Template:What?

Instructions for {{What?}}

{{What?}} or {{what}} is for flagging up individual sentences which are so nonsensical that you have no idea how to edit the statement for clarity.

Usage

With sentence fragments

For instance, imagine coming across this paragraph:

Football was something the The Eighth Doctor then made his way to 20th century France to attend the World Cup.

Well, clearly the preceding editor meant to say something important about football, but somehow that thought got truncated. You have no idea how to edit the first bit, but you want to leave it in to help jog the memory of the person who edited the piece before you. So instead of just purging this thought, you might want to flag it up with {{What?}}, like this:

Football was something the^{[statement unclear]} The Eighth Doctor then made his way to 20th century France to attend the World Cup.

With complete, but ambiguous, sentences

Sentence fragments are easy enough to spot as problems. But sometimes full sentences either don't make sense or don't give adequate context, even though they may be grammatically correct. Consider these examples:

The Plath were a race who had been using advanced quantum computers for 10,000 years.

The Fifth Doctor regenerated during his trip to the Eye of Orion. (TV: The Five Doctors)

Obviously both of these are complete sentences. And they make sense, from a purely grammatical standpoint. But if you look more closesly, you begin to spot the problems.

The Plath statement gives no sense of when those 10,000 years took place. Thus the sentence has no useful context. Hence, it would be important to flag up this sentence, in the hopes of finding out when and on what planet those 10,000 years were. 10,000 years from when, to when?

The Fifth Doctor statement wouldn't bother the non-fan, but it makes the rest of us do a double-take. "Whatcha talkin' about, you fool?" we'd immediately say. If we flagged it with {{what?}}, we might find the editor meant that he regenerated his console room, or maybe the editor meant to cite a ST story that gave the sentence additional meaning, but he forgot to. Either way the statement as is offers some difficulty that needs correction, and it's not immediately obvious how to safely fix it.

This wiki has a number of templates which put small, inline statements within the body of articles that seek specific improvements in articles. These include:

Attribution request templates

Categorised into articles with statements that need more specific attribution

Primary documentation at {{says who}}

These all do the same thing, but put different, contextually-appropriate phrases into the body of the article:

• {{which}}
• {{by whom}}
• {{says who}} or {{sezwho}}
• {{who}}

Clarification request templates

Categorised into articles with statements that need clarification

This indicates that a statement, as worded, makes so little sense that you can't figure out how to improve it. It's not meant as a statement of incredulity. You're not saying with this that you don't believe the statement. You're saying that it's so poorly written that you have no idea what the statement means.

• {{what}}

Source request templates

Categorised into articles needing citation

These templates challenge the veracity of a statement, to one degree or another, by indicating that the statement needs better sourcing:

• {{fact}} or {{source}}
• {{disputed}}
• {{facts}}, categorised into articles needing additional citations

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