This template should only be put on articles which meet the orphan criteria.

Do not use this template on articles that you honestly believe will be impossible to de-orphan. The community wants this tag used to identify potentially solvable problems, not to create a complete index of all articles with zero, one, or two incoming links. If the community actually wanted every orphan tagged, it would be using a mindless bot to tag these articles, rather than relying on editors and their best judgment.

The simplest way to add this template to an article is to copy and paste either {{Orphan|date=November 2024}} or {{Orphan|{{subst:DATE}}}} at the top of the article.

You may use a date parameter with this template, for example {{Orphan|date=November 2024}} to help with the categorisation of articles requiring links. If you leave it out, a bot will fill it in (but this will result in more edits and watchlist alerts, so adding the date right away is preferred).

If you have made an unsuccessful attempt to de-orphan the article, then please add the month/year of the attempt to the template, like so:

{{orphan|date=Month Year|att=Month Year}},

where the "date" parameter is the date the template was ORIGINALLY placed on the page, and the att parameter is set to equal the CURRENT month and year. This places it in Category:Attempted de-orphan for that date and also hides the article message box.

If the geo parameter is included, the phrase "...about a place" will be included in the category title, and the article will be added to the orphaned geographic articles category.

This template places the article into "Category:All orphaned articles" as well as "Category:Orphaned articles from {{{date}}}". If the "att" parameter is set, the article will still be in Category:All orphaned articles, but instead of placing the article into "Category:Orphaned articles from {{{date}}}" (e.g. Category:Orphaned articles from April 2008), it places it into "Category:Attempted de-orphan from {{{att}}} (e.g. Category:Attempted de-orphan from April 2008).