Editorial Notices

An editorial notice is how this wiki says out loud that one of its own pages needs work. Three of the content policies name a notice as their enforcement, and none of them describes what the notices are. There are two kinds, and they behave differently: an editor places one on a single article, and the site derives the other from every page at once.^[1]

Notices an editor places

A notice is a block, added to a page the same way a paragraph is, and it renders as a bordered strip above the prose. Six variants exist, each with fixed wording an editor can override with a sentence about the specific page.

Read at 26 August 2026, the whole wiki carries five of them across 370 pages: the advertisement notice on Blue Chick NFTs, UniSci and UniX, and the stub notice on Kernel layer and Application layer. All three advertisement notices sit on projects the Ecosystem directory records as dormant or closed, which is where promotional copy is most likely to be left over from a livelier period. The other three variants have never been used, so an editor reaching for one is setting the precedent rather than following it.

The notice nobody places

May be outdated is the one variant the site can raise on its own. A page whose facts were last checked more than 180 days ago gets the notice inserted above its first block, worded with the date of the last check or with the fact that no check is recorded. It is a rendering rather than a stored block, so it disappears the moment the page is re-verified, and it stands aside when an editor has already placed an outdated notice by hand.

An editor records a check by stamping the page, which the maintenance sweep does with scripts/mark-verified.mjs. That stamp is the only thing that resets the clock: editing a page also moves it, because an unstamped page falls back to the date of its last edit. 224 of the 369 pages under a category now carry an explicit verification stamp, and none of the 369 is past the threshold. The oldest page on the wiki was checked 150 days ago, which leaves it about a month before it raises the notice by itself.

Tracking categories

A notice sits on the page it describes, where only a reader of that page sees it. The Maintenance index inverts that: it runs four predicates over every page and publishes the pages that fail as work queues. Nobody files a page into a queue and nobody removes it. Fix the page and it leaves the list on the next revalidation.

• Orphaned – no other page links here, so a reader can only arrive by search or by the category index. 19 pages on 26 August 2026, the largest queue.
• Unsourced – the page carries no external link at all, which the verifiability standard treats as a page that cites nothing. 13 pages.
• Missing required metadata – a field the page’s tag path declares as required is empty, so its infobox and its category facets are incomplete. 2 pages.
• Outdated – the same 180-day predicate that raises the synthetic notice. Empty, and an empty queue is not rendered, so the heading is absent from the index rather than showing a zero.

The queues and the notice variants share two names and no machinery. Unsourced as a queue is computed from the absence of any outbound link; Needs citations as a notice is a judgement an editor makes about a claim that has one. A page can sit in the queue without carrying the notice, and the reverse holds too.

Clearing a notice

A notice is an address to the next editor, so removing it is an editorial act with a record. Fix what the notice describes, delete the block in the same edit, and say in the revision message what changed – every page’s revision history is public, and a notice that vanishes without an explanation reads as a page that was tidied rather than corrected. Removing a notice while the problem stands is the one move the policy rules out.

The reverse also applies. Adding a notice, rather than rewriting a page on the spot, is the right move when the fix needs a source or a judgement the current editor cannot supply, and neutral point of view asks for exactly that on a promotional page.

Separate from all of this, every page carries an optional quality grade on a six-step scale from Stub to Featured. It is assessment rather than a work queue, it is set by hand, and it is set on six pages. A stub notice and a Stub grade can disagree, and neither reads the other.

See also

• Maintenance – the live tracking categories
• Verifiability
• Neutral point of view
• No original research
• Notability
• Freshness
• Conflict of interest