Wikipedia:Spoiler

For software, see Wikipedia:Software (WP:SOW)

Some articles may contain spoilers. A spoiler is a piece of information about a narrative work (such as a book, film, or video game) that may reduce your enjoyment of it by revealing certain plot events or twists. If you haven't read or seen the work the warning refers to, you might want to do so before reading the spoiler in the article.

Suggested template

Not all visitors may recognise the site as an encyclopedia, which should strive first to informative, spoilers or not. The article should also contain analyses and background detail not available—or at least, not obvious—in the work being critiqued. Where this is the case, a spoiler notice should be made prominent as a simple courtesy.

The standard way to warn readers of potential spoilers is to insert before the revealing text:

{{spoiler}} 

This expands to:

If this general purpose template is not suitable for the particular article you are working on, feel free to custom-design your own warning, but please link back to this page.

Unacceptable alternatives

On the Usenet, a popular way of avoiding spoilers (and sometimes, offensive material) was ROT13 encryption. This is obviously unacceptable on a general purpose encyclopedia.

Another common way to hiding spoilers from readers is to changing the color of the text to match that of the page background, thus rendering the text unreadable until hilit by the reader in a selection. Hiding text like this is unacceptable here because it requires explanation to readers unfamiliar with the practice, and because it may be incompatible with computer accessibility devices such as screen readers. It is also regarded as an ugly hack. [[fr:Wikip%E9dia:D%E9voile_l%27intrigue_du_r%E9cit]]