Wikipedia:Patent nonsense

Wikipedia guidelines
Behavioral
Assume good faith Conflict of interest Don't bite the newbies Don't disrupt Wikipedia to make a point Etiquette Gaming the system User pages
Content
Citing sources Identifying reliable sources
Stand-alone article
Notability
Discussion
Signatures Talk page guidelines
Editing
Article size Be bold Don't add the full text of primary sources Don't create hoaxes Edit summary Patent nonsense
Organization
Categories, lists, and templates Categorization Disambiguation Subpages
Style
Manual of Style Manual of Style/Lists Manual of Style/Tables
More
List of policies and guidelines

Wikipedia writers and editors contribute a lot of brilliant prose, but occasionally some patent nonsense. This falls into two categories:

1. Total nonsense, i.e., text or random characters that have no meaning at all, such as a passage of lorem ipsum text. This would include strings of characters produced by random banging or dropping an object on the keyboard. (See the Wikipedia article on babbling).
2. Content that, while apparently intended to mean something, is so confused that no reasonable person can be expected to make any sense of it. If the meaning cannot be identified, it is impossible to accurately copy-edit the text. (See the Wikipedia article on word salad).

Not to be confused with...

The following should not be speedy deleted as patent nonsense, although some of it might meet other speedy criteria. There are other ways to deal with these things; see the deletion policy.

• Copyright violations or plagiarism, nonsense or not. These should be removed immediately, and possibly revision deleted by an administrator.
• Libelous, defamatory, or slanderous comments, no matter how silly. They should be removed immediately if not supported by a reliable source. See Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons.
• Poorly written content that can be improved. See Wikipedia:Basic copyediting.
• Badly formatted or unwikified text. Consider tagging it with {{Wikify}}.
• Text not written using the Latin alphabet or otherwise not written in English. See Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English.
• Text poorly translated or written in English by someone who is not a native English speaker. For examples of what would fall under this category, see All your base are belong to us or Engrish.
• Vandalism, including joke edits, hoaxes, (irrelevant) obscenities and other immature material, is not necessarily the same thing as patent nonsense. Some nonsense may be a mistake, or a test edit, with no malicious intent.

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 brilliant prose.
• Move it to the page's talk page.
• Move it to the user's talk page.
• Remove it from the article if there is anything left in the article after that.

Warn users responsible for introducing patent nonsense using the uw-test or uw-vandalism series of warning templates, and report them as vandals if they continue. Do consider that it might have been a test edit, and don't bite the newbies.

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 prepending {{db-g1}}, or its mnemonic, {{db-nonsense}}, to the page. Warn users responsible for creating the page using the uw-create series of warning templates.

See also

• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, a notable instance of grammatically correct nonsense
• Wikipedia:Complete bollocks
• Wikipedia:Deletion policy
• Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines