Forum:Trivia Maintenance Proposal

As a long-time member (though inactive) of TDW, one aspect of upkeeping and maintaining quality of the Total Drama Wiki are the dreaded trivia sections. No matter how hard we work and how often we keep on top of them, whether it's for an episode or a character, the trivia tends to balloon out of control with useless factoids, information that fits better in the main article, or redundant bits of trivia from people who don't bother looking through the lists before making their own additions. There's also bits of "trivia" that aren't really trivia, but subjective speculation from fans trying to pass them off as facts.

The good people of Total Drama Wiki have done an admirable job, but at times the job seems futile because the stream of useless/misplaced/redundant/false trivia seems to never stop coming. On top of that, there is no full consensus on what should constitute as real trivia. Thus, a never-ending battle of removing and re-adding trivia bits ensues, and while the trivia sections grow in the character and episode pages, the longer the pages become and the more cumbersome they can be to load.

Recently, another Wiki I've been following has had a similar issue with its own trivia and recently came up with a method that intrigued me. Much like how the running gags grew large enough to warrant their own separate page, I believe any trivia that is experiencing similar growth problems would benefit the same way. Here is an example of what I mean:

Main Series article with link to trivia →Trivia page

The purpose of giving the trivia its own page (please note: for TDW's case, I'd propose all character-based trivia goes in one page separated by subheadings, while episode trivia goes to another page organized in the same manner) would be to trim down the main article pages to a manageable length (so that other issues can be dealt with more efficiently) and load time while isolating the trivia so that it can be focused on in a more convenient manner. This way, we can utilize new, fresh talk pages that aren't cluttered with general character talk to discuss  what standards we should set for the trivia and more efficiently keep it tidy without repeats of the same tidbits littering the listings. We can determine what sort of details constitute as worthwhile trivia and discern whether or not certain bits of trivia would be better in another area of the main article. And of course, a link to the article's respective trivia page can be left behind on each page so anyone can view and/or edit and participate as they wish. All it takes is just one extra click.

In theory, all of this could be done without isolating the trivia, true, but I believe moving the trivia to its own page - if only for a temporary time for some cases - will be a much more efficient way to maintain quality control on one of our biggest areas where quality control suffers in our articles. I hope no one finds this proposal cumbersome (I feel it would be a relatively simple task to copy+paste paragraphs to a new page) and sees merit in this attempt to find a long-term solution for trivia maintenance.

Any alterations to the proposal are welcome.

Support

 * 1) ~ ♦Shinneth ♦ (Speak ~ ♪ )  (See ~ ♫) 02:57, February 9, 2012 (UTC)