WikiTrivia

WikiTrivia is a proposed offshoot of Wikipedia. WikiTrivia pages will be made up of lists of trivia items collected regarding any and all topics.

This is a proposal for a new Wikimedia sister project.

Status of the proposal
Status	closed
Technical requirements

Note: An old proposal from October 2003, for a similar project, was archived.

This project is a response to the perceived negative impact of trivia lists in Wikipedia articles (see Wikipedia's Trivia guideline). WikiTrivia would serve as a place where Trivia sections in Wikipedia articles could be moved and retained, for those who are interested in reading and maintaining them, while no longer hindering Wikipedia's efforts to remain encyclopedic in article quality.

WikiTrivia needs a home

In order to start building WikiTrivia, temporary web hosting would be required. This would only need to be until the project (hopefully) gets picked up by the Wikimedia Foundation, at which point the project would be transferred to their servers. The reason hosting is needed at this point is that project proposals with working models are more attractive and garner more attention from the Foundation, as well as from supporters (like yourselves).

The following items are needed:

• Web hosting, which includes some space and bandwidth on a web server, at least one database, and remote access privileges.
• A registered domain name.
• Wiki designers and/or programmers, to help us set up and customize a copy of the MediaWiki software for our needs, as well as to design the project's main pages.
• possibly more when I think of it.

If anyone is interested in donating any of the above items, please leave a message on my talk page.

Keep in mind that this is not a financial request; we aren't set up to accept monetary donations of any kind (and probably never will be). This is purely a request for services. If you own or lease a web server, or a reseller hosting account, and can spare some limited resources (very little would be required), let me know.

Proposed by

• Equazcion (Talk • Contribs)

Alternative names

• WikiTrivia
• WikiCulture

People interested

1. Equazcion (Talk • Contribs)
   (proposer)
2. SamBC (Talk)
3. David Witchell
4. DHowell
5. Karpeth
6. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} - Much support for the idea; my focus will have to remain on Wikipedia though. Would like to see this succeed, due to expected benefits for both trivia users/fans, and Wikipedia.
7. Ixfd64
8. Workster
9. Almafeta 22:14, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

Original proposal

The following proposal by dmmaus has been copied and pasted (by

Equazcion (Talk • Contribs)

) from Wikipedia's Village pump (proposals):

As a contributor/editor at the level of making the order of tens of edits a week, I often run across debates over the inclusion of trivia sections or "references in popular culture" sections in articles. The thought occurred to me:

We have Wiktionary for dictionary definitions, Wikinews for current events, Wikiquote for quotations, Wikibooks for "how-to" material, Wikitravel for travel guides, and so on - none of which fit into Wikipedia under existing policy guidelines. Yet they are integrated enough that a simple cross-reference link can refer the reader to additional material in these associated projects, if they choose to follow them.

My proposal: Create Wikiculture. Allow this to be a repository of cultural references to things. Move existing trivia and "in popular culture" sections into Wikiculture and cross-link to them in the same way that Wikitravel, Wikiquote, etc. are linked into Wikipedia articles. Any trivia deemed important enough to remain in the Wikipedia article (i.e. not really trivia) should be integrated into the article rather than migrated.

In practice:

• Pages such as w:Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc and w:Bigfoot in popular culture would become Wikiculture:Joan of Arc and Wikiculture:Bigfoot. The article w:Joan of Arc and w:Bigfoot would then contain a link to the corresponding Wikiculture article.
• Pages such as w:London Eye which has a burgeoning section w:London_Eye#The_London_Eye_in_film_and_television would have the relevant section moved to Wikiculture:London Eye.

Advantages:

• Removes these sections from Wikipedia, in accordance with w:Wikipedia:TRIVIA.
• Retains trivia and popular culture sections for the benefit of those who value them.
• Provides a suitable location for adding such material.
• May grow into a repository of cultural trivia that many readers may well find interesting and valuable, but that is currently being excluded from Wikipedia.

Disadvantages:

• Requires new Wikimedia project to be set up. (I have no idea how difficult this is.)
• Requires education of Wikipedia editors and transmigration of much data (though this will naturally occur incrementally as part of the inherent growth and modification of Wikimedia projects).
• May be some confusion over what qualifies as Wikipedia material versus Wikiculture material. (May be no worse than current confusion over adding material to the article proper or to an existing trivia section within it.)

- dmmaus 23:56, 22 August 2007 (UTC)