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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 source.
Usage
{{Primary sources|date=February 2026}} for entire articles
{{Primary sources|section|date=February 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:
Whether a source isindependent is a different concept from whether it is aprimary source. To tag an article as lacking sufficientindependent 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., anop-ed written by the subject, an advertisement).
{{self-published source}} – When the source is written byand 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 offilling the page with similar tags.
Parameters
There are five parameters, one positional, and four named parameters. All parameters are optional.
Positional parameter|1= is the 'type' parameter, which may be set toparagraph orsection 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=February 2026}}. Adding this parameter sorts the article into monthly subcategories ofCategory: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, abot 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 includesparenthetical 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:
Param|find= may take the special valuenone in order to suppress display offind 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.
^Because of the nature of the workflow using the current date makes sense, it is simpler to add, especially for theWP: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.
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.