What's our current stance on "spoiler-only edits?"

Question

Most of the answers on these questions seem to indicate we should consider this to go against the answerer's intent and/or too minor:

• Should we accept edits that only insert spoiler markup?
• What should be done if someone insists on posting an un-spoilertagged answer?
• Is a spoiler-markup-only edit to this answer acceptable?

There's never really been a consensus on how spoilers should be utilized in answers, but the answers suggest when it comes to edits we lean strongly in one direction: that edits which merely introduce spoiler markup should be rejected. Yet, from what I've seen, such "spoiler-only edits" seem to almost always get accepted in review.

Meta and main site paint two very different pictures in this regard. Is this something we need to revisit?

Answer 1

Spoilers are available for a reason. One person's idea of "obvious or common knowledge" may totally ruin the future enjoyment of a mental puzzle or story for others long after the original questioner or answerer has moved on.

If spoilers are likely to be needed by future readers, this is a useful edit. It serves the site to have people enjoy the user experience, instead of wondering what plotlines or puzzles will be ruined for them next.

And, if the absence of the spoiler makes the answer drastically different in effect, this is not a minor edit.

As such, if the addition of a spoiler tag is justified by the fact that it hides information which may need a spoiler, it should be accepted as an edit.

Answer 2

This is by no means a new question — the first question you linked was asked by me, over two years ago, about the exact same topic. My personal stance remains that the decision to include spoilers should generally be left to the answerer themself, and edits that are only meant to insert spoiler markup without improving any other aspect of the question should be rejected.

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I generally have personal internal guidelines for when to put a part of my answer in spoilers. They might have evolved over time, but in general I follow two rules:

1. I only put something in spoilers if it's not the entire answer.

In essence, I follow badp's policy on spoilers.

This means that if the entire answer or effectively the entire answer excluding some auxiliary framing text would be placed into spoilers so that the answer wouldn't make any sense without them even as a hint, I will leave the whole thing as is. This precludes answers such as "The answer is [rest of answer under a spoiler]" or even "We have [spoiler] and so we can deduce that [another spoiler] to arrive at the conclusion that [final answer spoiler]".

You might mention this answer or this answer as a counterexample, but in both of those cases, I put the final answer on top, and the explanation under spoilers, because it's really the rule that the sequence follows or the reasoning behind each word that's a challenge for people to find out — the answer itself is just to check if your rule is correct.

So far people have been good about not making edits to put an entire answer behind spoilers just because they think it's a good idea to spoiler everything that explains an answer. And I don't edit people's answers who do do this to use smarter spoiler formatting, because I understand people have different norms about this stuff.

2. I only put an answer in spoilers if the formatting of the answer affords it.

This is one place where I might insert spoilers contrary to badp's policy.

One categorical example of questions that do afford a spoiler-by-default format are questions containing a series of mini-questions in a list (a few of which I've answered here). Those ones, I don't mind putting spoilers on because it's natural that you might only want to see the answer for a few of them at once.

For other examples of things that might be spoilered that aren't list questions, take a look at this edit that I just made to an answer of my own to insert spoilers. That part of the answer was already isolated in a quote, to draw attention to it, so that can be put into a spoiler.

However, some of the edits I've seen have literally just taken the single answer for a question and put it on its own line to spoiler it out, like this:

We have some interesting explanation here, and the answer is blah, as we expected before.

turns into

We have some interesting explanation here, and the answer is:

blah

as we expected before.

This ruins the formatting I intended for that answer, all for the sake of hiding the answer from somebody who may or may not want to see it.