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 deal with patent nonsense.
Wikipedia writers and editors contribute a lot offeatured andgood articles, but occasionally, they contribute somepatent 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" (seeword salad). If the meaning cannot be identified, it is impossible to accurately copy-edit the text.
The following shouldnot be speedily deletedas patent nonsense (though some might meetother speedy-deletion criteria). There are other ways to deal with these things: editing to fix the problem(s); possiblyreverting ortagging; or see thedeletion policy.
Disinformation and factual errors, including citations to unreliable sources.
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, ortest edits, without malicious intent, andtact may be needed.
Remove it from the article if there is any acceptable content left in the article after that. Often patent nonsense is easy toundo.
Do consider that it might have been a test edit, anddon'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 clearwarn using the uw-vandalism series of warning templates, andreport 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.
