---
title: "Editorial Notices"
url: "https://radix.wiki/policy/editorial-notices"
version: "1.0.0"
updated: 2026-08-26
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Editorial Notices

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Policy** | Editorial notices |
| **Type** | Editorial process |
| **Applies to** | Every article |
| **Mechanisms** | Notice blocks placed by an editor; tracking categories derived by the site |
| **Surfaces** | The article itself; [Maintenance](/maintenance) |
| **Enforces** | [Verifiability](/policy/verifiability), [NPOV](/policy/neutral-point-of-view), [Freshness](/policy/freshness), [COI](/policy/conflict-of-interest) |
| **Adopted** | 26 August 2026 |

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]](#ref-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.

|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Stub** | The article is too short to be useful yet. | [Notability](/policy/notability) |
| **Needs citations** | Claims are unsourced and need references. | [Verifiability](/policy/verifiability) |
| **May be outdated** | The facts have decayed since they were written. | [Freshness](/policy/freshness) |
| **Written like an advertisement** | The page has taken on its subject’s framing. | [Neutral point of view](/policy/neutral-point-of-view) |
| **Needs cleanup** | Structure or formatting falls short of the standard. | House style |
| **Conflict of interest** | A major contributor is close to the subject. | [Conflict of interest](/policy/conflict-of-interest) |

Read at 26 August 2026, the whole wiki carries **five** of them across 370 pages: the advertisement notice on [Blue Chick NFTs](/ecosystem/blue-chick-nfts), [UniSci](/ecosystem/unisci) and [UniX](/ecosystem/unix), and the stub notice on [Kernel layer](/contents/tech/core-protocols/kernel-layer) and [Application layer](/contents/tech/core-protocols/application-layer). All three advertisement notices sit on projects the [Ecosystem](/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](/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](/policy/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](/policy/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](/maintenance) – the live tracking categories
- [Verifiability](/policy/verifiability)
- [Neutral point of view](/policy/neutral-point-of-view)
- [No original research](/policy/no-original-research)
- [Notability](/policy/notability)
- [Freshness](/policy/freshness)
- [Conflict of interest](/policy/conflict-of-interest)

### References

1. Wikipedia – _Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup_ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_messages/Cleanup
2. Wikipedia – _Wikipedia:Categorization_, on hidden tracking categories — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization#Hidden_categories