Collab: Empty Section Policy

[Ray Trace]

Recently, I nominated Baby Mario for a featured article, and plus several articles were unfeatured. One reason that it doesn't follow a fairly new policy on this wiki: The Empty Section Policy.

To clarify, sections that has only the following content for example:

==Gallery==
{{morepic}}

Is not allowed due to it containing nearly no information. The sheer majority of the articles here on this wiki, however, do not follow this policy. We need to implement this into more of our articles so more people realize what to do when they come across sections like these.

I have done myself since I haven't been given an example, but I know how it works. All you have to do is insert a summary of information, depending on what the empty section is.

For example (trying to be very vague and blunt here so I can get my point across)

==Beta Elements==
{{main|List of Super Mario World beta elements}}
Super Mario World had stuff that was shown at the E3. Examples include "name of enemy that wasn't in the final game" that did stuff and stuff. Etc etc

Just a small summary of some prominent beta elements will suffice.

Too many articles suffer from having Empty Sections. Anyone want to help out?

I have done these articles so far:

*Baby Mario
*Baby Luigi

Lefty has done several as well.

 

[LeftyGreenMario]

This is pretty easy to do, so I don't think we need a collaboration. We can just do it as we go.

 

[Ray Trace]

Yeah but if we gotta have a policy like this, we gotta do it more and more so people realize it and stop trying to remove the sections

 

[Banon]

My proposal recently passed : MarioWiki:Proposals/Archive_34#Empty_sections_templates

The template is here : Template:Empty

The category is here Category:Pages with empty sections

Basically, when you see an article that has empty sections, you should add this template at the top of the page (if there is only one empty section, just add it here).
That allows us to check which articles are in the category in order to add a preview.

(In my proposal I talked about a category on the Maintenance page but I don't know if that's really needed?)

However note that if you have some time and there is only a few empty sections on the page, you should just add the preview instead of the template.

 

[Ray Trace]

Okey dokey. If you don't have the time to solve the issue, just put a template there and take care of it some other time.

 

[Glowsquid]

I've noticed that some users have been "filling" empty sections by copying random sections of the target page without any addition. Obviously, that's not How You Should Do It.

That kind of section should ideally features original writing that summarize key points of the linked page, or (for quote and images) feature a reasonably wide range of material that illustrate the game's/character style/evolution. But really, just don't copy random crap and call it a day.

 

[Dardy]

Could you add what you said on the policy page?

 

[Glowsquid]

Sure, why not.

 

[Dardy]

Note that the sections should ideally be original writing (or in the case of galleries, feature a reasonably wide range of material) and not simply consist of random content copied from the target page.

That looks OK.. good work1