Erik Moeller wrote:
Trivia sections must die, in all articles, period. If you see one, do Wikipedia a favor and move it to the talk page (or remove it entirely).
I made much the same point back in February; if I was online I'd pull out the link to the archives.
Here's one of the useful (ie. not "OMG WP:NOT paper") replies:
Subject: [WikiEN-l] "Trivia" sections in articles To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Message-ID: 43FD53A3.7050804@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
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.
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.