User blog:LostInRiverview/All Trivia Must Die!

Usual disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post do not represent the official opinions of The Sims Wiki or its administrators.

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The Sims Wiki has thousands of mainspace articles, with many of these articles being very detailed and full of useful information. There's pages about Sims, worlds/neighborhoods, objects, traits, aspirations, careers, life states, and more. A lot of these articles are very in-depth and have a lot of sections and plenty of information to read. These articles tend to be chosen as featured articles for the very reason that they are typically the most well-read and heavily-trafficked pages on the wiki.

But, there is an insidious foe lurking near the bottom of these pages; the "trivia" section. Why is trivia so insidious, you may ask? The reason has to do with the meaning of "trivia:"

trivia (n): insignificant trifles of little importance, especially items of unimportant information.

The big problem with trivia is that it's junk information, it is totally unimportant, and it's clutter with which many a fine article would be better off without. After all, what is the point in including information about a topic if the information included is of little importance? What is the purpose of including facts that are so irrelevant to the rest of the subject that we choose to shove them into a "trivia" section instead of actually incorporating the trivia into the main article text?

In short, trivia is useless... Or is it?

Read through many trivia sections on The Sims Wiki and you're likely to encounter many useful pieces of information. These chunks of knowledge are, by the very definition of the word, not trivia. So, why are so many pieces of information stuck in the Trivia section of articles? The cause, I suspect, is that it's more difficult to get a piece of seemingly random information to fit into the text of an article, than it is to simply throw the text into a separate section. Over time, other editors find other pieces of seemingly random information and throw those pieces into the section as well. Eventually, there's quite a bit of information here, and possibly even connected pieces of information which could (and definitely should) be better incorporated into the text of the article, rather than chucked into the article's metaphorical junk drawer.

So, all trivia must die. Or, more precisely, all trivia sections must die. Information in a trivia section can only be one of two things - trivia, or not trivia. If the information is truly trivia, by the definition of the word itself, then it should be tossed out immediately, because it serves no purpose on the wiki. If the information is not trivia, then it should be moved out of the trivia section and into a place where it can be more useful.

The Trivia section represents all that is useless and redundant. It must be killed.

-- LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 01:57, October 12, 2014 (UTC)