[WikiEN-l] Trivia and popular culture sections

[John Lee]

Daniel P. B. Smith 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.
>  
>
IMO, anything in a trivia section (not necessarily "X in popular 
culture", which is distinct from plain trivia) that is encyclopedic can 
be easily merged into the rest of the article. Anything else is 
unencyclopedic and should be chucked. For instance, when [[Hey Jude]] 
had a trivia section, most of it was devoted to things like "[[Jude 
Law]] was named after the song". Only one item was encyclopedic -- a 
mention of [[Wilson Pickett]]'s cover version, which was easily merged 
with the rest of the article. The rest was just chucked. Likewise, is 
[[The Beatles]] any less comprehensive after I pruned it of cruft like 
"Paul bought his house for X pounds"?

John