Wikipedia advert and notability tags

What does the advert tag on Wikipedia mean?

The advert tag means an editor thinks the article, or part of it, reads like an advertisement rather than an encyclopedia entry. The template is now named Template:Promotional, and the old name Template:Advert redirects to it, so both produce the same banner: "This article contains promotional content. Please help improve it by removing promotional language and inappropriate external links, and by adding encyclopedic text written from a neutral point of view."

The template's documentation describes its target as articles that have been made, in whole or part, into public relations documents or brochures, and that portray a subject in an unfairly positive or negative light. The policy behind it is the section of What Wikipedia is not on promotion, which says articles about a person, company or organisation are not an extension of their website, press releases or social media.

Two points in the documentation are easy to miss. The tag is not a conflict of interest tag: editors are told to decide on the basis of the article's content, not on who they think wrote it. And whoever adds it should be able to identify specific, correctable content that tends to sell the subject. A section can be tagged on its own with Template:Promotional section, and a single phrase with an inline tag.

What kind of wording triggers a promotional or peacock tag?

Wording that praises the subject in Wikipedia's own voice, tells readers what to buy or think, or follows the shape of a brochure. Wikipedia's help page on removing maintenance templates lists the typical signs: telling readers to buy a product, price lists, links to online sellers, meaningless buzzwords, peacock language, and text that reads like the subject's website or a press release.

The examples below are invented, but each is the kind of sentence that draws a tag, set beside the kind of sentence that does not.

The Peacock tag targets the first kind of sentence. Its banner says the article "contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information", and asks editors to use facts and attribution instead of proclamations about importance. Wikipedia's guideline on words to watch gives a list of terms that often signal it, including legendary, acclaimed, iconic, visionary, leading, award-winning, cutting-edge, innovative, world-class, renowned, prestigious and pioneering.

Related tags pick out particular shapes of the same problem. Template:Resume-like is for biographies written like a résumé, and Template:Weasel for vague phrasing, such as "many experts believe", that often accompanies biased or unverifiable claims.

How is a promotional article properly fixed?

By rewriting it from a neutral point of view, which involves what the article covers as well as how it is worded. Wikipedia's help page on the advert tag makes this point directly: removing promotional language is a good start but may only be a surface treatment, and editors often strip a promotional article down to a stub before rebuilding it from independent sources.

In practice a proper fix usually means:

1. Removing the selling. Calls to action, product lists, pricing, slogans and links to shops or booking pages go.
2. Replacing adjectives with facts. "Rapid growth" becomes figures with a source. "Renowned" becomes a named source saying something specific.
3. Rebalancing coverage. If reliable sources report a lawsuit, a failed product or a regulatory finding, a neutral article mentions it in proportion. An article that omits everything unwelcome is still promotional, however mild its wording.
4. Changing the sources. Claims resting on press releases and the subject's website are replaced with independent coverage, or removed.
5. Restructuring. Sections modelled on a corporate website, such as "Mission", "Values" or "Clients", are folded into a history and description written as prose.

A connected person or their agency should do this by edit request rather than by editing the article, and an editor without a conflict of interest removes the tag once the article no longer sells. The fixed article is often shorter than the tagged one. That is normal, and a short, neutral article is far more stable than a long, polished one.

There is a harder end to this. A page that is exclusively promotional, and would need a fundamental rewrite to become an encyclopedia article, can be deleted without discussion under speedy deletion criterion G11. The criterion itself says that if the subject is notable and the content could plausibly be rewritten neutrally, that is preferable to deletion.

What does the notability tag mean?

The notability tag means an editor thinks the subject may not qualify for a Wikipedia article at all. Its banner reads: "The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted."

The tag can point at a subject-specific guideline instead of the general one. On biographies it often names the notability guideline for biographies, and on business articles the notability guidelines for companies and organisations.

The template's documentation sets the threshold for adding it. The editor should judge the subject reasonably likely to be non-notable. If they think it certainly and hopelessly non-notable, the documentation tells them to go straight to proposed deletion or Articles for Deletion instead. A notability tag is therefore a doubt, not a verdict.

The same documentation is careful about what notability does not require. It depends on whether appropriate sources have been published about the subject, not on whether anyone has cited them yet or written the article well. An article can be badly written and still be about a notable subject, and a beautifully written article can be about one that is not.

Why is a notability tag often a step before deletion?

Because Wikipedia's deletion process asks editors to try tagging first. The instructions at Articles for Deletion say that if an article has issues, editors should first raise concerns on the talk page or with the main contributors, or add a cleanup tag, and they name the notability and promotional tags among the examples. A notability tag that brings no new sources leaves the next editor with a straightforward case.

From the tag, the usual routes are:

The tag is not a deadline, though. Its documentation rules out nominating an article simply because the tag is old, and says the concern can be resolved at any pace. Nor does it apply after the question has been settled: the tag should not be placed on an article that has been kept at Articles for Deletion, and the help page says it may then be removed and not re-added.

Our guides to proposed and speedy deletion and Articles for Deletion explain each route in full.

How is a notability tag properly resolved?

Only by showing that independent, reliable sources have covered the subject in depth. Rewriting, expanding or reorganising the article does not help on its own, and Wikipedia's help page puts it plainly: no amount of editing can overcome a lack of notability.

The help page lists the mistakes most often made when people try to resolve the tag:

• Unreliable sources. Blogs, personal websites, forums, social media profiles and open wikis do not count.
• Connected sources. The subject's own website, press releases, sponsored content and interviews in which the subject does the talking may verify facts but do nothing for notability.
• Passing mentions. Many sources that mention the subject in a line are worth less than two that treat it in detail. The help page suggests thinking of roughly two paragraphs of text focused on the subject, and warns that a pile of weak citations is itself a sign of a non-notable topic.

Once the right sources are in the article, or listed on the talk page, an editor who is confident the concern has been met can remove the tag. The template's documentation says it is highly desirable to list the sources so others can see them, and that if the tag is re-added, nobody should edit war over it. The question is then settled through discussion or at Articles for Deletion.

For a connected subject, the sensible order is to collect the independent coverage first, propose it on the talk page by edit request with a short note on why each source qualifies, and let an uninvolved editor judge. If the sources do not exist yet, the honest conclusion is that the article is early, and adding weaker sources will make the eventual deletion discussion harder, not easier.

Which sourcing tags often appear with these?

Promotional and notability tags rarely travel alone. Articles written by or for their subject usually lean on the subject's own material, and editors flag that separately. Each of these tags is fixed in its own way.

The primary sources template's documentation makes a useful distinction. Whether a source is primary and whether it is independent are different questions. A company's own website is neither independent nor secondary. A news report that simply relays a company announcement may come from an independent publisher and still count as a primary source, because it adds no analysis. Editors who know the difference will notice it.

For how these sit among all the other banners, and who may remove them, see Wikipedia maintenance tags explained.

Should the subject rewrite a promotional article themselves?

Not in the article itself. A subject who edits directly to remove a promotional tag runs into two rules at once: the conflict of interest guideline strongly discourages direct edits, and Wikipedia's edit filter labels removals of the advert and promotional templates by accounts that are not yet extended confirmed. A rewrite proposed on the talk page is a different matter. Volunteers will often accept a clear, disclosed edit request that replaces a few peacock sentences with sourced facts.

The difficulty is judgement. People rarely see their own article's promotional tone, because it describes them the way they describe themselves. Notability is harder still, since it turns on sources that cannot be created on demand, and on a reading of subject-specific guidelines that takes experience to apply well.

If the article carries these tags, the first useful step is an honest assessment of the sources: whether they support a neutral article of some length, a short one, or not yet any article. Our page health check gives you that assessment, and any changes we then propose go through edit requests for independent editors to accept or decline.