When to use

Use this tag to identify personal essays. Personal essays describe the author's own emotional feelings about a topic. Although Wikipedia is supposed to compile human knowledge, it is not a vehicle to publish users' personal opinions.

This template should be used when the article contains the editor's own personal, emotional comments on the subject. Use it when the article does not necessarily represent a blatant opinion or opinion piece, but is still overly judgementalist in tone.

When not to use

Do not use this template to tag fact-oriented pages that sound like they might have been written as research papers for school (called "essays" in some parts of the world). Instead, if those pages need a different writing style or tone, use {{Research paper}}, or general templates like {{Tone}} or {{Copy edit}}.

If the article is biased, but without expressing the editor's emotions or value-based judgments, use tags like {{unbalanced}} or {{POV}}.

How to use

Place this:

{{Essay-like|date=November 2024}}

at the top of the article to alert editors to the inappropriate presence of editors' personal reflections throughout the article.

Sections
  • To mark specific sections instead of the whole article, place {{Essay-like|section}} at the top of the section.
Options
  • To replace the text "a personal reflection or essay", you may use {{Essay-like|article or section|yourtext}} or {{Essay-like|2=yourtext}}
  • Articles tagged without the optional date parameter will be given the parameter by a bot.
  • Add a new item to the talk page explaining the problem so editors will know what to address, and when to remove this tag.

Notes

See also

TemplateData

This is the TemplateData documentation for this template used by VisualEditor and other tools; see the monthly error report for this template.

TemplateData for Essay-like

Use this cleanup template to identify personal essays

Template parameters

This template prefers inline formatting of parameters.

ParameterDescriptionTypeStatus
Type (typically section)1

This parameter allows an editor to replace the default word "article" with another word, usually the word "section"

Default
article
Stringoptional
Replaced text2

To replace the template text "a personal reflection or opinion essay" with a custom description

Auto value
Contentoptional
Month and yeardate

Month and year of tagging; e.g., 'January 2013', but not 'jan13'

Auto value
{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}
Stringsuggested