When to use

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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 judgmental in tone.

When not to use

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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

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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

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See also

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TemplateData

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This is the TemplateData for this template used by TemplateWizard, VisualEditor and other tools. See a monthly parameter usage report for Template:Essay-like in articles based on its TemplateData.

TemplateData for Essay-like

Use this cleanup template to indicate that an article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic.

Template parameters

This template prefers inline formatting of parameters.

ParameterDescriptionTypeStatus
Month and yeardate

The month and year that the template was placed (in full). "{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}" inserts the current month and year automatically.

Example
January 2013
Auto value
{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}
Linesuggested
Custom text2

Text to replace "a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay" in the template

Example
a forum post
Stringoptional
Affected area1

Text to replace the word "article", usually "section"

Example
section
Auto value
section
Lineoptional
Make template smallsmall

Enter "left" here to make the template box small and aligned to the left.

Example
left
Auto value
left
Lineoptional