Template:Orphan

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Template:Orphan is used on pages with no incoming links from other articles or lists. The template is responsible for populating sub-categories of Category:Orphaned articles. There are currently 0 orphaned articles.

How to use

The simplest way to add this template to an article is to copy and paste either {{Orphan|date=March 2026}} or {{Orphan|{{subst:DATE}}}} at the top of the article.

• Please do not subst: this template.

When to use

This template should only be put on articles which meet the orphan criteria.

Use your judgment about whether to add this template. Do not add this template to articles that you honestly believe will be impossible to de-orphan.

Visibility

The template message is visible on all pages where the date parameter is set to either the current month or the previous month (currently March 2026 or February 2026). It is also visible on all pages where it is used inside the {{multiple issues}} template. Older-dated orphan templates used outside of the {{multiple issues}} template are invisible by default, but are still categorized. To override the default and make the message visible on all pages where it's placed, put the following line in your common.css file (create the file if you don't have one yet):

.ambox-Orphan{display: table !important;}

This may not work in some older browsers - if it doesn't work, use

.ambox-Orphan{display: block !important;}

instead.

Alternatively, to never see this tag, you could instead add to your common.css:

.ambox-Orphan{ display: none !important; }

The orphan message box is invisible on this page by default. If you have correctly installed the above common.css the orphan message box is visible here.

Rationale

With over 100,000 orphaned articles in the project, WikiProject Orphanage has an extreme backlog. The tags on newly created articles are visible for a month or two, in hopes that the article's creators or reviewers will tend to the issue. After a couple of months it's assumed that the WikiProject will need to take on the task, and project members use their common.css files to keep the templates visible. The community consensus is that this issue is insufficiently critical to merit notifying general readers of the issue for more than a couple of months, unless the article has {{multiple issues}}. Please review the discussions related to this on Template talk:Orphan and its archives.

Automated placement and adjustment

Several semi-automated tools and bots facilitate orphan-tagging. Some notes on tool implementation:

• Per Another tweak for orphans, as of March 9, 2010 AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) restricts orphan tag addition to linkless pages.
• Per Move orphan (and some more) tags on the top, AWB moves incorrectly positioned orphan tags to the correct location for orphan tags, at or near the top of the article.

Parameters

date

You may use a date parameter with this template, for example {{Orphan|date=March 2026}} to help with the categorisation of articles requiring links. If you leave it out, a bot will fill it in (but this will result in more edits and watchlist alerts, so adding the date right away is preferred).

att

If you have made an unsuccessful attempt to de-orphan the article, then please add the month/year of the attempt to the template, like so, {{orphan|date=Month Year|att=March 2026}}, where the |date= parameter is the date the template was originally placed on the page, and the |att= parameter is set to equal the current month and year. This places it in Category:Attempted de-orphan for that date and also hides the article message box. The "att" is an abbreviation for "attempt", as in "I attempted to de-orphan this article but failed".

incat

If the article has no link and probably never will, but is well categorised the incat option can be used. For example, {{Orphan|date=March 2026|incat=March 2026}}

Per the discussion at template talk:Orphan/Archive 2#"Few links" template?, this parameter was, but is not currently, used in the template itself.

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 Orphan

This template should only be put on articles which meet the orphan criteria.

Template parameters

Parameter		Description	Type	Status
Date	date	The date this template was added to the page. (Input: Monthname Year) Auto value {{SUBST:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{SUBST:CURRENTYEAR}}	String	required
De-orphan attempt	att	If you have made an unsuccessful attempt to de-orphan the article, please fill in this field to record the attempt. (Input: Monthname Year)	String	optional
In Category	incat	If the article has no link and probably never will, but is well categorised this option can be used.(Input: Monthname Year)	String	optional

Categories

This template places the article into "Category:All orphaned articles" as well as "Category:Orphaned articles from {{{date}}}". If the "att" parameter is set, the article will still be in Category:All orphaned articles, but instead of placing the article into "Category:Orphaned articles from {{{date}}}" (e.g. Category:Orphaned articles from March 2026), it places it into "Category:Attempted de-orphan from {{{att}}} (e.g. Category:Attempted de-orphan from March 2026).

See also

• Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/General fixes#Mainspace tagger
• User:Magioladitis/AWB and orphans
• User:CleanupWorklistBot
  • e.g., for WikiProject Athletics: Cleanup listing
  • e.g., Wikipedia:WikiProject Tennis/Cleanup listing
• Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Addbot 16
• Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Addbot 18
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage
• {{Orphaned essay}}: for orphaned essays in the project namespace

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:Orphan/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.