User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-80.74.111.178-20130917151542/@comment-20725805-20130917225842

I'll repeat: it's not the content of the article that bothers me, but the placement on the site. I've yet to watch the episode "An Unearthly Child," so I wouldn't read the article unless I specifically did not care to have that episode spoiled. It's clearly marked as an article about an episode, so I go in with some idea of the kind of information I'll find.

Imagine, however, if the first sentence of An Unearthly Child described how the Fifth Doctor died. It's possible that the Fifth Doctor's death is relevant to that episode (I don't know, as I said I haven't seen it), but I doubt it really belongs front-and-center, and I'm sure many readers would be displeased at this placement despite, theoretically, it not being a spoiler. It would both be unnecessary and detracting to the general purpose of this wiki (I'd assume, anyway... you probably know the general purpose of this wiki better than I do).

The counter-example that I'm specifically not complaining about (which is to say, this is okay) is River's presence in the list of Time Lords. Again, a user knows that they're looking for certain information when they click a certain link, and it's their fault for clicking. With the search function as it is, a user could be looking for *anything* and run into completely unrelated information. That's the bit that I have a problem with: that the output has nothing to do with the input, *and* is plot-sensitive. If I'd done a search specifically for River Song, or even something related like Silence in the Library, I wouldn't disagree with being shown River's full name. It's that, in the screencapped case, the input was an episode that occurs a full season before River even appears, has no bearings on her whatsoever, and the output is irrelevant to said episode and simultaneously plot-sensitive to River. It seems to me that, even if this isn't technically a spoiler, it goes counter to the goals of this wiki.