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Archive 1Archive 2

This discussion is pretty much replaced by the discussion page at Wikipedia:Importance, which was created 10 days before this was. In a previous incarnation, Wikipedia:Importance was structured like this discussion (for/against), but I've since realized that this actually creates a separation of viewpoints rather than consensus (see Wikipedia:How to create policy). How would you feel about merging this to Wikipedia:Importance? ··gracefool |☺ 23:57, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Good idea. The more centralization, the better. • Benc • 01:38, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Okay, the project page now redirects to Wikipedia:Importance. Feel free to propose merges, changes etc. at the talk page. ··gracefool |☺ 22:32, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

About waiting to open the discussion

I'd like to see this discussion run as smoothly as possible, hence the 3 day waiting period. If I'm alone in this (i.e., everyone else wants to open the discussion as it is), then go ahead and remove the notice and start discussing.

Please note, though, that the real reason I decided to wait on updating this page is the discussion on Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Proposal - suspension of VfD. I'd like to wait for some consensus to be reached there — or at least for the flurry of messages to quiet down a little. I'd rather not see this page catch fire. This is an issue that needs to be discussed, but let's do this right, please. • Benc • 03:59, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Re-opening page

Someone changed the redirect of this page to "department of fun". Well, something that is "importance" one day (the previous redirect) and "department of fun" the next, maybe needs a definition in his own right, not redirecting to either of these totally opposite pages.

The deeper motivation of re-opening this page as a separate page is this paragraph from the NPOV tutorial:

Different views don't all deserve equal space. Articles need to be interesting to attract and keep the attention of readers. For an entry in an encyclopedia, ideas also need to be important. The amount of space they deserve depends on their importance and how many interesting things can be said about them.

Presently both hyperlinked words in that paragraph ("interesting" defined as being different form "important") redirect to wikipedia:importance, that proposed guideline not giving a clue about what is exactly the difference between "important" and "interesting". That guideline proposal has other problems, I don't need to elaborate here, but even if these problems are all solved, I don't see how it would clarify "interesting" as an inclusion criterion.

So, I propose wikipedia:interesting to redirect to wikipedia:Trivia, giving some insight on where wikipedia draws the line between "interesting" and "not interesting" - but as a separate definition of the difference between "important" and "not important", while otherwise that quite essential paragraph in wikipedia's NPOV concept would become sort of void of real meaning.

--Francis Schonken 10:48, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I still think it's better to have policies centralized, than the hundreds of overlapping ones (this included) we would have if we kept every one that was created. It's basically the same issue, and Importance can be expanded slightly to highlight the fact that it includes parts of articles, not just whole articles. Importance still isn't policy, but you have a better chance of the stuff in this page becoming policy if it's part of one that is being discussed. ··gracefool |☺ 22:42, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
I think part of my motivation was also: trying to get things moving re. the "eternal" proposed status of wikipedia:importance - importance is not the same as "being interesting". the "importance" guideline trying to treat all these things in a single go, was maybe one of the reasons of it never getting beyond "proposed" status (for nearly a year now, if I remember well).
A traditional way of approaching a problem that's too big to solve at once, is to break it into smaller, more approachable topics, and try to solve these (dixit Descartes if I remember well).
And if this approach is successful, and the guideline text(s) resulting from that not too large to fit in a single guideline page, well of course, let's merge it back together. --Francis Schonken 06:58, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Village Pump discussion (October/November 2005)

the problem of trivia sections

This section was retrieved from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive M#the problem of trivia sections on 09:43, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

There's an unfortunately widespread tendency among editors to create, at the end of the article, a section entitled "Trivia" or "Miscellaneous facts" or somesuch, where they place a bulleted list of a few facts that they couldn't fit into the article anywhere else. There are two big problems with this:

  1. This is a gawdawful way to write an encyclopedia article. I don't think anyone would dispute that well-structured paragraphs are far superior to random lists of facts.
  2. They grow. When editors happen upon an article with one of these tumors, it's easier for them to add another item to the list than to integrate a fact into the existing structure of the article. People being lazy creatures, they often choose the former course of action. And so the section expands, and expands, and expands, until it's fully one quarter the length of the rest of the article's real content (excluding references, external links, cross-references, and suchlike): http://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Amiga&oldid=26750909#Trivia is an egregious example, but it's far from unique.

It's relatively easy to nip this in the bud, when the list contains only a few items. When it has metastasized, as in the Amiga example above, fixing it becomes a herculean task: for every fact on the list, one has to check that it's accurate, check that it's not duplicating anything else, and find an appropriate place for it. This is not easy. If it isn't fixed, however, it not only makes the article look bad and read poorly, but actively contributes to its degradation, as editors add to the list rather than the structured prose above it.

So:

  • Am I the only one who thinks this is a problem?
  • If not, what can we do to discourage it? Policies and guidelines on this seem to be lacking, but for a bit at the end of Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles.

I am inclined to think that removing such lists to the talk page, or a subpage thereof, is the best solution. The information is not lost or buried in the history; editors can, at their leisure, integrate the facts into the article properly; and the section is no longer actively causing damage. Would there be support for a Wikipedia:Trivia section guideline along these lines? —Charles P. (Mirv) 20:22, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

For the time being I made Wikipedia:Trivia section redirect to Wikipedia:Trivia (see below) - I suppose such suggestions can be taken up there (and/or on wikipedia talk:trivia of course). --Francis Schonken 09:13, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

I would disagree. I think it helps keep a concise record of information regarding a given subject, especially in the case of media. In cases of something that spands several series, integration of such information would require more expansion in an already limited area (which tends to cause another article being created to accomodate the size). It is easier to go directly to a certain factoid rather than having to process the entire subject. However it depends on how well the information would be integrated into its respective topic as well. Ereinion 21:35, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

I disagree as well. I tend to call those sections "Notes" because that's what they are: notes. Look at The Deadly Assassin for an example of an interesting, informative section that adds greatly to the article. Attack of the Cybermen is another interesting example, because the "Authorship" section was originally contained in the notes, but I merged it out so it wouldn't envolope it.--Sean Black | Talk 22:18, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
Alright, so it can work well in articles on pop culture topics. But consider the trivia sections in these articles: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]. . .and on, and on, and on. Can one say the same about these? —Charles P. (Mirv) 00:32, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
I don't really like these sections in the articles I work on. For example, take Jimmy Carter. That article contains:
Miscellaneous
   * On October 14, 1978 President Carter signed into law a bill that legalized the homebrewing of beer and wine.
That point is accurate, but it somehow really is fairly trivial, in comparision to other things going on at that time (hostages being held in Tehran, etc.). I don't really think it belongs in the main chronological part of the article, but I also don't like it the way it is. Morris 00:18, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
That's another problem; such sections become a magnet for stuff that is at best tangential to the subject of the article. In the example above, that fact is highly relevant to homebrewing (where it is mentioned) but really not very relevant to Jimmy Carter. (Often these tangential additions concern pop culture references to the subject of the article; Marduk is a particularly bad example of this. But that's another rant. . .) —Charles P. (Mirv) 00:47, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
No, I think you're right there. If you can't find a section to integrate the fact into, you should probably leave it out. And on Marduk- I think a "References in Popular Culture"section is useful, and it lets those of us into fictioncruft to have a presence, while not intruding on the "real-life" stuff. It's a good compromise.--Sean Black | Talk 02:27, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

There's trivia and trivia. While this is supposed to be a commonsense thing, some editors (usually anons) seem to have difficulty with this. I've had this on Golem and Metatron, two articles where the trivia section at some point was longer than the remainder of the article. Pop culture references are two-a-penny. In seventy years few people will remember The Simpsons. JFW | T@lk 03:03, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. The Simpsons is astoundingly popular, it's the longest running animated television series ever, and will be for some considerable time. The validity of including particular bits of trivia depends on their relevance. Is the work critically acclaimed? Does it have a large fanbase? Is there a significant ammount of material on Wikipedia about it? You can't remove all pop culture references, nor can you reference all of them. For example: Albert Einstein appears (briefly) in the Doctor Who serial Time and the Rani. I would expect this to be mentioned in Time and the Rani, maybe in List of Doctor Who historical characters, but not in Albert Einstein. Like I said, it's about a compromise between the crufty and the real.--Sean Black | Talk 04:05, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

I recently revived wikipedia:trivia: that had been a separate (proposed?) guideline a long time ago, then it became for several months a redirect to wikipedia:importance (but that guideline is "proposed" for ages without coming to a conclusion). Then someone changed trivia to redirect to BJAODN. Then I revived it as a separate guideline proposal a few weeks ago, and this morning it got sorted in category:wikipedia notability criteria, a wikipedia guidelines subcategory.

Guidance on "trivia lists"/"trivia sections" can be found in wikipedia:trivia#Trivia policy. I don't know whether I did a good job of describing the present policy regarding trivia in that section (I can only say that during the week the revived trivia guideline proposal was on wikipedia:current surveys nobody commented on that section). So please have a check whether that section answers the present questions, and improve and/or suggest improvements on its talk page. --Francis Schonken 08:51, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

All-inclusive encyclopedia

This proposal seems to go against the policy that Wikipedia should be as inclusive of information as possible. With no definition of importance or how interesting something is no decision can be made, and if someone adds something that they think is interesting then chances are that others will find it interesting too. violet/riga (t) 15:26, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

My thoughts exactly.--Sean Black | Talk 20:16, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments,

  1. see #the problem of trivia sections too;
  2. "the policy that Wikipedia should be as inclusive of information as possible", please: where can that policy be found? The present policy "is" (also) Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.
  3. "With no definition of importance [...] no decision can be made" - The trivia guideline doesn't exactly need the definition of "importance", although the "Article content should be interesting" section tries to clarify by examples how the difference between "important" and "interesting" is perceived in the context of this guideline.
  4. "With no definition of [...] how interesting something is no decision can be made", sorry, no, the whole section Wikipedia:Trivia#When is a topic interesting? is devoted to defining the treshold below which things are not interesting enough to be kept in Wikipedia.
  5. "if someone adds something that they think is interesting then chances are that others will find it interesting too" - this is perfectly in line with the present version of the trivia guideline: "When (the proposed definitions don't concurr), only Wikipedians trying to reach consensus can solve the issue."

--Francis Schonken 08:07, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Proposal/Guideline

The absence of discussion does not equate to the absence of opposing views. The fact that there was little support for the proposal is more important than the fact that nobody bothered to say anything against it. violet/riga (t) 15:26, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments,
  1. "The absence of discussion does not equate to the absence of opposing views", I absolutely agree with that. And I think it a good point these views are voiced.
  2. "The fact that there was little support for the proposal is more important than the fact that nobody bothered to say anything against it" - Please define the meaning of "(more) important" in that sentence, it's hard to comment on that statement as long as I don't know what you mean by "important".
--Francis Schonken 08:21, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

In fact, the general consensus seems to be that this does not deserve its own page and is thus not accepted as a guideline. violet/riga (t) 15:27, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

I saw Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive #the_problem_of_trivia_sections as a confirmation that something is hampering at Wikipedia as long as this doesn't get sorted out. In other words, I saw the comments in that village pump section as a wish, expressed by several wikipedians, that this "this does deserve its own page" --Francis Schonken 08:21, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

A month later

  • I have put the "Proposed" template back on. And I'd like to make several points:
  1. The majority (almost all) of the discussion that I've been able to track down was limited to the issue of trivia sections in articles. This proposal does not directly address those, but rather speaks in general terms without providing guidance for whether or not it's intended to be applicable to articles as a whole or simply to segments like bulleted trivia sections. As such, the majority of the discussion does not appear to be reflected by this proposal.
    • Sorry, changing to "proposed" is "major edit", no consensus for that - all suggestions are welcome. Changing to proposed without prior discussion is not one of them.
    • According to the edit history, I'm the third person to do it, and only you have objected to any of us doing it. If anyone besides you believed this has been agreed upon, surely you could produce at least one such person. The Literate Engineer 18:04, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
    • Please read prior discussion on this page, I don't have an impression you read any of these, just tumbling in and wanting to impose your unique view.
    • I don't think merging to "importance" or "notability" a good idea at this point, see above. Again, I don't have the impression you read any of that, or are replying to the reasons given, you appear to just stumble in to give it a go whether you can impose your unique view on the community. --Francis Schonken 09:12, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
  2. This was listed as a guideline. Its wording includes a section headed "Trivia Policy". Which is it? Guideline and policy are different, having distinct levels of support (consensus is required for a policy, a mere "many editors agree" is required for a guideline), legitimacy, and coercive backing. Needs to be one or the other, and until it is, it's just a proposal.
    • With that wording it got through the required procedure to make it a guideline. Not with the stature of "official policy". What is your suggestion? Unless your suggestion makes more sense (or is accepted as such by the community) I see no reason to change the Trivia policy section title. --Francis Schonken 09:12, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
  3. Consensus to have a policy or guideline does not automatically carry over to a consensus in support of this specific proposal for a policy or guideline, and must not be assumed to.
    • Where, other than your unilateral decision, did this get accepted? I see at least two users above explicitly rejecting it (violetriga and Sean Black) and none other than you explicitly saying "Yes, I like this, make it a guideline". That's not conensus, it's not "a great many", it's effectively nothing.
  4. The safest assumption regarding people who don't speak in favor or against a proposal is that they don't know about it. Looking at the discussion I've been able to find, not enough people have been aware of this for any supporting consensus it may have gained (and I have not found evidence of such consensus) to have met a reasonable standard for quorum.
  5. Note that only three editors (Benc, Francis Schonken, and Zondor) have ever made an edit that was not tagged minor and was not to dispute this proposal's status or redirect [[Wikipedia:Trivia]] to some other target, and that one of those three editor's sole edit was to reference WP:NOT. This indicates a lack of general awareness, interest, participation, or some combination thereof regarding this proposal, which is further reason it should not yet be considered a guideline.
    • Sorry, I can only see your lack of awareness of village pump discussions, guideline procedures & exposure and the like. If you want to participate, OK. If you want to reproach other wikipedians their degree of activity, not OK. --Francis Schonken 09:12, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
  6. This is a particularly vague proposal, and while I think I agree with the intent, the current execution might fairly be labeled Instruction Creep.

-The Literate Engineer 03:04, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Please, Literate Engineer, what are your practical suggestions w.r.t. the guideline text? --Francis Schonken 09:12, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Narrow the scope of the article to things that might appear on Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit (eg. make it similar in scope to WP:CORP or WP:MUSIC, things which people have less of a problem leaving as an accepted guideline). Trying to come up with consensus on notability in general is probably not currently possible. There are a large number of attempts previously or currently ongoing, none of which have succeeded yet. --Interiot 00:25, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

I must echo my own previous comments and those of by others above that this has not gained acceptance and should not be labelled as anything more than a proposal. violet/riga (t) 02:16, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

I consider myself relatively engaged in this debate and had never seen this page. I oppose more rulecruft, but had not seen this proposal. Trollderella 01:06, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Okay, first off this would not be a policy but a guideline. I'd think that'd be obvious. Second, I'm going to invoke m:instruction creep on grounds that at a casual glance it is entirely unclear what this (proposed) guideline is about. In other words it's too verbose; please consider cutting it down a notch. And third, for a guideline to be useful it should be actionable. What is the intent? Delete trivial articles? That's possible but doesn't require a guideline, just drop them on AFD. Delete 'trivia' sections from otherwise good articles? That'd be up to the individual articles but is generally covered by normal editing (and anything not verifiable is a no-no). Radiant_>|< 00:42, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Categorisation in "Wikipedia notability criteria"?

see also: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Notability

As it happens, several "perennial proposed" guidelines touching on "Notability" are in the Category:wikipedia notability criteria:

Included in that category without any guideline-related template:

There's even the {{Historical}}, but nonetheless rejected Wikipedia talk:Fame and importance in the same "notability criteria" category.

So here's the question: should Wikipedia:Trivia be included in the same? I mean, the reasons given at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Notability] for such types of pages not becoming guideline over a long period of time, while nonetheless used by wikipedians to make up their minds when applying "NN" (non-notable) in any for Deletion vote, sounds perfectly reasonable to me: put it in the cat, and people will be able to find it. --Francis Schonken 13:25, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

My goal in creating the category was to hilight the perenial proposal nature of the topic, and to try to avoid rehashing the same details if possible. As long as we have a number of ongoing proposals for notability, I think that the historical/rejected Wikipedia talk:Fame and importance belongs in the category, as it may be relevant to discussions (even though the previous one was rejected, the topic and discussions in it are similar to current proposals and discussions).
Regarding Wikipedia:Trivia, it's never been clear to me exactly what this article is about. Is it about 1) proportion and emphasis, how long articles should be, how detailed should articles get, or 2) the specific trivia portion of certain articles, such as Baba O'Riley or Soylent Green, or 3) whether certain topics are important enough to survive AfD, whether they're important enough to have their own article? If it concerns the third issue, then it should be in the category.
I added this article back into the category, because, as far as I know, no article in the category is currently accepted policy. If a single article does become accepted policy, or there's a single article that summarizes "there is room for interpretation" and it's widely accepted to the point that people no longer feel the need to create or discuss new proposals, then at that point, the category should be deleted/merged. --Interiot 16:36, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
I just recategorised Wikipedia:Autobiography from "notability criteria" cat to the "subject specific notability criteria" subcat. Looks like that in the subcat most are "accepted" guidelines. Note that Wikipedia:Autobiography, Wikipedia:Notability (people) and Wikipedia:Deletion of vanity articles show some overlap, so I suppose one could say that that corner of the field ("people"-related notability criteria) is pretty much covered by "accepted" guidelines.
Those are all notability criteria guidelines "by topic", which seems to work: the general ones are more difficult, but for a limited subtopic often consensus can be found. In my first attempt above I advocated that technique: break off a piece of the large problem, and try to solve the sub-problem. With hindsight, "Trivia" is still too "general" I suppose.
Again, I want to make clear that whether "Trivia", "Importance", etc are official guidelines or essays or whatever is the least interesting bit of the discussion IMHO - however, that's what people react to most, so I engaged in that discussion too (mea culpa).
The ideas proposed by radiant in Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Notability] struck me when I read them a few days ago. Factually radiant said 180 degrees the opposite of what I had always been saying: I advocated "Trivia" and the like to be guidelines, but philosophical ones, so that they couldn't be (ab)used as if they contained rock-solid criteria in "votes for deletion" type procedures/disputes. Radiant said: these notability criteria guidelines are used in votes discussions, but no problem: those that haven't found consensus yet can't be abused to slap each other on the head with. (sorry, that aren't the exact words radiant used, and radiant should correct me if I tweak the interpretation too much). Anyhow, it somehow depicted a solution I could live with. So that we could stop the void guideline/non-guideline discussions, and move on with discussion of the content of these proposals.
Re. Soylent Green (accidently that's one of my favourite films): the most trivial of the three trivia items contained in the trivia section of that article, is, I suppose, the fact that one of the actors died shortly after completion of the shooting of that film. That same bit of information is contained in the article on that actor, but not in a "trivia" section. Further, are the details about the Soylent Green "newspeak" contained in Soylent Green#Lexicon less trivial than what's contained in the "Trivia" section of that article? I couldn't say. Maybe it's partly a fictitious problem: it's not the "Trivia" section title that makes something worth including in (or: excluding from) wikipedia. But there are complaints that some articles are overgrown with endless lists of trivia, not really contributing anything to the topic of the article. Maybe Wikipedia:Trivia#Trivia guideline should be reformulated a little less severe.
Re. Baba O'Riley: the list concluding that article is not really a "trivia" list. Compare BWV565 (and so many other articles on classical compositions): it's not unusual to have a "reception history" and/or "in popular culture" and/or "other versions" section in such articles. For the Bach composition, really little is known about its origin, so apart from some theories on that (and info on the musical construction of the composition) more than half of the article is about what happened to the composition long after Bach had died, including the Walt Disney/Stokowski version (which somewhat surprisingly is not in the "in popular culture" section). So, in comparison, for the Baba O'Riley article I couldn't find much that would fit under a "Trivia" section header.
Yeah, all this illustrates it's pretty hard to define "Trivia" in general terms for the "wikipedia" context. It might never happen. I can live with that. But what I think we should offer to those looking for where the line is between what belongs in wikipedia, and what doesn't while too trivial or non-notable, or whatever, is some general background info, so that everyone can make up his/her own mind, but rather based on wikipedia culture (whatever that is), than everyone inventing his/her own (incompatible) standards. --Francis Schonken 14:37, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Change focus to "Trivia" sections

I agree with much of the discussion above that this proposed guideline as it stands is too vague and redundant with other policies. However, I do think something deserves to be said about trivia sections. These are almost always a bad idea, in my opinion, and it's a constant battle to keep the trivia at bay, particularly on articles related to popular culture. For example, today someone made this edit to Woody Woodpecker. Now, the fact that Woody Woodpecker is the favorite character of another fictional character (this one Argentinian) is not something that needs to go in the Woody Woodpecker article. It's akin to adding "Charlie Brown has a striped shirt" under its own section to our pattern article.

Likewise, ". . . in popular culture" sections, while not quite as bad, are also magnets for endless additions of cruft. See for example, the evolution of tengu. It began with this edit, a mere two months ago, which introduced the "Tengu in media" section. Then others discovered the article and decided to add references to their favorite video games and Japanese comics: [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22].

There already seems to be broad consensus that "trivia" sections are bad. At Wikipedia:Featured article candidates, trivia sections are a common obstacle to an article being promoted. These users seem to agree: Superm401, Monicasdude, Rossrs, Wackymacs, Anville, Bte288, Bunchofgrapes, Petaholmes (nixie), and again, Nichalp, Maclean25, Johnleemk, Harro5, Bishonen, and Flcelloguy.

FAC is where the best of our articles are identified. The regulars there have reached consensus on this. Now it's time for the community as a whole. Can we add something on this to this proposed guideline? Is a change in focus warranted? — Amcaja 16:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion: Add something to the effect that only certain articles should have "popular culture" sections. I don't think it's surprising or interesting that a piece of music as popular as the Moonlight Sonata would be used in countless films, games, TV series etc. Therefore it shouldn't have a section. However, if a reference to the Flying Spaghetti Monster turned up on the Simpsons, I think that would be would be surprising and interesting. Stevage 04:01, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Anyway, a similar discussion has taken up volume at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive V#Should "Trivia" be a valid sub heading for Wikipedia Articles? - I was waiting for that discussion to head anywhere, before changing the ideas presently in Wikipedia:Trivia. --Francis Schonken 10:21, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

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