Help:Maintenance template removal

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Further information: Wikipedia:Responsible tagging and Wikipedia:Tag bombing

This page is a how-to guide, detailing processes or procedures of some aspect or aspects of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines.

Shortcuts: WP:MTR H:MTR

This page in a nutshell: If you have the ability, please boldly assist Wikipedia by fixing the issues flagged by maintenance templates! All problems on Wikipedia are resolved through the efforts of volunteers like you. If you understand the problem that the template highlights, such as by reading the explanatory links it contains or found guidance through this page – and have reasonably fixed the issues – you may simply remove the maintenance template; it will not be removed automatically.

Many Wikipedia pages display maintenance templates that address problems with the topic or content of the page. You may have arrived at this help page after you clicked on a link in just such a maintenance template, that said "Learn how and when to remove this template message".
Maintenance templates are added and removed by volunteers. This help page explains the process for examining and removing such templates.

Contents

• 1 Overview
• 2 Addressing the flagged problem
  • 2.1 An example
• 3 When to remove
• 4 When not to remove
• 5 Removal
• 6 Changing a template
• 7 Specific template guidance
  • 7.1 Researching the tagged issue
• 8 Still need help?
• 9 See also

Overview

Maintenance templates (or "tags") are never removed automatically. If you fix the issue(s) described in a maintenance template, the tag will remain in the article until you or someone else manually removes it. The mechanics of removal is usually as simple as clicking "Edit" at the top of the page or in the section involved (if you're not already in edit mode), removing the code that produces the display of the template, leaving an edit summary, and saving the page.
It is not okay to remove maintenance templates until the issue flagged by the template is remedied first – that is, only once the maintenance tag is no longer valid, unless it truly did not belong in the first place.
Wikipedia works because of the efforts of volunteers like you, making bold edits to help build this encyclopedia. Fixing problems and then removing maintenance templates when you're done is important in that effort.

Addressing the flagged problem

We don't know which maintenance tag brought you to this page, and thus what specific problem needs attention. However, every maintenance template contains links to help pages, policies, guidelines, or other relevant pages that provide information on the problem the template was placed to flag. You will also find guidance on some of the more common templates below.
Many common templates address problems with article citations and references, or their lack—because reliable sourcing is the lifeblood of Wikipedia articles and at the core of all of Wikipedia's content policies and guidelines, such as notability, verifiability, neutral point of view, and no original research. But a host of other issues may be flagged, including tone and style of writing, structure and formatting, lack of links to other articles or from other articles to the article at issue, compliance with Wikipedia's manual of style and the lack of a lead section.
Making sure that the issue has been fixed is the condition you need to fulfill before removing the template. That does require some effort on your part—to understand both the problem and how to solve it.

An example

If the issue flagged by the maintenance template is that the article contains no references, then the template used might be {{Unreferenced}} – typically placed by the code you would see when wikitext (source) editing: {{Unreferenced|date=April 2017}}.
It is important to understand that what you see when reading an article, and what you see when editing it, is different. Thus, the above code, only seen when doing source editing, results in the display of the 'called' template below:

Example:

This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

This template contains a number of links, indicated by the words and phrases in blue. Three of these links are to pages that, when explored, provide context and resources for you to understand why the template was placed on the page, and how to address the issue of the article being unreferenced:

• "cite", which links to the content guideline Wikipedia:Citing sources;
• "sources", which links to the policy Wikipedia:Verifiability; and
• "adding citations to reliable sources", which links to a help page providing a how-to guide to the basics of citing references.

Whatever maintenance tag brought you to this help page should likewise contain relevant explanatory links addressed to whatever its issue is. Read these explanatory and contextual pages to learn about the problem and what it is you need to do to take care of it. Again, some of the more common maintenance templates seen are addressed in the specific template guidance section below.