Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-1738746-20150714113923

(For the life of me I SWEAR the trivia policy was written out somewhere but now I can't find it. If it does exist and I haven't gone crazy, if someone can link me to it that would be great :D)

So it got highlighted in the last moot that since the approval of the Trivia policy CT, in which trivia of speculative nature was allowed on articles, there has been an increase in inappropriate additions to said trivia sections; this has called for stricter guidelines for what can or can't be placed in said trivia section. For those interested, the original CT can be found here and the approved CT which was brought up again for discussion here.

I'm not putting up a poll because the point of this is to better define the policy through discussion to make sure that people don't have a free reign to go nuts and essentially vandalise articles or ruin the wiki's reputation regarding accuracy. The main thing I brought up in the past, and I guess I'll make even more clear that this should be more strictly enforced under the policy, is that anything of speculative nature must be referenced. The reasons for this are:
 * To better show readers where you're coming from in terms of the information presented i.e. allows them to confirm your information for themselves
 * To show that you've done your research rather than pulled something out of thin air
 * And to prevent people making up nonsense and adding it into articles

Another stricter rule that could be enforced more strongly is the prevention of addition of large "fan theories" to the trivia section. To do this, I propose including some sort of 'general guideline' for how much should be written for a single trivia point. For example, "Trivia points should be small facts or tidbits of information. If you find yourself writing a paragraph for a single point, it is probably too long for the trivia section and should either not be added or shortened down". This point is open to further suggestions as I'm not very creative...

Another thing that should be made more clear to people is that, referenced or not, it is still speculative in nature and should always be treated as unconfirmed information when written in the trivia section. What I mean by this, is that it should influence the way you write your point. You can't write "X character design was influenced by Y character from Z show [link].", instead it should be written as "X character design may have been influenced by Y character from Z show [link]." A basic example I know, but you can find a better example in the Sload article history via comparing Atvelonis' recent edit in rewording a trivia point that did something similar to this. Someone else (I think Tim?) even suggested adding an unconfirmed tag of some sort that further lets readers know that this is information of speculative nature and not something confirmed by Bethesda- this is something we could think of adding as well.

The point of this past CT's approval and reformation of this policy was to allow the wiki to showcase the creative thinking of fans who do research in their own time and discover interesting information. It was not meant to bring down the wiki's accuracy or give them a reputation of "low editing standards". It's meant to give a richer experience to our readers and a greater wealth of horizontal information to the wiki, and I hope that this re-evaluation can help us achieve such a future as opposed to the opposite which appears to be occurring at the moment. 