Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Subject:
[WikiEN-l] "Trivia" sections in articles
To: wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <43FD53A3.7050804(a)gmail.com>
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They look ugly and unprofessional. Can we get a policy or something to
suggest that they be renamed "Miscellaneous information" or merged
into
the rest of the article?
And while we're at it, can we get rid of "{{PAGENAME}} in popular
culture" sections?
Much if not all of much of this content is unreferenced. People
apparently just toss in stuff off the top of their head. Like lists,
I think they become a game in which people try to think of something,
anything that isn't there already.
We should be proactive about putting {{unverifiedsect}} tags on these
sections, {{fact}} tags on the unreferenced items, and removing them
after a reasonable period of time and in a fair way. That will go a
long way to solving the problem.
I personally believe these items are valuable and interesting _if
referenced._ Incidentally insisting on reference is also a reasonable
filter against subtrivial cruft; if the Statue of Liberty appears _in
an important way_ in some movie, Ebert or someone is likely to have
mentioned it somewhere; if it is just a cameo appearance to establish
that a ship is approaching New York, nobody is likely to comment on
it outside of a personal blog or forum, and finding a reference will
be hard.
IMO, anything in a trivia section (not necessarily "X in popular
culture", which is distinct from plain trivia) that is encyclopedic can
be easily merged into the rest of the article. Anything else is
unencyclopedic and should be chucked. For instance, when [[Hey Jude]]
had a trivia section, most of it was devoted to things like "[[Jude
Law]] was named after the song". Only one item was encyclopedic -- a
mention of [[Wilson Pickett]]'s cover version, which was easily merged
with the rest of the article. The rest was just chucked. Likewise, is
[[The Beatles]] any less comprehensive after I pruned it of cruft like
"Paul bought his house for X pounds"?
John