Help:Maintenance template removal

Many Bharatpedia pages display maintenance templates that identify problems. You may have arrived at this help page after clicking a link on a maintenance template saying "Learn how and when to remove this template message".

Maintenance templates are added and removed by volunteers. This help page explains the process for examining and removing such templates.

Overview

Maintenance templates (or "tags") are not removed automatically. 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. The mechanics of removal are usually as simple as clicking "Edit" at the top of the page or in the section involved (if you're not already in edit mode), removing the code that produces the display of the template, leaving an edit summary and saving the page.

It is not okay to remove maintenance templates until the issue flagged by the template is remedied first—that is, only once the maintenance tag is no longer valid, unless it truly did not belong in the first place.

Bharatpedia works because of the efforts of volunteers just like you, making bold edits to help build this encyclopedia. Fixing problems and then removing maintenance templates when you are done is important in that effort.

When to remove

Maintenance templates are not meant to be in articles permanently. Any user without a conflict of interest may remove a maintenance template in any of the following circumstances:

1. When the issue has been adequately addressed;
2. Upon determining that the issue has been resolved (perhaps by someone else);
3. If it reasonably appears that the template did not belong when placed or was added in error. Consider first discussing the matter with the original placer of the template (unless this user is no longer active on Bharatpedia). In any case, if the issue appears contentious, seek consensus on the talk page;
4. When there is consensus on the talk page (or elsewhere) as to how to address the flagged issue, and you are reasonably implementing those changes. (It is good practice to note the location of the consensus in the edit summary accompanying your removal, ideally with a link to the location);
5. When it can reasonably be concluded that the template is no longer relevant, such as a {{Current}} template appearing in an article that no longer documents a current event;
6. If the maintenance template is of a type that requires support but is not fully supported. For example: Neutrality-related templates such as {{COI}} (associated with the conflict of interest guideline) or {{POV}} (associated with the neutral point of view policy) strongly recommend that the tagging editor initiate a discussion (generally on the article's talk page) to support the placement of the tag. If the tagging editor failed to do so, or the discussion is dormant, and there is no other support for the template, it can be removed;
7. You may remove a template when according to your best judgement the lack of edits and/or talk page discussion should be interpreted as the issue not worth fixing (as a form of "silent consensus"). Please note there is currently no consensus for general age-related removal of maintenance templates - that is, removing a template purely or chiefly because it is old is not considered a sufficient argument. Exception: removing POV-related templates whose discussions have gone dormant is encouraged, as addressed in the bullet point immediately above;
8. Lastly, there are times when a person attempting to address a maintenance template that flags some fundamental matter may find that the issue cannot actually be addressed. For example, if an article is flagged as lacking citations to reliable, secondary sources, written by third-parties to the topic, and a user seeing the maintenance templates discovers that such sources appear not to exist, that usually means the article should be deleted. In such cases, it is not so much that the template does not belong and should be removed, but rather that flagging the page for maintenance will never address the more critical issue that the page itself does not belong on Bharatpedia at all.

When not to remove

You should not remove maintenance templates if any of the following apply:

1. You do not understand the issues raised by the template;
2. The issue has not yet been resolved;
3. There is an ongoing activity or discussion related to the template issue;
4. The problem that the maintenance template flags is plainly and unambiguously required for a proper article under Bharatpedia's policies and guidelines;
5. You have been paid to edit the article or have some other conflict of interest.

Removal

Have you carefully read the help pages and thoroughly fixed the problem? Or have you made a considered decision that the template is not, or is no longer, applicable? Great! Now, to remove the maintenance template:

1. Either click on "edit" or "edit source" at the top of the page, or if the maintenance template is not at the top but somewhere in the body of the article, you might instead use a section edit link;
2. If you are editing wikitext ("source" editing): Delete the template code. The template code you see in this edit mode will usually be in the following form, as in the example above: {{Name of template|date=Month Year}}. If you are editing using VisualEditor: Click on the template (tag), which will then turn blue. Press the "Delete" or backspace key on your keyboard.
3. Leave a descriptive edit summary, e.g., "Removed [insert the name of template] because I have fixed the issue;"
4. Click Publish changes.

That's it. Thank you!