Template documentation[view] [edit] [history] [purge]{{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).
Use
- For all citations, append the tag to the end of the citation (usually just before the closing reference tag
</ref>):{{author missing|date=June 2026}}
- 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:
{{author missing|partial=yes|date=June 2026}}- or
{{author incomplete|date=June 2026}}
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:
|last1=Familyname1|first1=Given Name1(s)|last2=Familyname2|first2=Given Name2(s), etc- 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 xxx}}-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=<!--none-->- or for free-form citations:
<!--No author specified by source.-->
- 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=none - 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 xxx}}-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
- Source citation guidelines
- Citation repair templates
- {{Full citation needed}} – the catch-all
- {{Author missing}}
- {{Author incomplete}} – a variant for partial data
- {{Date missing}}
- {{ISBN missing}}
- {{Place missing}}
- {{Publisher missing}}
- {{Title missing}}
- {{Title incomplete}} – a variant for partial data
- {{Year missing}}
