What's the effect of shorting the wiper terminal with one of the ends of a trim pot?
If you connect to the top and wiper, you can use the potentiometer as a simple variable resistor.
If you connect to the top and wiper, AND short wiper to bottom, you are still using it as a variable resistor, but with one important difference : if the wiper goes open circuit, the resistance value is 10K rather than infinity.
That can:

reduce crackling noises in an audio circuit when the track is old or dirty
prevent loss of signal or things blowing up due to wiper failure
prevent gain (and volume) attempting to reach infinity in circuits
where gain is proportional to resistance

If you have to design circuits to tolerate component failure, this is worth remembering.