--- Brian M brian1954@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be deleted. It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum. But when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes a major problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at all.
I enthusiastically agree, and I'm glad I'm not the only one that has noticed and been (mildy) irked by this phenomenon -- phew! Perhaps we could propose a [[Wikipedia:*]] advice page cautioning against this trend?
Seriously, how does one go about deleting these sections? Someone is going to insist that it is "removal of information" and, therefore, vandalism to remove them.
Yes, I can see that happening :( But just like questioning accuracy or neutrality of material, I think it's quite legitimate to question something's importance (relative to the topic) in an article. There's a trade-off at work here, something like:
* The benefit of the information provided;
versus
* The risk of bloating the article and making it less useful as a concise survey of a topic.
This is quite a different dynamic to VfD, because trivia parceled up in its own separate article is much less harmful to other content (some might even say harmless).
On a large scale, we can be guided by the balance that other people have thought workable, for example, themes that are covered in other encyclopedia articles, books, textbooks, surveys, etc. Ultimately, though, the best any of us can do is to make a heuristic judgement about how "trivial" such information is -- it might be controversial, but we can try and discuss things and arrive at consensus (yes, I'm an optimist...)
-- Matt
[[User:Matt Crypto]]
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