The Shrine

If Wikipedia is an odd collection of pointless and useless stuff, the trivia section must be like pointless squared. I realize trivia by definition is just a collection of useless stuff, but I thought they're supposed to be useless stuff that people might find interesting. I mean some of the stuff would look like "Did you know Don is the only word in the English language that begins with D, ends with n, and have an o in between the D and the n?" I realize whoever put those trivia must have thought they're really cool, but I've a hard time imagining why anybody would think this is the case. I know even Wikipedia has this tag that says like "The below section contains useless stuff, it might need to be cleaned up", so I don't think I'm alone.

Of course it gets even worse if you go into the fan wikis that seems to exist on every obscure stuff. It's not even just an English thing. I went to a Japanese wiki site and it's just as bad. It looks like when you're in a high school English class where you're forced to explain why when a guy says 'hi' this is supposed to be foreshadowing for the events to come. I saw one making a claim that some move with the character "Heaven" must be derived from Fist of the North Stars, just because there's a move that has the character with the move "Heaven" in it. It's like stop the presses, some series has a monopoly on using the word 'Heaven' in all of gaming! What's next? Does Capcom claim to have a monopoly on all energy based projectiles? Does Square lay claim to have sole use to the word Magic?

Trivia in Wikipedia is defined as "shit that I don't know where to point it". According to Wikipedia's Manual of Style (and WP:TRIV), trivia sections are frowned upon, and would be better off as sorted into their own sections.

If you come across one, and you think you can organize it better, go ahead. Or if the trivia piece is so useless as you describe, just remove it yourself. Bitching about an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone kinda removes the excuse that you couldn't do anything about it.

Judging by the discussion pages I've read, trivia sections are frowned upon in Wikipedia articles.

edit: Sine beat me to it.

edit edit: so that my post isn't a complete waste: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trivia_sections

I know Wikipedia has a policy on trivia. I'm just wondering why such useless stuff gets put on their in the first place, and no I don't have any intention to actually clean this stuff up since somebody who is equally bored will probably just put them back up.

Sometimes it looks like the trivia section is there just so some people can say they added something to this entry.

If it gets put back up, so be it, but it never hurts to try. Sometimes, it's just some random yahoo that puts up something fairly useless, and that person never reads the page again.

It's up there cause someone PUT it there. There's lots of people who live trivia, and who know lots of useless trivia about a certain topic, so they like to post it on Wikipedia to share. How is that hard to understand? Not everyone feels trivia is useless, and anyone can post stuff into the articles.

Yeah, but most of the time it's not appropriate, and trivia sections should be merged into the article whenever possible.

SineSwiper wrote:Yeah, but most of the time it's not appropriate, and trivia sections should be merged into the article whenever possible.

I don't disagree, but Don can't understand why anyone would even post trivia in the first place

Tessian wrote:

SineSwiper wrote:Yeah, but most of the time it's not appropriate, and trivia sections should be merged into the article whenever possible.

I don't disagree, but Don can't understand why anyone would even post trivia in the first place

And I said:

I realize whoever put those trivia must have thought they're really cool, but I've a hard time imagining why anybody would think this is the case. I know even Wikipedia has this tag that says like "The below section contains useless stuff, it might need to be cleaned up", so I don't think I'm alone.

I looked up one of the random articles on the 'trivia needs to be cleaned up' section. One was on Marvel vs Capcom and one of the trivia was like "Ryu can transform to Akuma or Ken", which is more like a game mechanism than anything else. Or that Roll has her own ending isn't something anybody would care about or even meaningful (most secret characters always had their own ending, this isn't exactly new). Now there's one on the announcer of MvC is soandso who did voice for suchandsuch. Maybe people care about that. I can at least see why that got there.

Most of the trivia I find fall well short of the 'hey this could be pretty cool to somebody' level. I cannot speak this for everyone. Maybe to most people it is really exciting to know Ryu can transform into Akuma or Ken, which you'd find out after 3 minutes after picking him.