From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of John Lee
Peter Mackay wrote:
The keyword is "indiscriminate". "Unimportant" is nowhere merntioned. Organising small but interesting facts into a trivia section, where there are enough to warrant doing so, is hardly indiscriminate.
(This is not a real example; I just made it up off the top of my head.) If the trivia section opens with a bullet-point stating "Paul McCartney was introduced to drugs by his dentist", has an entry in the middle along the lines of "McCartney's fifth house was bought for X pounds sterling", and ends with "Paul McCartney's dog, Martha, was the basis for the Beatles' song 'Martha My Dear'", yeah, I'd say that's pretty indiscriminate. Of course people will say, "Well, that's useful information!" Rightly so. But there's no reason for it to stand alone in the trivia section. The information on McCartney's drug behaviour can stand in a section on its own (because you know, it's not like that's the only thing that can be said about him and drugs). So can the real estate purchase information, perhaps as part of a subsection on McCartney's wealth and earnings. And the information on the song inspiration? It doesn't even belong in the article (although the part about the dog can easily be merged with a section on personal life). The rest can go in the song article instead.
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.
I take your point, but it seems to me that it is more organised and discriminating to put minor but interesting facts into a distinct trivia section than to wedge them in to other parts of an article. One might well spend two or three sentences tying these facts in smoothly so that the text flows naturally.
Or, as articles evolve, a trivia section can be seen as a temporary repository for details which are yet to be incorporated.
These facts are never going to go away, whether or not Wikipedia includes them. There are enough people who care about trivia (and whole books have been written about the manner in which the songs of the Beatles were composed) that they will feel that an article on Paul McCartney is incomplete without their favorite fact being included. It may well be a piece of pop philosophy upon which they have founded their life. All you need is love, you know, and though you may not agree, just how much of a zealot should one be in making a bonfire of these little factoids?
It seems to me that many of the "Death to Trivia" crusaders are perpetuating a small deception here (one of which you yourself are not guilty), by deliberately including boring and useless information under the category of trivia, portraying ALL such information as similar. Of course we don't want to include every known, sourced, indisputable but minor fact about a person or subject in an article. But not every minor fact is uninteresting or useless. We should see ourselves as plucking out the diamonds from the pebbles. We are an encyclopaedia, after all, trying to present a concise but comprehensible picture, and while we are happy to direct students to the mountain of pebbles in our sources, we need not cast every small rock aside.
Pete, student of [[pataphysics]]