In Wikipedia's early days, editors added Template:Orphan to mark both orphaned articles and articles with relatively few incoming links. The use of the template has since been restricted. It is now recommended to only place the {{Orphan}} tag if the article has zero incoming links from other articles. The template is only shown temporarily, under certain circumstances. Adding this template to any article is not strictly necessary, and many editors prefer to add it only when they believe that the article should be linked from many others.

A single, relevant incoming link is sufficient to remove the tag. Three or more incoming links will help ensure the article is reachable by readers.[1] Editors may also remove the tag from any article if they believe that de-orphaning is unlikely to be successful, or if they have attempted to provide incoming links. See § What if I can't de-orphan it? below for more information.

The following pages do not count as incoming links:

Disambiguation pages

Any article in mainspace that is linked only in a hatnote

Redirects and Soft redirects

    ...except that incoming links to the redirects do count

Discussion pages of articles

Wikipedia pages outside of article space

The following pages do count as incoming links:

Any article in mainspace except those specifically excluded above (This includes links only present in collapsed navboxes.)

List of... articles

Set indexes

On redirects

Neither soft nor hard redirects should normally be tagged as orphans.

On disambiguation pages

Disambiguation pages themselves often should be orphaned. The only mainspace pages that should link to them are other disambiguation pages, and articles with hatnote links to them (via templates such as {{Other uses}}). Please do not place the {{Orphan}} template on disambiguation pages. See also Wikipedia:Disambiguation § Links to disambiguation pages.