[WikiEN-l] Trivia and popular culture sections

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> Subject: [WikiEN-l] "Trivia" sections in articles
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <43FD53A3.7050804 at 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.