So I've been watching Babylon 5 a tv show from the 1990s, but I'm still on the first season. It's almost impossible to look anything up without being spoiled on subsequent seasons so I just don't look anything up at all.
I wish there was a way to set my current progress through the series and just have anything past that be spoiler tagged. This does not seem to be a thing on any series fan wiki but it would be cool if it was.
This is also the case with One Piece where I'm up to date with the english dub, but the Japanese anime and manga are far enough ahead with existing characters I might want to look up that I don't feel good about looking up anything.
In order for this to work, you need to have a way to tag certain blocks of text with when and where in the media franchise you learn the information in question. Worse, you basically have to rely on everyone who edits the wiki both knowing they should do this, and knowing how to do it. But many people will want to edit without doing one or both, which puts you in a bad spot where a reader will have an expectation of a certain structure (say, accurate spoiler tags) and that expectation will be broken by many edits in practice.
I've seen a bunch of different ways that wikis handle this in practice:
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Limit contributions to a small cadre of vetted contributors. This is the Fandom1 approach. At this point, what you have is less of a "wiki" in the traditional sense than a "curated hypertext encyclopedia", with a higher risk of getting abandoned entirely should the set of contributors thin out.
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Have a small cadre of knowledgeable editors who monitor and fix other people's contributions. This is the Wikipedia approach. It's better than approach above in that it has a lower risk of lockout and it does still provide a genuine wiki experience, but it requires a tremendous commitment of labor from editors—labor that's a lot less fun than just writing the articles yourself in the first place. And as @staff has pointed out, it's kind of sketchy to solicit volunteer labor for an entity with a real budget.
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Allow anyone to edit with relatively low editor supervision and limit the complexity of available features. This is the Fextralife approach, and having contributed substantially to that wiki in the past, the one I'm most inclined towards. It's not perfect and it certainly leads to a degree of messiness, but it's much more democratic than the Fandom model while also mitigating the labor concerns of the Wikipedia model. But it does make this sort of spoiler tagging is effectively impossible.
Now, as is the case for most media properties, the Babylon 5 wiki is in fact on Fandom which would make it theoretically possible to add a feature like this. But I'm glad it doesn't exist personally, because it would push in the direction of having fan resources be more closed-off and undemocratic and that's not the kind of world I'd like to see.
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boo hiss
