Template:Primary sources

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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.

Use this template to tag information or analysis that you believe is improperly or unnecessarily supported by a primary source, so that other editors can see whether this use is appropriate or replace it with a citation to a secondary or tertiary source.

Usage

{{Primary sources|date=October 2026}} for entire articles
{{Primary sources|section|date=October 2026}} for sections

Substitution of this template will automatically fill the date parameter.

{{subst:Primary sources}}

Optional find parameters are available, for modifying the operation of the {{find sources}} links displayed by the template:

{{Primary sources|find=double-quoted search keyword(s)|find2=unquoted keywords|date=October 2026}}

This template will categorize tagged articles into Category:Articles lacking reliable references.

There is currently no consensus on where in the article to place templates such as this.

When to use

The presence of primary sources in an article doesn't mean the article must be tagged. Primary sources may be used on Wikipedia, but they need to be handled with care.

Whether a source is independent is a different concept from whether it is a primary source. To tag an article as lacking sufficient independent sources, use instead the templates {{independent sources}} or, in the case those sources are published directly by the person/organization itself, {{self-published}}.

Some alternatives include:

{{independent sources}} – When the source is written by or paid for by the subject (e.g., an op-ed written by the subject, an advertisement).
{{self-published source}} – When the source is written by and published by the subject (e.g., a personal or business website).
{{user-generated source}} – When the source is written by ordinary people on the internet (e.g., a wiki).
{{primary sources}} (this template)) – When the source contains no analysis, comparison, evaluation, etc. of the subject (e.g., WP:PRIMARYNEWS).

Many sources fall into multiple categories. It's best to use the most specific or important one, instead of filling the page with similar tags.

Parameters

There are five parameters, one positional, and four 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. 'October 2026' (no default)
|talk= – section or fullpage id of discussion
|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.

Details

Positional parameter 1

Positional parameter |1= is the 'type' parameter, which may be set to paragraph or section or any string value.

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 {{Primary sources|date=October 2026}}. Adding this parameter sorts the article into monthly subcategories of Category:Articles lacking sources, rather than adding it to the category 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 {{Primary sources}} 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. Note that booleans, exclusion terms (preceded by minus sign) and other search operators may be used in unquoted search (|find2=) if valid for the search domains:

{{Primary sources|find=John Adams|find2=president -Quincy}} ⟶ (see Examples below)

Param |find= may take the special value none in order to suppress display of find sources links. (Note that specifying |find=none and a nonempty value for |find2= is not a valid combination.)

Wrappers

To tag an individual section instead of the whole article, you can use {{Primary sources section}} template.

If you use template {{BLP primary sources}}, it indicates that the article is a biography of a living person, and also sorts the article into subcategories of Category:BLP articles lacking sources. This serves to indicate a problem with the policy on self-published sources in biographies of living persons.

Examples

{{primary sources|date=October 2026}}

Exclusion term in unquoted search:

{{Primary sources|find=John Adams|find2=president -Quincy}} ⟶

For Biographies of Living Persons:

{{BLP primary sources|date=October 2026}}

Redirects

Aliases include:

Aliases

{{BLP primary sources}} – this template with |BLP=yes

Notes

↑ 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.

TemplateData

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

TemplateData for Primary sources

Use this template to tag information or analysis that you believe is improperly or unnecessarily supported by a primary source, so that other editors can see whether this use is appropriate and/or replace it with a citation to a stronger, secondary source. Primary sources may be used on Wikipedia, but they need to be handled with care.

Template parameters[Edit template data]
This template prefers inline formatting of parameters.
Parameter		Description	Type	Status
Focus	`1`	Use if the focus is a particular section or paragraph Default article	String	optional
Month and year	`date`	Month and year when template was applied; if left blank, this will be filled by a bot Auto value `{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}`	String	suggested
Talk	`talk`	Section name or full page and section of discussion Example Discussion section name	String	optional
Find	`find`	Search keywords for 'find sources' double-quoted (exact) search. May be one or more words. Leave empty to suppress 'find sources' output. Example Austen's early life	String	optional
Find2	`find2` `unquoted`	Search keywords for 'find sources' unquoted search.	String	optional

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:Primary sources/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}} {{Deprecated archival service}} {{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 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 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}} {{Parenthetical referencing}} {{Shallow references}}
General advice	archive.today guidance Citing sources Reliable sources Maintenance template removal Citation needed Find sources Combining sources Referencing styles