Avoiding Spoilers in Fan Wikis of Episodic Fiction
Shawn M. Jones, Michael L. Nelson

TL;DR
This paper examines how to effectively avoid spoilers in fan wikis of episodic fiction by analyzing web archive access methods and proposing improved algorithms to reduce spoiler encounters.
Contribution
It introduces an algorithm to calculate spoiler probabilities and suggests a new heuristic for web archives to better prevent spoilers in fan wikis.
Findings
38% of fan wiki pages are unavailable in the Internet Archive.
Up to 66% chance of encountering spoilers when accessing archived pages.
19% of requests to the Wayback Machine for fan wiki pages resulted in spoilers.
Abstract
A variety of fan-based wikis about episodic fiction (e.g., television shows, novels, movies) exist on the World Wide Web. These wikis provide a wealth of information about complex stories, but if readers are behind in their viewing they run the risk of encountering "spoilers" -- information that gives away key plot points before the intended time of the show's writers. Enterprising readers might browse the wiki in a web archive so as to view the page prior to a specific episode date and thereby avoid spoilers. Unfortunately, due to how web archives choose the "best" page, it is still possible to see spoilers (especially in sparse archives). In this paper we discuss how to use Memento to avoid spoilers. Memento uses TimeGates to determine which best archived page to give back to the user, currently using a minimum distance heuristic. We quantify how this heuristic is inadequate for…
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Taxonomy
TopicsWikis in Education and Collaboration · Digital Games and Media · Topic Modeling
