User:Mlewan/Defence of Trivia

One problem at Wikipedia right now (October 2007) is deletitis, a number of people who "clean up" articles and delete sections for the single reason that they do not understand them, even though they think they do. This page gives some thoughts to one aspect of it - the removal of "Trivia" sections.

What is the perceived problem with a Trivia section?
A "Trivia" section in Wikipedia tends to be a section of material that does not fit the main text.

Occasionally people use Trivia sections as garbage containers and throw ill researched and irrelevant facts into it. Obviously that is not good. Trivia has to be as verifiable and notable as any other part of the article. And it has to be relevant to the subject.

In some cases it is more a matter of a bad header than bad content. The section could often as well be labelled "other facts" or "background facts" or "further information". "Trivia" is hardly ever a good description of what the section contains, but it is sometimes the best title available.

When some people see the confusing and bad results of that kind of behaviour, they tend to over-generalise and think that all "Trivia" is bad.

What is the alleged problem with a Trivia section?
There are several arguments usually put forward against "Trivia". They are usually variants of one of the following:
 * "I do not like unnecessary information."
 * "I do not like bullet points."
 * "I want Wikipedia to be encyclopaedic."

Unnecessary Information
For the unnecessary information argument, it can hardly be the base of a policy, as it is up to each of us to judge what we consider unnecessary. It has to be handled at article level. It is kind of obvious that information that really is unnecessary should be removed.

We can have general guidelines for what is relevant, but one cannot claim that all information in all Trivia sections is unnecessary.

Bullet Points
Bullet points are often a very efficient way to structure data so it is quick and easy to get an overview of the content. Sometimes they are appropriate. Sometimes they are not.

They take more place than dense text, so they are rare in paper encyclopedias, which need to cram as much relevant information as possible into an as light weight of paper as possible. However, Wikipedia has access to an infinite amount of white space.

It would be ridiculous to say that all Trivia bullets are inappropriate. Some are. Some are not.

"Encyclopaedic"
Has anyone using the encyclopaedic argument ever used a paper encyclopaedia?

I absolutely hate paper encyclopaedias.

As a child I silently adored the beautiful leather bindings of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but as soon as I tried reading its articles, I found that they often contained information that was impossible to verify, that was likely to be wrong, plenty of POV, impossible to browse and in general a discouraging experience to anyone who wanted to actually learn anything.

There were terms that were used in different senses in different articles. There were several pages with irrelevant ramblings about someone they considered an "important" person, while other slightly less important persons got no information at all.

I have used other paper encyclopaedias in English, Russian, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, French and Italian. They have all been depressing experiences. Some of them have been reasonably easy to browse, and you eagerly go from article to article, but then the articles are usually disappointingly short.

I have the deepest respect for the people who wrote and published those paper encyclopaedias. At the time they were gargantuan works. However, the limitation of paper as a medium made the result miserable, compared to what we can achieve today.

Of course paper encyclopaedias often contain pieces of information which we should integrate in Wikipedia. However, claiming that those of Wikipedia's articles that are good have much to learn in layout, style or content disposition from those paper dinosaurs, is very strange.

What is the advantage of a Trivia section?
The good thing with Trivia sections is that facts that are not directly linked to the main topic can be separated out.

If I read an article about the chemical Strychnine, I do not want the main text cluttered with names of famous people who have been poisoned by strychnine. I want the chemical description. I also want a list of famous people who have been poisoned. If that list is labelled "Trivia" or not, does not matter.

Look at an article like Meiosis. It mentions that the word comes from Greek meioun. That is trivial and superfluous information in an article about genetics, and yet it is the kind of information that has been in encyclopaedias since Blarf, the palaeolithic inventor, documented how he made fire for the first time in a speech to the rest of his tribe.

There is often, but not always, a problem with the quality of the Trivia sections. However, you do not solve that by integrating the information where it does not belong. And to solve it by removing the section is like using a guillotine to cure headache.

The robot
I was not even aware of the discussion about trivia in Wikipedia before an automatic robot started updating every single Wikipedia Article with a Trivia section with a tag stating that there was "trivia" in the article which should be removed or integrated in the main part of the article.

The Box
The robot added a box looking like this:

This article contains a trivia section.

Content in this section should be integrated into the body of the article or removed.


 * The box was distracting from the content of the article. It was information overload. It degraded readability.
 * In some cases, people have misinterpreted the intention, and removed useful information or integrated it where it makes no sense.

Robot Edits

 * The text in the box was not finalized when the robot went out there. There was no consensus for the text. So thousands of articles were updated with text no one had approved.
 * It is a bad precedent to let a robot tell humans what to do. Asimov would not have liked it. Once we allow a robot to tell humans how to use their intelligence, we are approaching a state, where humans no longer use their intelligence, where we become the slaves of the robots.

The main problem was that the stupid (literally) robot tried to apply a "policy", which was adopted by very narrow margin, to articles it did not understand.

The trivia-box stops making any sense when applied by computers. If you, as a human, had applied it to an article, I might have considered as useful information. Now, I know it is added by a computer, and I can therefore safely ignore it. Trivia is not wrong. Trivia is not bad. Trivia has always been with us, and it will always be there, regardless of how many ransacking robots are sent out there to stop it.

Trivia

 * The word trivial was first used in English in the 15th century to refer to the three liberal arts Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic..