On 9/10/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Brock, I've commented from time to time that the intent of at least some of the people who are trying to delete trivia sections and popular culture sections is to remove material on the significance of themes and structure because of their personal view that such information can never possibly be encyclopedic. A good deal of the material in so called trivia sections is of this nature. People have said I'm over-generalizing, that nobody wants to remove it all.
Many trivia section contain some junk as well, but to say that everything in every one of them is worthless--well, I think you have just confirmed what I've been saying. You do want to remove it all.
Personally, I'm there to write an encyclopedia for general use, not just a collection of information for my own private purpose. WP:OWN usually means articles, but you think you own wikipedia. If you want your own wiki, limited to what you wish to have in an encyclopedia, branch WP, and work at a project where you can safely call yourself "we".
I can't pretend to speak for Brock, but as someone who opposes the existence of trivia sections, I think a miscommunication has taken place. Perhaps Brock and a few others think otherwise, but if you ask me, the problem is usually not the content; it is how the content is organised. I do not like trivia sections, but I never remove them wholesale unless all the information in them is clutter (should, say, [[lesbian]] have a trivia bullet-point along the lines of "character Y in sitcom X was a closeted lesbian"? That information may be useful in [[sitcom X]], but not in [[lesbian]]).
The usefulness of information depends almost as much on its context, location and presentation as it does on the information itself. "George W. Bush is the President of the United States" is almost always a useful thing to know, but it is more useful in articles like [[United States]] than articles like [[gecko]]. Trivia sections are a very poor way of presenting information, and almost always lead to bad organisation of our information.
Eradicating trivia sections is not an end in itself; it is a means to better presenting and contextualising our information. Wholesale removal of the content in trivia sections defeats this latter end; removal of clutter and moving around potentially useful information is what serves the end we have in mind.
Johnleemk