wording, but this won't always be possible; Mr. Reus's theme, for example, is hard to talk about without mentioning a spoiler.
Basically, I'm wondering whether we should extend the "spoilers may be found on any page at any point" to include soundtrack pages. Bluebully (talk) 22:18, December 5, 2017 (UTC)
Universal collapsible sections[]
I suppose now is as good a time as any to throw this out there. Wikipedia's mobile site has collapsible sections by default. I think the main difficulty of implementing something like this on this wiki -- other than FANDOM not offering that kind of functionality to my knowledge -- is that the way we've structured the wikitext in articles doesn't lend itself to an easy implementation. We've had a template for the "Main article:" text since 2016, but it has almost never been used, with the text being inputted manually instead. One way of implementing collapsible sections would be to expand this main article template to have that kind of functionality.
I guess I bring this up now due to the recent creation of Template:Spoiler and Template:SpoilerEnd, adapted from the Fire Emblem Wiki. Hypothetically, if we wanted to make sections collapsible by default, something like these templates could simply be used, and maybe even merged into the existing main article template. What I'm wondering, then, is what might be considered sufficient to inform a reader that there are spoilers for such-and-such games/episodes in a given section. My long-standing assumption has been that the "Main article:" text would be enough, and the reason people get spoiled by bios despite this is that the section's contents are still visible while the reader is being informed of games/episodes the section draws information from. Maybe that's not true, and we do in fact need boxes specifically warning readers of spoilers?
A relevant difference between Ace Attorney and something like Fire Emblem is that AA is a mystery series involving drip-feeding information to the audience. While something like FE can get by with just warning about ending spoilers, just about every detail in AA has the potential to have a not-insignificant impact on someone's experience of the games. In fact, with AA being historically inspired by Columbo (a show where the culprit's identity is known to the audience, and the characters' journey to coming to that conclusion is the point), some details can arguably have even more of an impact than ending spoilers and identity revelations.
Maybe all this is a bit rambling and disorganized, so the main points here are:
- Should we just try to make most/all article sections collapsible?
- Are explicit spoiler warnings necessary, or would it suffice to collapse each section and give a "Main article:" style text listing relevant games/episodes? Depending on how often we use collapsible sections, there could be concerns with aesthetics or subjectivity on what should be hidden under a spoiler warning.
Capefeather (talk) 19:02, 27 June 2021 (UTC)
- The most common way I've been spoiled by bios is seeing their contents when trying to look at infoboxes or check something at the bottom of the page, like a name pun or meaning, though I do think contents of bios being visible while you're seeing what the section has spoilers for can be an issue. Because of the creative names of section headers, it can be hard to tell what game or case is being discussed in their contents until they're already visible on the page, as well. Some section headers also make spoilers very easy to infer, even if they aren't spelled out exactly. I do think collapsible sections would help with a lot of this, and it would probably be fine to just say "Main article:", maybe with a general template at the top of the page clarifying that there will be spoilers in collapsible sections or something. However, I do think the spoiler warnings or something similar and spoiler blur in sections for sections like personality or name meanings (Or even appearance in some cases) would be best, as often parts of those sections (Or most for name meanings) don't have spoilers, or seem like they wouldn't. PeriwinkleDreams (talk) 22:45, 28 June 2021 (UTC)
This policy shouldn't exist[]
There's virtually no reason for this to exist; this is an encyclopedia, so obviously there WILL be spoilers at EVERY turn. Here, read this as a reason why no wiki, period, should ever have spoiler templates. ToThAc (talk) 00:14, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
- The problem with this is that it doesn't reflect reality. Saying that it's "common sense" to expect spoilers on a page doesn't change the fact that all sorts of people of all sorts of perceived intelligence levels run into spoilers that they did not want to see. Whether or not a wiki has spoiler tools and policies in place depends on the wiki and its subject matter. This policy page, for its part, merely states that there are spoiler-hiding tools, and explains how to use them, but there is no hard rule in place as to when to use them. Capefeather (talk) 00:23, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
- The reason I made the spoiler templates in the first place was because people on other websites kept complaining about seeing them at the top of pages instead of just like...going on here and bringing it up. I got sick of seeing it and seeing people bash the wiki for it without trying to do anything to fix it. This wasn't supposed to be some big permanent thing, but at the same time there are a lot of places spoilers are on this wiki that they do not need to be in. (Intro paragraphs, cross-game counts, etc.) I agree that there is no way to just expect a wiki to have no spoilers, but enough people had an issue with it that I felt it needed to be brought up, especially with Chronicles' release. And for the record, while I do agree with you generally, most Mario games have far less things that could be spoiled than AA games do (With the only possible exception of the RPGs), so I don't think that's the best comparison to make here. PeriwinkleDreams (talk) 01:52, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
- If the argument is about people using common sense, then, in my opinion, common sense would dictate that it should probably be fine to go to a character's page after they've died, like, say...a certain character from The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles whose page has, like, a million spoilers. And you would certainly think it would be fine to scroll to the earliest parts of a character's history section for a character you've seen (especially if you've finished the game the character debuts in), but that will often contain backstory details that can be very spoilery. I'm sure there are plenty of wikis where it really doesn't make sense, but I don't think this is one of them, even if there could be better ways to go about fixing the issue. Pikapika A La Mode (talk) 02:25, 20 September 2022