Steve Bennett wrote:
On 7/25/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email)
<alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
My initial complaint was that "trivia"
sections were ugly and stupid.
The insight of dpbsmith was that they are *harmful*. Sadly, everyone
forgot about it.
The sort of people that add trivia to non-trivial articles are not the
sort of people that can easily be stopped. Hence my harm minimisation
strategy: Regularly prune these sections without guilt.
Steve
What about putting a notice on the talk page about things in trivia
sections still needing references. Then after some short time move a
copy of the section to the talk page and remove any unreferenced bits
from the article. Leave a comment in the article at the top of the
section suggesting that trivia that someone wants to add, should first
be added to the talk page where people if they re so inclined can find
references for it.
As I said before in cases where I have seen these sections come into
being where they had not previously been, it was to get the information
OUT of the rest of the article. Editors who felt that the information
was *ahem* trivial, did not want it in the article but could not win an
edit war for its removal so as a sort of compromise the trivia section
is born. I am only pointing this out since I think it should be
remembered by anyone trying to do the section in. The editors who want
to add this information will not go away, and can usually make a good
enough argument for some of the info being useful to keep it in the
article somewhere.
SKL