Use this tag to identify personal essays. Personal essays describe the author's own emotional feelings about a topic. Although Wikipedia is supposed to compile human knowledge, it is not a vehicle to publish users' personal opinions.

This template should be used when the article contains the editor's own personal, emotional comments on the subject. Use it when the article does not necessarily represent a blatant opinion or opinion piece, but is still overly judgmental in tone.

Do not use this template to tag fact-oriented pages that sound like they might have been written as research papers for school (called "essays" in some parts of the world). Instead, if those pages need a different writing style or tone, use {{Research paper}}, or general templates like {{Tone}} or {{Copy edit}}.

If the article is biased, but without expressing the editor's emotions or value-based judgments, use tags like {{unbalanced}} or {{POV}}.

Place this:

{{Essay-like|date=December 2024}}

at the top of the article to alert editors to the inappropriate presence of editors' personal reflections throughout the article.

Sections

• To mark specific sections instead of the whole article, place {{Essay-like|section}} at the top of the section.

Options

• To replace the text "a personal reflection or essay", you may use {{Essay-like|article or section|yourtext}} or {{Essay-like|2=yourtext}}
• Articles tagged without the optional date parameter will be given the parameter by a bot.
• Add a new item to the talk page explaining the problem so editors will know what to address, and when to remove this tag.

• This template will add tagged articles to dated subcategories of Category:Wikipedia articles with style issues by month and to Category:All articles with style issues.
• This template is a self-reference.
• Please do not subst: this template.

• Template:Editorializing – inline version of this template, for flagging particular statements
• Template:Essay – identifies internal Wikipedia:Essays
• Template:Manual
• Template:Research paper
• Wikipedia:Cleanup process
• Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup

Use this cleanup template to indicate that an article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic.

Template parameters[Edit template data]

This template prefers inline formatting of parameters.

Parameter		Description	Type	Status
Month and year	date	The month and year that the template was placed (in full). "{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}" inserts the current month and year automatically. Example January 2013 Auto value {{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}	Line	suggested
Custom text	2	Text to replace "a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay" in the template Example a forum post	String	optional
Affected area	1	Text to replace the word "article", usually "section" Example section Auto value section	Line	optional
Make template small	small	Enter "left" here to make the template box small and aligned to the left. Example left Auto value left	Line	optional