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Welcome to WikiProject Unreferenced Articles's February 2024 backlog drive! The referencing portion began on February 1 and ran until March 1, 23:59 UTC. At the start of the drive, there were 111,643 articles tagged as entirely without references on Wikipedia. At the end of the drive, there were 97,343, a net decrease of 14,300 articles.
There is a very simple way to improve Wikipedia: add at least one inline citation of a reliable source to any article tagged as lacking sources. Fewer unsourced articles means the quality of Wikipedia as a whole increases, accurate information becomes more reliable and transparent, and inaccurate information can be removed. ( § Detailed instructions).
To get through this backlog, which dates back to 2008, we need a lot of people to help with this monumental task. So leave your dent on the backlog today!
1 point was awarded for sourcing. Mass deletion or tag removals were strictly prohibited, and were subjected to disqualification.
If you need tips or guides, you can take a look at § Tips, the helpful guide at WP:CITE, or ask at the WikiProject's talk page. The drive began on February 1 and ran until March 1. To encourage additional reviews, the drive was extended for one week (March 1-8) as an additional review period. Only reviews were counted during this period.
[[WP:FEB24]]
in the
edit summary will not be counted.
Remember to tag your edit summary with [[WP:FEB24]] , both to advertise the event and tally the points later using
Edit Summary Search. |
Find an article in Category:Articles lacking sources (Credits to User:Ajpolino and User:Ipigott).
[search term] incategory:"All articles lacking sources"
.articletopic:[topic] incategory:"All articles lacking sources"
. The list of topics can be found at
mw:Help:CirrusSearch/articletopic.Then, find a reliable source. Look for reliable sources, see §§ Some tricks and Determining what sources are usable for tips.
If at least one reliable source is found:
[[WP:FEB24]]
If no reliable source can found with the best of your effort, according to WP:BEFORE, there are a few options:
Goal: Bring the backlog down to below 100,000. Achieved on February 22! At the end of the drive there were 97,343 articles left, which means that since the start of the drive we have removed unreferenced tags from 14,300 articles.
Date | Participants | Articles |
|
|
---|---|---|---|---|
1 February 2024 | 241 | 111,643 | — | — |
2 February 2024 | 254 | 110,859 | 784 | 784 |
3 February 2024 | 261 | 109,820 | 1039 | 1823 |
4 February 2024 | 268 | 109,147 | 673 | 2496 |
5 February 2024 | 271 | 108,439 | 708 | 3204 |
6 February 2024 | 274 | 107,808 | 631 | 3835 |
7 February 2024 | 274 | 107,189 | 619 | 4454 |
8 February 2024 | 278 | 106,446 | 743 | 5197 |
9 February 2024 | 278 | 105,743 | 703 | 5900 |
10 February 2024 | 279 | 105,305 | 438 | 6338 |
11 February 2024 | 281 | 104,847 | 458 | 6796 |
12 February 2024 | 282 | 104,342 | 505 | 7301 |
13 February 2024 | 284 | 103,956 | 386 | 7687 |
14 February 2024 | 284 | 103,494 | 462 | 8149 |
15 February 2024 | 284 | 103,056 | 438 | 8587 |
16 February 2024 | 286 | 102,715 | 341 | 8928 |
17 February 2024 | 288 | 102,169 | 546 | 9474 |
18 February 2024 | 288 | 101,749 | 420 | 9894 |
19 February 2024 | 288 | 101,415 | 334 | 10228 |
20 February 2024 | 288 | 101,127 | 288 | 10516 |
21 February 2024 | 288 | 100,819 | 308 | 10824 |
22 February 2024 | 288 | 100,348 | 471 | 11295 |
23 February 2024 | 290 | 99,975 | 373 | 11668 |
24 February 2024 | 290 | 99,645 | 330 | 11998 |
25 February 2024 | 291 | 99,408 | 237 | 12235 |
26 February 2024 | 290 | 99,065 | 343 | 12578 |
27 February 2024 | 290 | 98,792 | 273 | 12851 |
28 February 2024 | 291 | 98,413 | 379 | 13230 |
29 February 2024 | 292 | 97,845 | 568 | 13798 |
1 March 2024 | 292 | 97,343 | 502 | 14300 |
Cleared backlogs
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Category:Articles lacking sources from April 2008
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
|
337 / 337 (100%)
|
Category:Articles lacking sources from May 2008
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
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283 / 283 (100%)
|
Category:Articles lacking sources from June 2008
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
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355 / 355 (100%)
|
Category:Articles lacking sources from July 2008
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
|
241 / 241 (100%)
|
Last updated March 08, 12:01 UTC.
All participants with experience in citing sources were encouraged to perform reviews. Reviewers were awarded 0.5 points for each review. A tool was available to locate unreviewed submissions and simplify wikitext formatting.
Even though we are just citing one source to the article, that source must be chosen carefully. That source needs to:
This is a lot to take in. And worse, sometimes you couldn't find such a source! It can be very hard to determine whether you should go forward to cite the article or ask for its deletion, even for experienced WikiGnomers, and sometimes you have to follow through with your gut feelings.
Generally speaking for English languages sources, citing Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles/Resources or Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources or peer-reviewed textbooks (for math and science articles) is enough to do satisfy all four of these criteria. However, other books and most reliable non-English sources are not present in these lists. In that case, you need to determine all four of these criteria yourself. It's probably easier to give examples of common not suitable sources:
Searching sources
Reading and parsing sources
Processing articles
The articles below are some of the more popular pages on Wikipedia and thus might be easier to find sources. They are queried from pageviews analysis at Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS). Please remove entries once references have been added. This section should be updated every day.