This Page Intentionally Left Blank Discussion

See ThisPageIntentionallyLeftBlank

It seemed only fitting that a work the size of WikiWiki should have one of these. Only problem is, I've already ruined it by writing this...

From FunnyThingsSeenInSourceCodeAndDocumentation:

How about those old DoD-style specification documents that would have pages saying only "ThisPageIntentionallyLeftBlank." What the hell good does that do? I kept waiting for the day I'd see "This page unintentionally left blank." :-) -- RS

Actually seen in the wild. It's on the back side of a page in the manual for MicroPro?'s WordStar 2.2 for CP/M. I have it on my shelf to this day. -- GarryHamilton

A friend of mine has a machine that mostly handles email. He replaced the default Apache home page with one that reads "This page unintentionally left blank." Caused me to double-take when I first saw it. --RogerLipscombe

Accidental blank pages used to be caused by copier malfunctions or mistakes on the part of the person loading pages into the copier. "This page left intentionally blank" was invented as a way to know that all really blank pages were duplication mistakes.

But if the page has the blank message on it, then it is no longer blank. In one document I wrote, I used the phrase: This page intentionally left non-blank. -- JimWeirich

I propose This page intentionally contains only seven words. Which somehow reminds me of "This sentence has cabbage six words". -- GarethMcCaughan

I once received a correction to a piece of documentation that changed a page that said This page intentionally left blank to say The remainder of this page intentionally left blank. -- AndrewKoenig

"This song's just six words long" -- WeirdAl http://www.google.com/search?q=%22six+words+long%22+yankovic

JohnCooperClark? wrote a wonderful haiku poem (from memory so it may be a little out): Expressing emotion in just seventeen syllables is diffic -- MarcusBaker

A friend of mine went to some extra trouble and expense once to have "This side intentionally left blank" printed on the back of his business cards. -- PatrickConnors

An old Atari ST/Macintosh/Amiga game called Brattacus came with a rather cryptic manual which seemed to purposefully leave many many questions in the reader's minds as to the nature of the game's plot and story. Anytime a bit of story or revealing info was suggested, or a question was posed, the answer was always listed like this: "To find out what crime Kyne is accused of committing, refer to page 27." Of course, page 27 had ya'lls favorite phrase on it: "this page intentionally left blank."

See AutoDescriptive.

People seem to think this is a stupid thing to do, but it allows a section to be replaced with a slightly larger section, without altering the page numbering of later sections. Surely that's a GoodThing(tm), and without deliberately ContentFree? pages would be impossible. To write something standard shows that the page is not an error. Yes, I know you're all having a laugh about a page deliberately declaring itself blank, and therefore lying, but it always seems that the people poking fun at it just don't get the point.

One of the manuals for the original (pre-Posix compliant) QNX operating system manual had a page that stated "This page was unintentionally left intentionally blank."