What's trivia and where do we draw the line?

Question

At least two users I have talked to said they are not interested in this site if it is just Trivia. To me trivia is well trivial,

Who is the main actor in Superman?

How many cars are in Gone in 60 seconds?

Basically anything that can be answered within a few seconds on a Game Show. Am I wrong in thinking this or are most questions on this site trivia? Can someone define trivia and when does a question fall into and out of the definition? I rather for this not to be a trivia site so I have stopped asking questions until I am sure I am doing it right.

Answer 1

I would simply add a line to your faq and make overt trivia off topic.

Banal trivia that does not add to the understanding or appreciation of the movie is off topic.

Simple enough. You really don't want this site to open up to a glut of "I was just wondering..." bar room talk. "How many Storm Troopers died in the series?", "List all the movies where the sequels surpassed the original" … blah, blah, blah. That's not good Q&A. It's a game show.

Oh... and, yeah; Simple reference questions like "who wrote [X]?" are right out.

Answer 2

Your first question is a "general reference" question, easily answered with a visit to IMDB. Therefore, it would be a very bad question here, and not because it is "trivia."

The second question might be a good question, although it needs some clarifiction. Is it asking how many were stollen? Is it asking how many cars were used during the production? Is it asking how many cars were visible on screen? In any case, I suspect any of those questions would fit on this site. I suspect they wouldn't get very many up-votes, though.

Answer 3

Trivia is boring, but I'm sure there'll be a lot of trivia questions. It's hard to find a place to draw the line. There's banal trivia (How many cars are in Gone in 60 seconds?) and interesting trivia (Which creatures in Tolkien's literature can be female?).

Ideally, boring trivia should not be upvoted. Right, like we believe it'll happen.

General reference trivia, like “Who is the main actor in Superman?” which is faster to look up on IMDB or Wikipedia than to ask here, should be closed. Lacking a general reference close reason, “too localized” can be used.