[WikiEN-l] Trivia and popular culture sections

[Matt Brown]

I think it's simply that adding trivia is something that pulls newbies
in to editing the site.  Therefore, be careful of newbie-biting.
Instead,encourage higher standards, and introduce them to the joys of
research and WP:CITE!

On 2/23/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> > 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.
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