Where active projects have a description, placeholder projects could instead have a brief paragraph explaining why the project is in Launchpad at all. Something like: "<project> is registered in Launchpad to help <distributions that use Launchpad for bug-tracking> track bugs in their <project> packages. It also lets people host branches of the <project> code using Bazaar." Perhaps followed by an invitation for curious upstream contributors to see the list of bugs that are recorded as existing upstream but that are already fixed in a distribution, if there are any; and the list of hosted branches for the project, if there are any.
Whoops, incomplete paragraph there. Complete version:
Where active projects have a description, placeholder projects could instead have a brief paragraph explaining why the project is in Launchpad at all. Something like: "<project> is registered in Launchpad to help <distributions that use Launchpad for bug-tracking> track bugs in their <project> packages. It also lets people host branches of the <project> code using Bazaar." Perhaps followed by an invitation for curious upstream contributors to see the list of bugs that are recorded as existing upstream but that are already fixed in a distribution, if there are any; and the list of hosted branches for the project, if there are any.