Template:Orphan

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Template:Orphan is responsible for populating sub-categories of Category:Orphaned articles. There are currently 1,395 orphaned articles.

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 July 2025 or June 2025). 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 1,395 orphaned articles in the project, the category All orphaned articles 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. 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 en: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.

When to use

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

How to use

The simplest way to add this template to an article is to copy and paste either {{Orphan|date=July 2025}} or {{Orphan|{{subst:DATE}}}} at the top of the article.

Please do not subst: this template.

Parameters

date

You may use a date parameter with this template, for example {{Orphan|date=July 2025}} 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=July 2025}}, 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.

few

If the article only has one or two links to it and it is felt more are required and possible the few option can be used. For example, {{Orphan|date=July 2025|few=July 2025}}

Setting the |few= parameter populates Category:Low linked articles.

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=July 2025|incat=July 2025}}

TemplateData

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

TemplateData for Orphan