[WikiEN-l] Trivia and popular culture sections

Mon Feb 27 15:23:25 UTC 2006

John Lee wrote:

>Information in trivia sections should not be there at all -- it either
>belongs elsewhere in the article, or it does not belong there at all.
>While I accept that people will just add the trivia section back (with
>more indiscriminate information), that doesn't mean the section should
>be kept. Ideally the information in it should be merged with another
>section of the article (or used as the basis for a new section), or
>removed entirely. I've never found a piece of trivia that didn't fall in
>either of the latter categories.

[[Mitchell Baker]]. Her fondness for the trapeze is in "Trivia"
because it is (it's a hobby, and it's completely irrelevant to why she
has an article). But it's trivia that keeps getting into press
articles about her. You could kludge it somewhere else, but leaving
trivia pending such kludging is IMO a much better option than just
trashing it.

On popular culture sections, I suggest a look at [[Lilith]] and
[[Lilith (disambiguation)]]. I shoved the popular culture into the
latter and, when people kept adding it to the article, I placed an
explicit pointer there ;-)

People are going to keep adding this stuff. I don't think it detracts
horribly from the encyclopedia, providing it's kept stylistically
readable within the article. Much as [[List of Pokémon by National
Pokédex number]] makes me lose the will to live, but I can tolerate
its existence in Wikipedia.

- d.