On 11/24/07, joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu <joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu> wrote:
I don't understand this continued war on trivia.
Trivia that's OR is a
problem obviously but other forms of trivia aren't problematic unless
they are distracting or the article needs to be cut down in size.
I can't envision a scenario where an article "needs to be cut down in
size", per se, except when portions of its content are unverifiable or
otherwise *actively being bad*. There is no correlation between this
and what proportion of the article has been properly or improperly
sectioned as "trivia". A more nuanced approach to "too long" articles
would be to choose a few of the longer and/or more compartmentally
stable sections into "sub-articles". We do it all the time. There's no
such thing as "too much [verifiable] information".
Many readers like Wikipedia articles precisely because
of the trivia.
Editors too. Enjoyable reading and enjoyable editing go hand-in-hand.
Leave well-sourced trivia alone.
Thank you, Jesus. Maybe we could require people to solve a captcha
whenever removing a <ref> tag. I should see if wiki-books has a decent
crash course in PHP. Haha, only serious.
—C.W.