User:Ken Arromdee/temp

Spoiler Warning (second RFA)

 * Initiated by  Ken Arromdee at 16:07, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Involved parties



 * Confirmation that all parties are aware of the request


 * Confirmation that other steps in dispute resolution have been tried

Link to current spoiler talk page as of now. . The archives contain a *lot* of discussion, including longer presentations by others of the problems with current anti-spoiler activity. Discussion has been going on for months with no result. Moreover, a RFC was tried and closed with no useful result. . The policy has had a disputed tag several times, but it keeps getting removed. A request for AWB revocation was also tried but cancelled. This is a new version of a previous RFA ; it was closed with the most common reason being that mediation was required first. The mediation is now over (talk), closed with the note that mediation cannot handle editor conduct issues and arbitration is more appropriate.

Statement by Ken Arromdee
This RFA deals with the spoiler warning "policy", which has been pushed through while bypassing the need for consensus. Several users have removed over 45000 of them. The fact that people don't revert the 45000 changes is then used to claim the policy has "consensus" -- yet any attempt at reversion is quickly stopped.

Deleting 45000 warnings is inappropriate for several reasons:
 * The blatant circular reasoning: "if there was opposition to this policy, people would be restoring spoiler warnings", when the policy is being used to prevent people from restoring warnings in the first place.
 * Related: warnings have been deleted with comments like "(rm per WP:SPOILER (redundant with section title))", which implies that they were deleted using to a settled guideline. Most users won't check the guideline talk page to see if it's really settled, and certainly won't figure out that their failure to oppose it is used to justify the guideline.
 * The accusations of edit warring. If restoring warnings is edit-warring, it makes no sense to claim that the policy has consensus because the warnings are not restored.
 * The huge logistical difference between adding and deleting warnings. Deleting them is easy; use the "what links here" feature.  Moreover, opponents have used AWB, and Tony has now announced he'll use a bot to tell him when spoiler warnings are added.   Proponents have a harder task because deleted warnings are harder to find, must be added one by one (you can't mass-add like you can mass-delete), and they have no access to AWB or bots.  Under these circumstances, it's absurd to claim that because the warnings stay removed, there is consensus.
 * Part of the controversy is over editing the spoiler warning template itself. The current template  doesn't include the words "spoiler" or "warning".  This discourages users from restoring spoiler warnings by making them vague and almost useless.

The users listed above are three who have participated in the spoiler page discussion and whose edit histories show a substantial number of removals of spoiler warnings, plus Tony Sidaway, who is the most prominent public supporter of the claim that the 45000 removals have consensus because they have not been reverted. There may be others, but I intend to establish whether this is proper behavior for any user. I don't have the technical skills to determine the full set of users responsible for all 45000 removals.

The spoiler talk page has degenerated into opponents arguing over whether almost all or almost almost all of the 45000 warnings are inappropriate; the removal itself is treated as a fait accompli and those who disagree with it are mostly ignored. This is another unreasonable form of "consensus": consensus-by-exhaustion where people get tired of talking to a brick wall for months.

As this guideline enforcement has been done on a Wikipedia-wide scale, it has gone far beyond content disputes on any individual article. Policies not followed include the AWB policy ("Do not do anything controversial with it"), WP:POINT, and particularly WP:Consensus. Note that this RFA case isn't about whether the spoiler guideline itself is good; it's about whether the activity of deleting 45000 warnings and enforcing a disputed policy is appropriate, and about establishing consensus in questionable ways.

Clerk notes

 * (This area is used for notes by non-recused Clerks.)