Wikipedia:Midden
Essay on editing Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Any Wikipedia article which becomes a midden is no longer very useful to readers.
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community. |
Signs of this include, but are not limited to:
- Laundry lists in the body or lede of an article of minor facts or events relating to the main topic of the article.
- Unreadable sections in any article (see Gunning fog index) which make the article unusable by a large percentage of users.
- Lists of references which are as long or longer than the article itself.
- Overcitation, especially where a single word has ten or more number cites attached.
- Lists of trivia which do not improve the reader's understanding of the article's topic.
The primary aims of Wikipedia are readability, and making topics clearly and accurately presented with a neutral point of view. Each of the situations given above makes those aims less possible in any article.