Earlier today, I was reading an article about some fiction novel. And someone posted in the talk, something like "Uhhh, this gives away THE ENTIRE PLOT. There should be a spoiler warning or something."
I responded something like "Certainly not; including the entire plot, spoilers and all, is Wikipedia's house style." After reading through this thread (well, the parts that weren't about the MBTI), I actually still stand by it, even though I'm not a fan of Wikipedia's "information diarrhea right onto your face" paradigm.
Rollup spoiler sections might be OK, but they don't seem very like the way Wikipedia does things, to me. Wikipedia is at its best when it delivers a concise, but complete synopsis of the entire plot of a work. I do think it ought to be a little more obvious that if you want to read about a literary work without spoilers, this is not the site to go to.
I actually think that's a perfectly OK standpoint, even though I'm a BLP extremist, along the lines of "nearly all BLPs ought to be deleted." I'm not sure how those two viewpoints tie together.
Maybe that BLPs harm people, or have a strong risk of harming people, but (I feel) presenting the entire plot of a work is something that can validly be expected from a website that claims to be what Wikipedia claims to be.
In short, I guess I'm saying that with plot synopses, people simply ought to know better than to go to Wikipedia?
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