The Wikipedia trivia

[Don]

Often I'll see an article in this format, usually found on Wikipedia but certainly can be found in all kinds of conversations too, which goes like:

Trivia: XYZ uses adamantium sword. This is a reference to WOLVERINE, who has an adamantium skeleton.

I mean, there's adamantium armor in Master of Orion and Final Fantasy. I realize part of the point is to show off that you know this cool stuff, except 99% of the time it's not even anything cool and generally flat out wrong. I mean if you knew the names of the 3 ninjas of Naruto came from Tengai Makyou from personal experience you're definitely pretty hardcore in terms of obscure Japanese knowledge so you get some cool points, but knowing that magical girls almost certainly started from Sailor Moon isn't worth anything, or that two guys shooting energy projectile may have gotten the idea from Dragonball. You might as well say an epic story is most likely influenced by Lord of the Rings which is also epic.

Heck, I remember WoWpedia has an article about the two Valkyrie-whatever encounter in WOTLK is supposed to be a reference to Ikaruga. I mean I can see that's probably where they get the idea from but there's really nothing about the fight itself that'd remind me of Ikaruga.

[SineSwiper]

Ummm... Wolverine was first. The term "adamantium" was created by Marvel, end of story. They created it in July 1969, information when you can also find on Wikipedia.

[Don]

Err, my point is that adamantium is so prevalent in fiction it's like trying to tell people mithril was first used by whatever, or that Dragonball was the first Anime that involves people shooting fireball. It's probably true but there's really no point to such trivia.

Maybe adamantium isn't a good example because there's actually a clear 'first'. Usually it's more of the "everything is a reference to WoW" kind of deal, or like Naruto is clearly the first manga that involves the 5 elements. For that matter, I don't think anyone would even care when is the first work that involves the 5 elements because it's so prevalent nobody really cares who thought of it first. It'd be like if I see a guy dual wielding swords and then there's probably a trivia about how something else also has a guy dual wielding swords.

[SineSwiper]

This is typically why Wikipedia discourages the creation of trivia sections. It's a lazy way of putting random items into a "catch-all" section, instead of actually creating a new section, or at least a few sentences, about the item.

[Don]

Yeah Wikipedia actually does a decent job at trying to at least contain it. But you see plenty of examples in the form of 'everything is a reference to WoW' or 'WoW is a reference to everything' variants. For example if I designed a game and there's a random minor enemy named 'CosineSwiper' and for some inexplicable reason my game become a hit, I'm not even sure if there's a point to point out 'CosineSwiper was based on a poster from The OtherWorlds Shrine." Sure if CosineSwiper is the final boss it might be cool for the fans to know where the origin comes from but most of this stuff reminds me of high school English class where you've to write up some stuff about how every sentence in this random book is clearly some kind of foreshadowing/allusion/reference to something. I recall people on this board talking about a show called Hero with people with special power, it'd be like people say: "You know show XYZ has this guy who is really fast? Did you know it's based on Hero because they got a guy there that is really fast too! And the guy who can freeze things? There's a guy in Hero that can freeze things too! And that guy who can throw fireballs in Hero? He's clearly a reference to some guy in Naruto who can throw fireballs! And that Japanese dude with a sword in Hero? Clearly a reference to (insert hundreds of stuff that involves a Japanese guy with a sword)!"

I'm actually a big fan of trivia, like if you knew the origins of the 3 ninjas of Naruto that's actually pretty impressive. I think people need to play Trivia Pursuit or Boulderbash a few times to get what kind of stuff are actually trivia-worthy, so to speak.