Category talk:Articles with empty sections

Thread started at help desk and moved here
The user asked the following question at the help desk: Is there a policy, guideline or recommendation, on how to deal with empty sections? In my opinion they are usually bad style, bloating articles with what are essentially work notes that don't contribute to the article. If an editor doesn't have the time to fill a section with content, they should also refrain from imposing a structure to future contributors. So if I were to go through Category:Articles with empty sections, starting with the oldest dates (currently 2008!), and start to remove a lot of them, would that be viewed as an improvement, or could it be viewed as destructive?

My recommendation to the editor is to ask the question here, and so I'm starting this thread. My personal feeling after reading a few of the oldest ones is to leave them. Like redlinks, it might impel someone down the road to create the content, but without them, it's less likely to happen. Otherwise, why create them in the first place? 12 years isn't a long time in the history of knowledge. Anyone care to make the case for keep or delete in a more eloquent way? TimTempleton (talk) (cont)  23:30, 26 February 2020 (UTC)


 * There are tens of thousands of these dating back to 2008. They did not compel anybody to expand anything in 12 years, and are unlikely to do so in the next 12 years. A few might be useful - History of the Hellenic Air Force, for example, has an empty WW1 section - that's a rather glaring omission and I'm fine with leaving that. But, most of these empty sections are useless. E.g. they came to be when people plunked down a stub on a play they half read for school, put in a ==Summary of the plot==, but couldn't be bothered to write it. Others come from templates, e.g. certain football players absolutely seem to need an "honours" section, even if they never received any; and British constituencies often have an empty "boundaries" section, even when the geographical location is rather evident. Yes I know WP is not a paper encyclopedia, but that's no excuse for clutter. People have to read, and edit around that stuff. Also, it's about creativity. If somebody has content to contribute, they should decide on the structure, and not feel restrained by somebody who had nothing to contribute, but felt compelled to decide what the article should look like. -- Theoprakt (talk) 23:50, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with Timtempleton that most empty sections should remain, though specific cases could be brought up at Wikiproject talk pages. If there are huge numbers of footballer articles with an empty "Honours" section, then a discussion at WT:Footy could decide whether to remove the section or add text such as "Bloggs received no honours". But I'm currently removing hundreds of empty "See also" sections; they are a special case, I think, because no article needs a "See also" section. -- John of Reading (talk) 10:35, 27 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I'll stop for now since this seems to be a lot more controversial than I would have expected, but I took the last two days to clean out most of Category:Articles_with_empty_sections_from_June_2008, which is the oldest dated category on that. You can look at my user contributions of the last 48 hours to get an overview; to me it looks very much like an improvement. I also find it rather telling that I did this to about 200 articles, and nobody, not in a single case, has objected to the removal, tried to enter a discussion about it, revert it, or showed any other indication that I should have removed anything of value. I have yet to hear an compelling argument that these old, empty headings are anything but useless clutter that shouldn't have been created in the first place, and if the resolution is to have individual discussions about these, I certainly won't be inclined to continue this cleanup. -- Theoprakt (talk) 17:22, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I took a glance at what you did and from the sample I saw it seems OK. If you are removing an intuitive or common section category that is standard for a series or specific type of article (ie parlaimentary boundaries), or a section that is repeated for other members of a list (appearances, for example, with characters in a series), you'll generally be OK.  What you don't want to remove is something that is not intuitive or unique to that article, which someone reading the article wouldn't know is missing. I trust your judgement to tell the difference. TimTempleton (talk)  (cont)  03:04, 28 February 2020 (UTC)