You may have arrived at this help page after clicking a link on a maintenance template saying "Learn how and when to remove this message".
Even if you fix the issue(s) described in a maintenance template, the tag will remain in the article until you or someone else manually removes it.
Wikipedia works because of the efforts of volunteers just like you, making bold edits to help build this encyclopedia.
Many common templates address problems with article citations and references, or their lack –this because reliable sourcing is the lifeblood of Wikipedia articles and at the core of all of Wikipedia's content policies and guidelines, such as notability, verifiability, neutral point of view, and no original research.
This section guides you on how to address some of the more common specific templates that may have brought you to this help page.
All of Wikipedia's core content policies and guidelines have as a common denominator the need for reliable sourcing.
This template no longer applies once a single reference appears in the article, whether placed through the preferred method of inline citations, ones appearing in a general references section, or even through such a poor method as including an embedded raw link.
A visual guide to placing inline citations through ... tags may also help, and appears below.
All of Wikipedia's core content policies and guidelines have as a common denominator the need for reliable sourcing.
{{Refimprove}}, typically placed by the code {{Refimprove|date=February 2025}}, having redirects such as {{Improve references}}, {{Verify}}, {{More sources}} and {{Citations needed}}, and displaying when reading as: flags the issue of an article that has some, but insufficient inline citations to support the material currently in the article.
To address the issue, add additional inline citations to reliable sources for all significant statements in the article.
All of Wikipedia's core content policies and guidelines have a common denominator: the need for reliable sourcing.
To address the issue, add inline citations to reliable sources, ideally for all significant statements in the article.
A visual guide to placing inline citations through ... tags may also help, and appears below.
Typically, they should only be used for straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge.
They should not be used to support content that presents interpretation, analysis, evaluation, or synthesis, and should not be the predominant form of sourcing in an article.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a specific type of reference work properly containing articles on topics of knowledge.
As stated in the template, addressing the issue requires adding citations to reliable secondary sources.
Advertisements are by no means limited to commercial topics and indeed are often seen for all manner of others, such as "noble causes", religious/spiritual leaders, sports teams, gaming clans and so forth.
If the article's main problem is not advertising per se, then you can change the tag to something more appropriate, such as {{COI}} or {{Peacock}} or {{POV check}}.
Pages that are exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to become encyclopedic may be tagged for speedy deletion under section G11 of the criteria using {{db-g11}} or {{db-spam}}.
Wikipedia articles should represent fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.
An unbalanced or non-neutral article does not fairly represent the balance of perspectives of high-quality, reliable secondary sources.
This tag is meant to be accompanied by an explanation on the article's talk page about why it was added, identifying specific issues that are actionable within Wikipedia's content policies.
Wikipedia attracts numerous editors who want to update articles in real time immediately after such current events are published.
The template should generally be removed when the event described is no longer receiving massive editing attention.
These bare URLs are particularly vulnerable to link rot, as the record of the reference depends on the hosting website maintaining the current site structure, which is not guaranteed.
The full citation format, on the other hand, preserves information (such as title and author) that can be used to restore a version of the reference that is still accessible.
To address this issue, convert all bare URLs used as references to the appropriate citation template format.
Alternatively, you could try the more general Help desk, or seek live assistance at the IRC channel: #wikipedia-en-help.