[WikiEN-l] Trivia/Notability tag?

[Ian Woollard]

On 24/11/2007, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
> Ian Woollard wrote:
> > ...Perhaps the real issue with trivia sections is that most of them are
> > unreferenced as to their notability; while they clearly may be factually
> > true, unless somebody has noted that they are important then they should
> be
> > removed. Right?
> >
> > So, taking this to the logical conclusions, perhaps we need a notability
> > tag, where somebody has to reference that something is notable...
> >
> > Comments?
>
> Well, for one thing, we've got way too many of these cleanup tags
> already.


Or perhaps we have the wrong set.

See [[Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)#Editorial
> banners at the top of pages are annoying and irrelevant to
> subject matter]].


I completely agree with that, I don't see that a full-page banner would be
at all helpful. I was thinking more about a tag for just a single paragraph,
similar to [citation needed], such as [reference for notability].

Second, I don't think the right standard for trivia is notability.
> It's "interestingness", which of course is a notoriously difficult
> concept to define.  One editor's interesting trivia is another's
> banal fluff.


Exactly my point though, it should NOT rely on the *editor* to determine
this; since that constitutes original research, that any particular fact is
notable; and I think that's where the big contentious arguments come in, and
quite rightly so.

Am I not correct in asserting that under the core principles, we need a
verifiable, notable opinion that something is notable for it to go into an
article?

There's already a drive (accompanied by an annoying banner) to
> eliminate trivia sections entirely.    I don't happen to agree
> with that drive, but it makes a "notable trivia" tag sort of
> doubly redundant: if the trivia sections are all eliminated,
> we won't need to worry about their verified notability, but if
> we asked for all trivia items to have their notability verified,
> virtually none of them would pass (how can you cite such a
> thing?), so they'd all be deleted, and we wouldn't need
> Template:Trivia.


Right. And I think that that's the point of the idea, because if it has been
tagged, then we can defensibly remove stuff, but in the few cases where they
are actually verifiably notable then they CAN be kept. I don't think the
'remove all trivia' concept stands up to the core values.

(Anyway, aren't "notable trivia" and "notably trivial" both
> oxymorons? :-) )
>

;-)

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.