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User talk:Little Professor

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Wildhartlivie (talk | contribs) at 06:58, 26 July 2009. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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John Dillinger

I approached you and left quite a detailed explanation of the reason why such imbedded notes are used on many articles and the clear rationale for why they are there. You removed my note and dismissed it as a "rant" and obviously didn't bother to read it. That's fine, but I also asked you to assume good faith about the use of the note, that trivia sections not being included in articles isn't just something that I "unilaterally decided", but in fact is covered specifically in WP:TRIVIA, which says "Avoid creating lists of miscellaneous information. A number of articles contain lists of isolated information, which are often grouped into their own section, labeled "Trivia", "Notes" (not to be confused with "Notes" sections which store footnotes), "Facts", "Miscellanea", "Other information", etc." and "Trivia sections should be avoided." This imbedded note helps to reinforce that and is successful in preventing the creation of such spurious sections. Similar notes are used on many high profile articles by many editors and they have been found to be a great deterrent to the addition of each and every time some mention of the person occurs on South Park or The Simpsons or multiple other pop culture media that otherwise have no relationship to the subject of the article, except to have used the name. This has to do with intelligent article management on high profile articles and saving multiple editors from otherwise having to waste productive editing time removing irrelevant additions or searching, for instance, for song lyrics to see if some song is even about the article subject.

As I noted, this is part of an effort by WP:CRIME to contain these additions to something manageable and relevant to the person and the person's historical activities. The best example of determining what is relevant and pertinent to an article is the context. For instance, in the South Park episode "Pink Eye," the space station Mir (a real thing) lands on Kenny McCormick (a fictional character), killing him. The overall importance of this piece of information may be hard to define, but it is certainly important to Pink Eye (South Park episode), somewhat important to Kenny McCormick, and not very important to Mir. That is the point of the note in John Dillinger, as well as many articles.

As I asked you to begin with, if you have a concern or a point you wish to make, it is much better faith to actually approach an editor and type real words and convey your thoughts than to leave templates or messages in edit summaries. If you can't do that, then you are acting to undermine the efforts of editors to control and maintain articles that would otherwise be fodder for run away lists of each time the name of some historical person is mentioned out of context to the person's life and activities. Thank you. Wildhartlivie (talk) 06:58, 26 July 2009 (UTC)