Template:Uw-refspam

Hello, Uw-refspam. We welcome your contributions, but it appears as if your primary purpose on Wikipedia is to add citations to sources you may be affiliated with, such as in the article Underwater basket-weaving.

Editing in this way is a violation of the policy against using Wikipedia for promotion and is a form of conflict of interest. The editing community considers excessive self-citing to be a form of spamming on Wikipedia (WP:REFSPAM); the edits will be reviewed and the citations removed where it was not appropriate to add them.

If you wish to continue contributing, please first consider citing other reliable secondary sources such as review articles that were written by other researchers in your field and that are already highly cited in the literature. If you wish to cite sources for which you may have a conflict of interest, please start a new section on the article's talk page and add {{Edit COI}} to ask a volunteer to review whether or not the citation should be added.

Template documentationview edit history purge

This warning can be given to users to alert them that their edits may be considered reference spamming or book spamming. Signs of this are if the majority of their edits are adding references written by the same academic authors, particularly if they add references without adding any content to the lead of numerous articles or to the further reading sections of articles.

Usage

{{subst:Uw-refspam}}
{{subst:Uw-refspam|Article name}}

When to use

If in doubt as to whether the edits constitute reference spamming or book spamming, please post at the conflict of interest noticeboard instead to ask for more opinions.
Please bear in mind that the user is probably acting in good faith and as an expert, could be encouraged to make more productive contributions.
Please refer to the index of message templates before using any template on user talk pages to warn a user. Applying the best template available for your purpose may help reduce confusion from the message you are sending.

Please remember to substitute the template using {{subst:Uw-refspam}} rather than {{Uw-refspam}}.

When not to use

Promotional content, like reference spamming, is a type of self-promotion. When the self-promotion occurs in the body content rather than in a citation, then this template is not appropriate. In those cases, template series {{uw-advert1}} may be appropriate.

Parameters

There is one optional parameter:

|1= – name of an article containing reference spam

Notes

Find subst count and examples of this template on User talk pages using this advanced search. (from 14 June 2026 on)
Before making stylistic changes: This template conforms to guidelines organized by the user warnings project. Please discuss the general visual appearance of these templates (for example, the image in the top-left corner) on the user warning talk page.