David Goodman wrote:
That's not the best solution at all. The best solution is to remove the real trivia entirely, and rewrite the cultural references in an encyclopedic way. That takes work, of course, but then writing an encyclopedia takes work; deleting large amounts from many articles based on superficial inspection without attempting to improve content is much easier.
"Rewrite all trivia-section-containing articles so that they are both inclusive of information and well-written prose" is of course the _ideal_ approach, but IMO not a practical solution to the immediate problem. There are too many people out there who want Wikipedia to look nice _right now_, and so will jump to the quick-fix deletion approach. Since simply telling them "no, you can't delete that, it's raw material that will be useful later" would result in major strife and the risk that it might get deleted anyway, I prefer a more harmonious solution.
As a way to resolve such differences in basic outlook, a two-level solution would work, though l think it would produce enough other problems to be unworkable. Those doubting can take a look a the difficulties Citizendium is having with that approach, and the very slow progress they are consequently making.
Citizendium's approach is different, and IMO significantly flawed. It hinges on OWNership and on an elitist approach that makes certain editors "gatekeepers" of article content. Contrast with Wikipedia's "featured article" process, which is a delightfully democratic mess of opinions. Citizendium also has some other unrelated issues that are IMO causing it major trouble. The licencing chaos they went through, for example.
A very important aspect that needs to be in stable versions, IMO, is the ability to ignore the system completely if one wants to. The first thing I plan to do when the feature is enabled is to set my preferences so that I always see the most recent version, not just the most recent stable version; I want to work at the raw coal face of Wikipedia, for me stable versions is just a fence around the worksite to get people to stop "helpfully" filling in the hole I'm trying to dig.
I'd actually like to see that as the default but I suspect that's not as likely. I'll take whatever stable versions I can get at this point. :)