Help:Lint errors/empty-heading

MediaWiki version:

1.44

This page is about Linter error empty-heading.

An empty heading occurs when the content of the heading normalizes to the empty string. For example, all of these will be empty headings and flagged on this list of lint errors.

=== ===

=== <!-- comment --> ===

=== <center></center> ===

=== [[File:Example.svg]] ===

=== [[fi:Example]] ===

=== [https://www.example.com] ===

=== _______ ===

=== {{Use dmy dates|date=February 2020}} === (or other template with no rendered output)

<h2 style="font-weight:bold;padding:0;margin:0;color:black;font-family:sans-serif;border:none;font-size:100%;padding-bottom:.1em"><big>[[File:Canada 10,000 banner.png|400px|link=Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada/The 10,000 Challenge]] </big> <i></i></h2>

Empty heading errors can also be reported when there are unclosed ref tags. A common error is trying to reuse a reference without the closing slash character, like ‎<ref name="reference name"> instead of ‎<ref name="reference name" />.

Suggested fixes

For empty headings that should have content, it is recommended to replace the missing section header with "Untitled" unless there is a better, more appropriate option.

=== Untitled ===

Other examples may require different resolutions. For empty headings that are placeholders, e.g. in a draft article, filling them with appropriate text, deleting them, or commenting them out may be appropriate.

History

In T368722, it was noted that Parsoid does not generate section edit links for empty headings, whereas the legacy parser will, but with an invalid empty anchor that the link in the table of contents can't navigate to. The creation of this lint error was discussed at w:Wikipedia talk:Linter/Archive 6#New lint category for empty headings.