Template:Correction

Correction — {{{date}}}

{{{explanation}}}

Template documentation

This documentation is transcluded from Template:Correction/doc. (edit | history)

This template is to be used for pages that need to be corrected. If the article is recent enough to simply edit and sight the edit, don't use this template. If it has been at least one day, then use this template instead.

To see a list of articles that use this template, see Category:Corrected articles.

Usual syntax

{{correction
| date=Date you publish the correction
| explanation=The correction you have to make, plus an article related to the error if applicable
}}

There is also an optional parameter label that can be used to override the Correction label in the banner. For example,

{{correction
| label=Notice
| date=February 29, 2009
| explanation=Some dates in this article may be inaccurate.
}}

would produce

Notice — February 29, 2009

Some dates in this article may be inaccurate.

Retractions

Retraction signifies the article should not have been published. Currently about 6.5% of our article corrections are retractions. We have used three forms of retraction (at this writing, roughly the same number of each form), as deemed appropriate:

Retraction hatnote on intact article.
Retraction notice, content removed but still available in revision history; generally the retraction notice includes a link to a suitable contentful revision.
Retraction notice replacing deleted page.

When retracting an article,

either specify a label on the article starting with "retract" (any capitalization), or specify non-blank optional parameter retraction, or both; and
reproduce the correction as a hatnote on the article's talk and opinions pages, if those pages exist.

Clarifications

Rarely, when we deem the reader is apt to misunderstand the article without some additional information that ought to be there but isn't, yet we aren't convinced the article should be considered actually wrong as such, we have applied this template with a variant label such as "note" and used optional parameter nocat to exclude the article from Category:Corrected articles (see next section re categorization). Most or all such cases are individually controversial.

Categorization

Ordinarily, when used in mainspace this template puts the article in Category:Corrected articles and Category:Published (to unpublish a corrected article, use Category:No publish), and, when marked as described above, Category:Retracted articles. Outside mainspace the template does not put the page in these categories.

If optional parameter nocat is non-blank, this template puts the page in hidden Category:Pages with nocat correction, regardless of whether the page is in mainspace.