Template:Unreferenced

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This template is used on approximately 113,000 pages.
To avoid major disruption and server load, any changes should be tested in the template's /sandbox or /testcases subpages, or in your own user subpage. The tested changes can be added to this page in a single edit. Consider discussing changes on the talk page before implementing them.

Any breaking changes to this template, including moving it or nominating it for deletion, must be communicated in advance to Twinkle's users and maintainers at Wikipedia talk:Twinkle. The standard installation of Twinkle relies on this template. Thank you.

This template should only be used on articles that have no citations or references at all. Don't add this template to articles that contain even one general reference, bare URL, or citation-containing footnote. A citation is any description of a reliable source that supports any of the article content. The format of the citation and the name of the section heading (e.g., ==External links==) are not what determines whether a link or citation is a source.

Usage

{{Unreferenced|date=May 2025}}
{{Unreferenced|find=World War II|find2=Mediterranean|date=May 2025}}

When to use

You should only add this template to articles that contain no citations or references of any kind.

Do not add this template:

In articles that have some citations, but not enough, the {{More citations needed}} template should be used instead as a general template, or the {{Unreferenced section}} template for individual sections that have no citations.
In articles containing a list of sources at the end, but no inline citations, including parenthetical references or in-text attributions, consider {{no footnotes}} when the article would be significantly improved by detailed attribution of sources to specific claims.
Watch out for lists of general references that someone has incorrectly listed under ==External links==. If the link leads to a reliable source that supports some article content, then that website is a reference, not just an external link.
Other templates, listed below, should be used when the citations are inadequate for other reasons.

Examples
Use {{no footnotes}}	Add {{third-party}}, too	Use only {{unreferenced}}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.	Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.	Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
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Alternatives:

Be bold! Consider searching for sources and citing them in the article, instead of adding this template.
In articles about people and businesses, consider using the more specific {{Third-party sources}} template, to encourage citation of WP:Independent sources rather than the subject's own website.
See Wikipedia:Biographies of living people for guidance on dealing with unreferenced biographies of living people.
Consider not adding this template to very brief stubs, since anyone visiting the page can see, in a single glance, that it contains no citations.

Parameters

There are six parameters, one positional, and five named parameters. All parameters are optional.

|1= – scope of notification (e.g., 'paragraph', 'section', 'article', etc.) default: 'article'. see Details.
|date= – month name and year; e.g. 'May 2025' (no default)
|find= – search keywords for {{find sources}} param 1 (double-quoted search); default: page title. See details below.
|find2= – search keywords for {{find sources}} param 2 (unquoted search). Alias: unquoted. See below.
|small= – set to left or no; see details at Ambox. Default: standard-width banner.
|status= – if set to hasaref, alters the tracking category to Category:All articles possibly lacking sources

Examples

{{Unreferenced|date=May 2025}}

or

{{subst:Unreferenced}}

Substitution of this template will automatically fill the date parameter.

The optional |find= parameter is available, for modifying the operation of the {{find sources}} links displayed by the template:

{{Unreferenced|find=search keyword(s)|date=May 2025}}

see below for details.

To flag an individual section as being unreferenced, use the {{Unreferenced section}} template, which categorizes more narrowly:

{{Unreferenced section|date=May 2025}}

Details

Positional parameter 1

Positional parameter |1= is the 'type' parameter, which may be set to paragraph or section or any string value. To mark an unreferenced section of an article, please use {{Unreferenced section}} instead.

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=May 2025}}. 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.

Find parameters:

There are two 'find' parameters available to control the presentation and operation of the {{find sources}} links optionally displayed by the {{Unreferenced}} template. By default, the template displays {{find sources}} with a quoted search query equivalent to the exact article title. Sometimes, especially if the article has a long, descriptive title, or if it includes parenthetical disambiguation terms, this may not give useful results. The find parameters can be used to provide the search keywords of your choice to the {{find sources}} links. Use:

|find= to specify keywords for an exact search (double-quoted query); this corresponds to {{find sources}} positional param |1.
|find2= to specify keywords for an unquoted search; this corresponds to {{find sources}} param |2. The alias |unquoted= may be used instead.

The value "none" may be passed to 'find' (|find=none) to suppress display of find sources links. (Note that specifying |find=none and a nonempty value for |find2= is not a valid combination.)

General information

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

Categorization

This template adds the article to Category:Articles lacking sources and a monthly subcategory such as Category:Articles lacking sources from May 2025 (as described above), which are hidden categories.

Differences from related templates

Short-cut

{{Unref}}
{{NR}}
{{No ref}}
{{No sources}}
{{Citesources}}

TemplateData

This is the TemplateData for this template used by TemplateWizard, VisualEditor and other tools. See a monthly parameter usage report for Template:Unreferenced in articles based on its TemplateData.

TemplateData for Unreferenced

This template generates a tag to indicate that an article has no citations.

Template parameters
This template prefers inline formatting of parameters.
Parameter		Description	Type	Status
Type (e.g., section)	`1`	Text to replace the word "article", usually "section". This is a legacy feature, and this usage has been replaced with the separate '{{Unreferenced section}}' template. Example section Auto value `article`	String	optional
Month and year	`date`	Provides the month and year of the citation request; e.g., 'January 2013', but not 'jan13' Example January 2013 Auto value `{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}`	String	suggested
Find sources keywords	`find`	Search string for 'find sources' template. May be one or more words. Set to value 'none' to suppress 'find sources' output. Example Your keyword list Auto value `empty string`	String	optional
Find2	`find2` `unquoted`	Search keywords for 'find sources' unquoted search.	String	optional

Tracking categories

Footnotes

Page Template:Reflist/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "plain text").

↑ 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.

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:Unreferenced/doc.
Editors can experiment in this template's sandbox and testcases pages.
Add categories to the /doc subpage. Subpages of this template.

[date-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.

[1]

v t e Citation and verifiability article maintenance templates
Sourcing	{{Circular}} {{Dubious}} {{Excessive citations}} {{Further reading cleanup}} {{Independent sources}} {{More citations needed}} {{More citations needed section}} {{More footnotes needed}} {{No footnotes}} {{No reliable sources}} {{No significant coverage}} {{One source}} {{One source section}} {{Only primary sources}} {{NRIS only}} {{Primary sources}} {{Primary sources section}} {{Religious text primary}} {{Self-published}} {{Self-reference cleanup}} {{Self-sourcing examples}} {{Refexample section}} {{Sources exist}} {{Text-source}} {{Unreferenced}} {{Unreferenced section}} {{Unreferenced category}} {{Unreliable sources}} {{Unreliable sources section}} {{User-generated}}
BLP-specific	{{BLP unreferenced}} {{BLP unreferenced section}} {{BLP primary sources}} {{BLP self-published}} {{BLP sources}} {{BLP sources section}} {{BLP IMDb-only refimprove}} {{BLP IMDb refimprove}} {{BLP no footnotes}} {{BLP more footnotes needed}} {{BLP one source}}
Topic specific	{{Localist}} {{Media IMDb refimprove}} {{More medical citations needed}} {{More science citations needed}} {{Neologism}} {{Science review}} {{Unreferenced law}} {{Unreferenced-law section}} {{Unreferenced medical section}}
Dispute-related	{{Cite check}} {{Cite check section}} {{Content}} {{Disputed}} {{Dispute about}} {{Disputed section}} {{Disputed chem}} {{Disputed list}} {{Disputed map}} {{Expert needed}} {{Hoax}} {{Original research}} {{Original research section}} {{Speculation}} {{Speculation section}} {{Synthesis}} {{Verifiability}} {{Verify sources}}
Citation improvements	{{Citation style}} {{Citations broken}} {{Cleanup bare URLs}} {{Format footnotes}} {{Full citations needed}} {{Ibid}} {{Page numbers improve}} {{Page numbers needed}} {{Shallow references}}
General advice	Citing sources Reliable sources Maintenance template removal Citation needed Find sources Combining sources Referencing styles