Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-2165692-20131223193030/@comment-4999744-20131225161113

Trivia is not pointless information. In a conversation I had with an admin a couple months ago, they said that they hate the name "Trivia" because it invites people to add things that aren't relevant to the game. However, TESWiki has a convention that the section should be called "Trivia" that containins information which is not directly required for the topic, but which is related to the topic in some way that has relevance to the game. For exmple, in a quest topic, the trivia section should include things which aren't needed to complete the quest, but which either have an effect on later quests, or which are affected by earlier quests. For example, many quests have information on what happens depending upon progress in the Civil War quest line - that information goes in the Trivia section only to avoiding a walkthrough with too complicated a structure (e.g. "if this is true, then the following happens instead" - having that in the middle of  a walkthrough makes it hard to read the walkthrough section).

As for speculation, there is a definite prohibition on speculation (I believe an admin posted something to that effect on my talk page). That's why I reverted the edit to Joelief - because it even had the word "speculate." Now, if it simply stated facts (e.g. "Leif means X in Norwegian"), then it would seem aceptable to me. It's a gray area because language origins for names really doesn't have any impact on gameplay, but there is an established precedent for it (for example, I think there are a few items that discuss names which came from the names of people in certain bands).

With all that said, I think we could benefit from having some clear statements from the admins on what should go into a trivia section. The existing article (http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki:LEAD#Trivia.2C_notes.2C_and_external_links) seems to come from a time where Trivia was nothing but language, voice actor names, etc., but it has definitely morphed in the way I describe above. It would be good if the admins could review the trivial guidelines and update them.