 | This is a documentation subpage for Template:Date missing. It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page. |
 | This template should not be substituted. |
 | Use this template sparingly It should only be placed in citation templates that are missing a date but should have one because the source cited is not properly identified without it. For example, most books and non-news Web pages are only published with a year as the publication date, and should not be tagged with this template. (See {{year missing}} for missing publication years). |
{{Date missing}} (or {{date?}} for short) is an inline cleanup template flagging a broken source citation that is missing the date of publication of the cited source (or at least the specified fact that date is not available). "Date" here usually means "more information than just the year".
Many references are added with an access-date= but no publication date. This may be due to the use of citation tools that cannot identify a page's date, but of course the access-date= is always today. The lack of a publication date is clearly wrong, an error; but {{Citation}} documentation says clearly "Access dates are not required for links to published research papers, published books, or news articles with publication dates."