Unfilled placeholders
- Id
- unfilled-placeholder
- Status
- Active
- Severity
- high
- Detection
- deterministic
- Evidence grade
- corroborated
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-15
Currently signals low-effort writing.
What it is
A template slot published with the slot still in it. The bracket text names the field nobody filled.
Why it reads as machine-made
Wikipedia records model output inserting placeholder dates into citation fields, most often the access date, and placeholder strings into source and publisher fields. Sign-offs arrive with the name bracket intact. This is not a claim about writing quality at all. It records that the draft was published without a read-through, which is the failure criterion G15 is written around.
Specimens
Thanks again for the call last week. I have attached the deck and the pricing sheet. Best regards, [Your Name]
Thanks again for Tuesday's call. The deck is attached, and the pricing sheet now carries the 40-seat tier we talked about, on page 3. Best regards, Anni
Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.
Source: INSERT_SOURCE_URL_30, publisher SOURCE_PUBLISHER, accessed 2025-XX-XX.
Source: the Finnish Tax Administration guidance on VAT for digital services, published 12 March 2025 and read on 14 August 2026.
How it is detected
- Pattern
- (?:\[(?:Your|Insert|Client|Company|Product|Brand)[ _][A-Za-z ]{2,20}\]|\bINSERT_[A-Z][A-Z0-9_]{2,30}\b|\bSOURCE_(?:PUBLISHER|URL|TITLE)\b|\b\d{4}-(?:XX|xx)-(?:XX|xx)\b|\b\d{4}-\d{2}-(?:XX|xx)\b)
- Flags
- g
- Scope
- document
Who writes this way legitimately
Mail merge and content management templates produce the identical artifact with no model involved: a broken merge field, a snippet pasted out of a boilerplate library, a citation manager that could not resolve a date. Writers working from a house template leave the brackets in when a deadline moves. Every one of those cases deserves the same flag for the same reason, so treat a hit as a publishing-process failure rather than a claim about who drafted the sentence. Writing about templates quotes these strings on purpose, and quoted examples have to be excluded before a hit counts.
Model attribution
Wikipedia records the citation-field forms in model output, naming the access-date parameter as the most common slot and the source and publisher fields as rarer ones. No vendor documents the behaviour, and no measurement by model family exists in anything this project read.
Platform notes
- wikipedia
- Criterion G15 covers pages published with no human review, and an unresolved citation field is the cheapest evidence that no review happened.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | Active and high severity. Wikipedia keeps dated examples of citations published with an unresolved access date and with source and publisher slots left as literal strings, and criterion G15 treats the same class of artifact as grounds for speedy deletion. The pattern is anchored to bracketed slot names, screaming-case tokens and unresolved date fields, so ordinary lowercase identifiers do not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and three negatives. |
Sources
- 01Wikipedia: Criteria for speedy deletion, G15communityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 02Wikipedia: Signs of AI writingcommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells