Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-8107636-20130607102031/@comment-188432-20130607143037

Your last paragraph sums up wiki policy. See Tardis:About for an overview of wiki policy. See T:OFF REL for incredibly detailed examples of what, precisely, counts as a spoiler in each medium.

That will answer your question, but I'm going to now give a few more thoughts, because this is an important and topical issue around the wiki.

A spoiler couldn't be defined as "what I personally don't know about". We'd never get any work done around here, as we'd be trying to guard against what viewers in certain parts of the world haven't yet seen. Heck, Canadians didn't get an official airing of Voyage of the Damned until like last year or something ridiculous like that. New Zealanders have, at various points in the BBC Wales run, been months behind the BBC One premiere. Many print releases don't make it to South Africa. IDW comic books were, until the advent of the IDW comic reader app, unavailable in the UK, except as a trade paperback once the story was finished in the US.

Doctor Who stories in all media are released at different times in different regions of the world. So we have to have the more objective standard of "after the official release of the story in whichever country first released the story".

I'm sorry that we spoiled something for you, but it is almost a month after the end of the series and several weeks after the (ahem, official) DVD/Blu-Ray release of series 7b. There's only so much we can do to protect people from spoilers. We vigorously — some have recently said ruthlessly — protect the site from spoilers about un-released stories. But our somewhat stern approach to spoilers can only work if the floodgates are completely opened swiftly after the credits roll on an episode. There has to be a simple and common standard that everyone understands and works toward.

At the end of the day, we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Our line is the time of release. If you don't want to be spoiled about a story that has already been released, watch, read or listen to the story before you come here. People who wait until the whole series is released on DVD are at a disadvantage with this site, because we will go back and change the article about episode 1 based on information from episode 9, and then it'll get revised again based on new info from episode 14. If you were using our site back in September 2012, you wouldn't have been spoiled after Asylum, cause we didn't know anything beyond that episode. Nine months later, we do, naturally, know plot-ending details.

Another helpful clue for you is that if there exists a page about story on this wiki, there's an almost 100% chance that the story has been officially released, and that its details may be freely seen anywhere on the wiki.

Let me end by pointing out the relevance of this thread to the broader debate some members of the community have recently brought to bear against our spoiler policy. Do you see now how difficult having a spoiler policy is? On the one hand, we got people who are complaining that they can't post about "official" announcements impacting stories that are months away, while poor Mister3hj got spoiled by something that's a month old. So our policy, which may seem to you Draconian, or at least administrative fiat, is actually a compromise, between your views and those of people like Mister3hj. And lest you think that Mister3hj's views are atypical, do remember there was a huge, multi-year debate on Wikipedia as to whether spoiler tags were required across all their fiction articles to protect people, even when the story was decades old.

By pointing to, and maintaining, a precise date as the demarcator of spoilers, we're giving people simple information that they can then use to decide whether — or when — to use our site.