Template:What?/doc

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.

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 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.

Categorisation
When pages have this template applied, they are automatically placed into category:Articles with statements that need clarification.