Template:Prose

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"Template:List" redirects here. For bulleted and unbulleted lists, see Template:HTML lists. For lists of links to directories, see Template:Lists.

Description

This template will add tagged articles to a cleanup category according to the month and year given.

Usage

{{Prose|date=January 2026}} → Category:Articles needing cleanup from January 2026 and Category:Articles with sections that need to be turned into prose from January 2026.

If no date is given, articles will be added to the more general Category:Wikipedia cleanup and Category:Articles with sections that need to be turned into prose.

Also parameter 1 may be included to replace "article" with a specific term, such as "section" or "table". For example:

{{Prose|section|date=January 2026}}

Closely related templates

Please keep this template's messaging consistent with the related templates:

• {{Create list}} – the opposite of this template
• {{Trivia}} – suggests relocation rather than reformatting of the details in a trivia section
• {{Expand list}} – for use where a list is too short/incomplete
• {{List to table}} – for use where a table would be better than a list
• {{Table to prose}} – for use where prose is preferable to a table
• {{Example farm}} – for articles or sections with too many examples

See also

• Wikipedia:Writing better articles
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trivia sections
• Wikipedia:Handling trivia – essay on trivia in Wikipedia, what it is and how it should be handled
• Wikipedia:"In popular culture" content – essay on "popular culture"–types articles and sections
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Trivia Cleanup – WikiProject designed to clean up long lists of trivia in articles
• Wikipedia:Proseline – essay on avoiding writing prose paragraphs that end up looking like a list anyway
• Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup – index of cleanup templates

TemplateData

This is the TemplateData for this template used by TemplateWizard, VisualEditor and other tools. Click here to see a monthly parameter usage report for this template based on this TemplateData.

TemplateData for Prose

Use this maintenance template to indicate that an article is in list format but may read better as prose.

Template parameters

This template prefers inline formatting of parameters.

Parameter		Description	Type	Status
Month and year	date	The month and year that the template was placed (in full). "{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}" inserts the current month and year automatically. Example January 2013 Auto value {{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}	Line	suggested
Affected area	1	Text to replace the word "article", usually "section" Example section Auto value section	Line	optional

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:Prose/doc. (edit | history)
Editors can experiment in this template's sandbox (create | mirror) and testcases (create) pages.
Add categories to the /doc subpage. Subpages of this template.