Template:References/doc


 * This template will categorize tagged articles into Category:Articles lacking reliable references.
 * This template is a self-reference, and thus is not appropriate for Subst.
 * There is currently no consensus on where on the article to place templates such as this.

When to use
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, but they need to be handled with care.

"Primary source" does not mean that the author is too closely affiliated with the subject. As a general rule, primary sources include all scientific journal articles about experiments, "eyewitness" newspaper stories, and historical documents. If you are looking for an independent, third-party source, use instead.

How to use
This template also has several optional fields.

If you pass in an unnamed parameter, it specifies which part of the article inappropriately relies solely on primary sources. By default, the entire article needs third-party sources, i.e. it's equivalent to:



To be more specific on which section of the article needs third-party sources, use:



This would show up as:

If you pass in a date parameter ( month year ), it sorts the article into subcategories of Category:Articles lacking reliable references and out of the parent category. This in turn allows the oldest problems to be identified and dealt with first. If the date parameter is omitted, a bot will add it later.

If you use BLP primary sources (which is a wrapper for Primary sources with the  parameter), 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.

Note that order does not matter with respect to the above optional parameters. Both  and   will produce the same result.

Redirects
Aliases include:
 * Primary
 * Primary source
 * Primary Sources
 * Primarysource
 * Primarysources
 * PrimarySources

Aliases

 * 1) BLP primary sources - this template with BLP=yes