Wikipedia:Patent nonsense

This page documents an English Wikipedia content guideline.

Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

Shortcuts

This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia writers and editors improve articles in the site, but sometimes, they contribute patent nonsense. There are various ways to combat patent nonsense, but you should always notify the editor who made the edit about their mistakes.

Wikipedia writers and editors contribute a lot of featured and good articles, but occasionally, they contribute some patent nonsense. This falls into two categories:

Total nonsense, e.g. text that purposefully has no relevant meaning at all (e.g. lorem ipsum) and random text (banging on the keyboard).
Content that, while apparently intended to mean something, is so confusing that no reasonable person can be expected to make any sense of it, such as "The land attests that agriculture shafts the uncontrollably mild delicacy and wistfully inanimates the fresh spruce tango jumpsuit impressively in one month" (see word salad). If the meaning cannot be identified, it is impossible to accurately copy-edit the text.

What is not patent nonsense

The following should not be speedily deleted as patent nonsense (though some might meet other speedy-deletion criteria). There are other ways to deal with these things: editing to fix the problem(s); possibly reverting or tagging; or see the deletion policy.

Disinformation and factual errors, including citations to unreliable sources.
Libelous, defamatory, or slanderous comments, no matter how silly. They should be removed immediately if not supported by a reliable source, and possibly revision deleted by an administrator. In extreme cases, libellous edits may be suppressed, making that information hidden even to administrators. See Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons.
Poorly written content that could be improved, such as text containing many grammar errors. See Wikipedia:Basic copyediting.
Text without links. Consider tagging it with {{Underlinked}}.
Text not written using the Latin alphabet or otherwise not written in English, unless it is genuinely gibberish in whatever language it was written in. See Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English.
Text poorly written in, or similarly translated to, English. For examples of this type, see All your base are belong to us or Engrish.
Vandalism (i.e., intentionally harmful edits), including joke edits, hoaxes, (irrelevant) obscenities and other immature material, might (or might not) be patent nonsense, but it still needs to be removed. Other nonsense may be mistakes, badly formatted text, or test edits, without malicious intent, and tact may be needed.
Copyright violations, nonsense or not. These should be removed immediately (not merely moved).
Plagiarism. Instead, the plagiarized content should be properly attributed (or paraphrased) unless it is also a copyright violation.

Dealing with patent nonsense

There are various ways to deal with total nonsense—use your good judgment to decide which is most appropriate:

Replace it with a well-written article.
Move it to the page's talk page.
Move it to the user's talk page.
Remove it from the article if there is any acceptable content left in the article after that. Often patent nonsense is easy to undo.

Do consider that it might have been a test edit, and don't bite the newbies by calling them vandals in this case, but instead warn them with a personal note or by using the uw-test series of warning templates (Template:Uw-test1). Where vandal intent is clear warn using the uw-vandalism series of warning templates, and report them as vandals if they continue.

However, if a user objects because they believe the content is not patent nonsense, discuss the issue and try to reach a consensus. In particular, if someone offers to rework the "nonsense" into worthwhile content, please allow them reasonable time to do so.

If a page contains nothing but patent nonsense:

First, examine the page history to determine whether the patent nonsense present replaced other earlier content. If so, restore the page to the latest revision before the content was replaced by patent nonsense. Warn users responsible for introducing patent nonsense as above.
Otherwise, identify it for speedy deletion by placing {{db-g1}} or {{db-nonsense}} at the top of the page. Warn and report as above.

Wikipedia:Patent nonsense

What is not patent nonsense

Dealing with patent nonsense

See also

Articles