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^ What Ramidel said. To the casual reader, the difference between a deleted and a commented out ZCE is moot. However, when they click the Edit button to add an example, the commented out entry should indicate to them that it's in need of expansion.
I can't honestly say which policy is better in the long run, as we have only anecdotal evidence to judge them by. Suspensions for uncommenting ZCEs without expanding them make up a non-trivial portion of our Edit Banned conversations.
Edited by Fighteer "It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Good to know. I will start commenting them instead; it can clutter up the page source, but as long as we're not worried about that, it does seem less potentially destructive.
Would it be all right if I edited the relevant Administrivia pages to show what is allowed, what is encouraged, and the appropriate way to do either?
I ask because I dunno if the Administrivia pages have editing rules/guidelines that differ from pages in the Main namespace.
Edited by SolipSchismI'm pretty sure that all relevant Administrivia pages are locked because of You Know Who, but sure, go ahead if you can.
Edit: My personal policy when editing is to delete newly-added ZCEs unless the article is already cleaned — that is, has an editing notice at the top and comments on all existing bad examples. If I don't have time to properly scrub an article, then leaving individual examples commented out is confusing and therefore counterproductive.
Edited by Fighteer "It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Administrivia.Zero Context Example is locked, but I was able to edit Administrivia.TV Tropes Customs. Just added a line after the above text, to add that it's often preferable to comment them out.
Also, I feel compelled to note that I Don't Know Who, but I'm okay with that. :p
Edited by SolipSchismOh hey. There's a thread that addresses this
. It seems the officially-sanctioned way to deal with them is to comment them out.

Another question here caught my attention as I don't want to get myself in trouble.
Point 9 on Administrivia.TV Tropes Customs under Editing The Wiki Proper says, "It is perfectly permissible to ... wholesale remove examples that are incorrect or violate a wiki policy like Zero-Context Example without anyone's permission, although you should leave an edit reason and note on the discussion page." I've been interpreting that as "Delete Zero-Context Examples whenever you see them," and thus that's what I've been doing (albeit with edit descriptions).
I hadn't actually read the Zero Context Example page until now, where it says instead that ZCEs should be "moved to that page's discussion space, or, if this represents a much bigger problem throughout an entire page, brought to attention in this Special Efforts thread dedicated to fixing these issues" and can also be commented out.
Is there a preferred method of dealing with ZCEs? I assume I should stop "wholesale removing" them, since I see now that the TV Tropes Customs page seems to be the only page encouraging simple deletion. And that Administrivia page should probably be changed, if that's not the preferred method of dealing with them.
Thanks in advance for any insight.
Edited by SolipSchism