And others should believe you’ve correctly “spotted it” because…?
“Because you have an established track record of contributing actual content” is the best answer I can come up with.
The Prohibition of trivia sections is part of the Manual of Style for the site.
(Aside to samclem: What is the year of the earliest use of the word cheeseburger? This will drive me nuts until I know.)
There’s nothing wrong with the fact that Wikipedia is much better on popular culture than it is on traditional academic subjects. There’s lots of other places to look up traditional academic subjects. If you want to know if there’s an n-dimensional generalization of Pascal’s triangle, you can find out about this subject in many ways. By digging through Wikipedia, books on Pascal’s triangle and binomial coefficients, and math journal articles about the subject (including one by me), you will find lots of things in print about it. On the other hand, if you want to find out about the “Surrender Dorothy” graffiti on the Washington beltway, there’s little in print about it except the Wikipedia entry:
And yet I suspect much more people know about the “Surrender Dorothy” graffiti than know about n-dimensional generalizations of Pascal’s triangle.
Is that really true? They have no entry for Batman?! No wonder people would rather use wikipedia.
Wikipedia has an article on Hattrick. It is an online, browser-based, football management game. I tried to make an article about a better but less popular game - http://www.onlinefootballmanager.co.uk/. That entry keeps getting deleted. It is just a popularity contest now.
Wow, nothing like making broad, sweeping generalizations about people with absolutely no basis in reality. I’m sure there are some people who do act because of the to motivation you’ve suggested, just like there are people who get their jollies by vandalizing articles. However, from having participated in innumerable deletion discussions, it certainly seems to me that the vast majority of people on both sides are participating because they sincerely believe that what they’re doing is in the best interest of the project.
Because the article makes claims about the non-existent person that are demonstrably false. Because there is no record of a person of the name given having ever existed. Because I’ve done some homework before making the nomination and put the results of that homework in the nomination when I make it.
I should be able to initiate the removal of patently false material with no penalty to myself. I should be able to remove factually incorrect information from articles with no penalty to myself. I should be able to revert vandalism and correct spelling and grammar errors with no penalty to myself.
What mechanism do you propose to create a firewall between those things and vandalism-by-deletionism?
According the OED, 1938.
The Vulcan Death Grip was in dozens and dozens of episodes, spanning every series. Which particular episode are you speaking of?
What?!
CITE!
The Vulcan Nerve Pinch was a common plot device, causing near-instant unconsciousness, but the “Vulcan Death Grip” (a nerve pinch apparently ramped up to lethal intensity) was a bluff in the TOS episode “The Enterprise Incident”.
Unless, of course, you were attempting to whoosh me, in which case I will personally track down and revert every single one of your edits. Trifle with me, willya?
Not only that, but the EB has citable words. 
Sorry to interrupt the wiki-discussion. The earliest verifiable is 1934. We may have one from 1928, but the menu is not verifiably dated. There is possibly the item in a 1926 cite, but it said "Heinie’s special is a combination cheese and hamburger sandwich. " Was that a cheeseburger? Probably. But not a good enough cite.
We now return you to the Wiki-flame.
I don’t believe that deleting articles or even entire types of articles is “vandalism” so I don’t propose any such mechanism. There are checks on the deletion process. In the main, they appear to work relatively well. Consensus may in the past have been that trivia sections in articles were things of value. Consensus may now be on its way to being that trivia sections have to be integrated into the main text of the article or removed. Consensus changes.
Sorry, Martini, but I find that tidbit rather boring and irrelevant. I wonder why I or anyone else should care.
This should tell you a little about the difficulties behind figuring out what to do about stuff like this in Wikipedia, if you didn’t know already. The sheer breadth of human interest is generally a blessing in the real world and in Wikipedia, but there are a lot of conflicts.
Oh, well, I don’t expect you to share my interests in locked room mysteries and anime. 
Depends on the circumstance. Some schools at various levels won’t let you cite a paper encyclopedia any more than they’ll let you cite Wikipedia.
Well, if you deny that the term “vandalism” applies to systematic removal of particular types of information, then I can’t continue this conversation until I have some sort of Rosetta Stone to translate between standard English and whatever language it is you’re using.
I find that this tends to apply to some of the people both posting and moderating articles on Wikipedia. Sorry it’s a lousy video.
Thanks, asterion. I have dialup so i was unable to bask in its truthiness but I was hoping that was the video you linked to.
I still stand by my assertion–nay, DEMAND!–that people STFU about an excess of trivia on Wikipedia and post more on what they consider important. Which is, to me, Andrew Jackson trivia.
I’ve seen deleters who keep bringing the same calls for deletions up time after time. They might lose twenty or thirty votes in a row. But they only have to win once.
And that’s assuming that they decide to abide by the process. There’s numerous examples of people who saw something that so “obviously” needed to be deleted that they simply went ahead and did it without bothering to put it forth for a vote. And I’ve seen people who lost the vote for a deletion and went ahead and deleting what they wanted to anyway because as far as they were concerned the consensus was wrong.
Isn’t the Vulcan Death Grip and the Vulcan Nerve Pinch the same thing? I never knew there was a difference.
No whoosh here. Just good old fashioned ignorance.