Template:Unreferenced

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 This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
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This template should be used only on articles that have no sources at all. Don't add this template to articles that contain even one general reference, parenthetical reference, or citation-containing footnote.

Alternatives:

  • In articles that have some sources, but not enough, the {{Refimprove}} template should be used instead.
  • In articles containing a list of sources at the end, but no inline footnotes or parenthetical references, consider {{nofootnotes}} when the article would be significantly improved by detailed attribution of sources to specific claims.
  • Other templates, listed below, should be used when the sources are inadequate for other reasons.
  • Be bold! Consider searching for references and adding them to the article, instead of this template.
  • Consider not adding this template to short articles consisting only of a definition or common knowledge. However, direct quotations and material that is likely to be challenged should have explicit sources provided (see Wikipedia:Verifiability).
  • See Wikipedia:Biographies of living people for guidance on dealing with unreferenced biographies of living people.

Contents

Usage

This template should not be substituted (subst:).

There are three optional parameters:

Description field
The optional description field is used to indicate more specifically what should be referenced. An example of its usage is {{Unreferenced|article's section called "Childhood"}}. The description field is commonly omitted, which is acceptable, and the information box displayed in an article would then read "This article does not cite any references or sources." If a description is supplied, the word article in the information box is replaced with the description; for the example just given, the information box would read "This article's section called 'Childhood' does not cite any references or sources."
Date parameter
The date parameter is (generally[1]) used to indicate when the template was added to a page. An example of its usage is {{Unreferenced|date=April 2010}}. Adding this parameter sorts the article into monthly subcategories of Category:Articles lacking sources, rather than adding it to Category:Articles lacking sources itself, allowing the oldest problems to be identified and dealt with first. If the date parameter is omitted, a bot will add it later.
Auto parameter
The auto parameter is used to suppress visibility of the template when added by a bot. This parameter was added for compatibility with {{Unreferenced stub}}, which was merged into this template. Bots that added {{Unreferenced stub}} to stub articles included "auto=yes" by default.

The optional fields can be used together, and placed in any order. For example, both {{Unreferenced|article's section called "Childhood"|date=April 2010}} and {{Unreferenced|date=April 2010|article's section called "Childhood"}} have the same effect:

 This article's section called "Childhood" does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2010)

General information

This template can either be placed at the bottom of the article page (in an empty "References" or "Notes" section—usually just before a {{reflist}} template), or at the top of an article, or on the article's talk page.

Categorization

This template adds articles to Category:Articles lacking sources, a hidden category.

Differences from related templates

One difference between the {{Unreferenced}} template and the similar templates {{Refimprove}} and {{Unreferencedsection}} is that {{Unreferenced}} adds an article to Category:Articles lacking sources, while {{Refimprove}} and {{Unreferencedsection}} add an article to Category:Articles needing additional references.

A common practice is to supply a description of "section", as in {{Unreferenced|section}}, which results in an information box reading "This section does not cite any references or sources." This is the same message that is displayed when using {{Unreferenced section}}, but the two templates place an article in different categories, as noted above.

Note: when adding {{Unreferenced|section}} to a section of an article, the date parameter must be included. Otherwise, SmackBot will change the template to {{Unreferencedsection}} when it adds the date parameter.

Redirects

The following templates redirect to {{Unreferenced}}, meaning that they are synonyms that work exactly as {{Unreferenced}} works:

The following templates previously redirected to {{Unreferenced}}, but have been changed:

See also

The following templates are useful in cases where there are some sources, but these are inadequate or insufficient:


Footnotes

  1. ^ Because of the nature of the workflow using the current date makes sense, it is simpler to add, especially for the WP:bots it means that older dated categories do not have to be constantly created and deleted, and it enables some measure of progress. moreover it is "good enough" to get the articles into the workflow and the intention is to ensure they are cleaned up eventually. Occasionally however it may be useful to bulk add items, to older categories, for example when the system was initially set up, when merging two schemes or when adding to the current month would swamp it disproportionately.



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