 | This is a documentation subpage for Template:Title missing. It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page. |
{{Title missing}} (or {{title?}} for short) is an inline cleanup template flagging a broken source citation that is missing the title, or complete and correct title, of the cited material (or at least the specified fact that title information is not available).
It is most commonly used to replace a bad title, when an automated tool or an incautious user has uncritically accepted the value of a <title>...</title> from a Web page and the value is incorrect; many sites just repeat the name of the site (the work, in citation terms) in this field, and put the title of the actual page only in a <h1>...</h1> heading or elsewhere in the page's content. Another replacement case is when the information is wrong because an editor copy-pasted one source citation in the wikicode of the article to use it as the basis for another citation to a different source, and adjusted the URL and other information but forgot to change the title.
The template can also be used to tag for cleanup a truncated title or the fact that the title information simply has been omitted entirely. A common case of this is an unformatted citation to an unspecified work (e.g. "Johnson (2001)", without any corresponding further data on the source). This is because an editor just forgot to fill in the details, because someone assumed a source was so well known it did not need complete citation, or because the material was split from an overly long article into a new sub-topical article without ensuring that all citations made the trip with the content.
When the given title is questionable or outright disputed, then a dispute template of some kind, such as {{citation needed}}, {{dubious}}, or {{disputed-inline}}, etc., should be used instead.
For a short citation (e.g. "Smith 2001") that is missing a corresponding full citation, or a citation that is so brief as to be unverifiable (e.g. "Article in The Washington Post"), use {{full citation needed}} instead.