Wikipedia’s Identity Crisis: Keep or Delete Trivia?

Wikitrivia?
“Wikitrivia has information on this subject.” would work just as good.

I love the trivia lists in the wikis, hate that they are discouraged.

Wikitrivia would be an awesome site.

The trivia of today is the history is tomorrow.

I majored in English, so I am hardly objective in this matter, but the trivia of Wikipedia is half the reason I go there (usually for looking up tidbits on films I’ve just seen). After all, what is most knowledge in the context of everyday life, but trivia??

I think trivia is the least of their worries. I notice that many entries appear to be monitored and “scrubbed”, especially anything to do with alternative healing or so called ‘conspiracy theories’. Huge corporations can afford to hire people just to keep information out of wikipedia! That’s no trivial problem.

I would expect “Alternative healing” pages are removed simply because they contain no verifiable information.

Not so trivial: Even though decisions on Wikipedia, such as whether to keep or delete an article, are based on votes, they’re not quite voting as most people understand it. It turns out that in those “votes”, it’s not the number of votes that count, but the strength of the voters’ arguments, as decided by an administrator.

And even if an admin deigns to keep an article the first time, articles can be nominated for deletion over and over. Some articles have been nominated for deletion over 10 times! Somebody who hated the article must’ve thought, “the 18th time’s the charm!”

For a while, Wikipedia had a crusade against plot summaries, and such things were deleted left and right. Plot summaries are half the reason I even use Wikipedia, to help me jump into fictional series midway. Now, however, a compromise has been reached: Plot summaries are allowed, but they must not take up more than half of the article.