Author Missing
Template documentation{{Author missing}} (or {{author?}} for short) is an inline cleanup template flagging a broken source citation that is missing author information (or at least the specified fact that author information is not available).
Usage
This template should never be substituted.
- With references in a {{Cite}}-type template ({{Cite web}}, {{Cite book}}, {{Citation}}, etc.):
|author={{author missing}}- or
|last={{author missing}}
- In the occasional case of a partial name (e.g. just a family name, or some construction such as "Dr. Falstaff" or "Reagan and Parkes" or "VNEA" without the full information being provided in a "Notes", "References" or "Bibliography" section elsewhere on the page), you can change the displayed text to [author incomplete] using:
|first={{author missing|partial=yes}}- or
|author=
{{author incomplete}}
- With a free-form reference citation, just append the tag to the end of the citation:
{{author missing}}
How to fix the problem flagged by this template
Do not remove the template without fixing the problem one of the following ways.
- If you know the author(s), fill in the needed information, and remove the template.
- For a template-formatted citation, there are three basic ways to do this:
|last=Familyname|first=Given Name(s)- or, for multiple authors:
|last=Familyname|first=Given Name(s)|coauthors=Coauthor name(s), formatted as needed for the citation style being used- or for a committee, working group, etc., instead of individual author names:
|author=Organizational author
- For a free-form citation:
- Just add the name(s) as appropriate to the format of the citation; or...
- Better yet, convert the entire citation to {{Cite journal}}, {{Cite news}} or some other {{Cite}}-series template, as appropriate for the work in question.
- If you know that no author was specified by the original source, as in common in many newswires, explicitly state this with:
|author=- or for free-form citations:
- Do not use question marks.
- Do not just repeat the publisher, work (publication/site) name, or other field.
- Do not leave the information blank and untag it, or someone else will just come along later and flag this with {{author missing}} again! The citation templates know how to properly format a citation to something with no specified author (thus the HTML comment formatting above).
- Do not use
|author=noneunless you are using {{Cite book}} or another template that recognizes the valuenoneand hides the output instead of displaying the word "none". Most of the {{Cite}}/{{Citation}}-style templates do not do this (as of January 2010), but certainly should. - Do not use
|author=unknown,|author=not sureor anything else vague; any implication other than that the source itself did not specify an author is simply a signal to other editors to re-tag it with {{author missing}}.
- If you don't know:
- Do not use question marks.
- Check the source, and add the necessary information, as above.
- If the source is a dead link, check archive.org for a backup copy (see your {{Citation}}/{{Cite}}-type template's documentation for use of
|archiveurl=and|archivedate=parameters). If no archive copy is available, use {{dead link}} after the citation, but leave {{author missing}} as well.
See also
ଛାଞ୍ଚ:Citation repair
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