I'd argue that for most people, the word trivia is pretty disconnected from its epitemological roots, and in this case serves as a convenient placeholder for a more precise descriptor that nobody's thought of yet (and would probably be long and cumbersome).
On 2/24/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Ben Yates wrote:
Wikipedia is not paper -- in a print encyclopedia, there's a limit on the total information volume, so any trivia would push out something more important; here, the contraints are easy navigability, readability, etc. I'm afraid I'm a bit baffled as to why /additional/ information at the end of an article upsets people so much, as long as it doesn't make the rest of the article less useful. If you don't like trivia sections, don't read them.
The problem is not so much the fact that they exist as that the name "trivia" is meaningless. I mean, if this information is so "trivial", why bother including it? It should be "miscellaneous information".
-- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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