Hi URA-ites! The bimonthly update will be on 4 February 2025 but I wanted to let anyone who's new or didn't know that the annual update of the historical data (here) will be updated by long time editor Altamel on 11 February. I think these data are really interesting and are great indicators of progress - you can see how many categories were cleared between 2021 and 2025, plus how ENORMOUS some of these categories used to be. I groan when I see a category with 500+ articles but in August 2009, almost every category was in the thousands. Really puts things in perspective and is a fun piece of Wikihistory. Cheers, Kazamzam (talk) 16:19, 29 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Headline: We cleared 2,963 articles and are now hovering barely over 69,000 (69,036 to be exact)! For yourself and your fellow editors, please clap.
Minutiae: For anyone interested in a more detailed breakdown of the numbers - average was 35.3 articles; median 12; mode 11. The average category declined by 6.6% and of the 189 categories being tracked, 149 (78.8%) had a decline of at least 10 articles and over 2% of their starting number compared to previous update (I consider this a growth metric that we're being comprehensive in clearing categories across the board). The smallest decrease was September 2019, which only decreased by 3 articles (I'm not mad, I'm disappointed). And the amount of time it takes to update all the categories individually is exactly the length of two (2) Simon & Garfunkel albums.
Highlights: Along with March and April 2009, December 2023 is in dustbin of history! This is the first non-chronological category clearance since 2022 (with the removal of July 2007). We also had a successful DYK submitted by @Cielquiparle for the show The Befrienders which had been unreferenced since 2006! And as editor in arms @Cakelot1 pointed out above, the unreferenced backlog is now under 1% of the total articles for the first time since April 2008. Huzzah.
Low-hanging fruit: We have a number of small fry thanks to the robust efforts of regular editors and drive participants. The infamous September 2019 is a humble 101 articles, dangling precariously like a sinner in the hands of an angry God. Give it a nudge.
High-hanging fruit: Everyone's favourite BFC (Big Friendly Category), December 2009, is a finger-lickin' 9,108 articles as of this writing, after a decrease of 460. The other high-hanging fruit are, still, the Frustrating Five (name open for revision): January 2013 (1,012), April 2019 (842), May 2019 (1,760), June 2019 (3,805), and September 2020 (1,004). This time, September 2020 had the lowest percentage of change between updates (1.57%). Godspeed to anyone working on these.
New challenge: No ties this time, but @ARandomName123 has set up a monthly leaderboard to encourage everyone's inner blood lust. Go forth.
Announcements: Per above discussion, the consensus seems to be that June 2025 will be the best time for our next drive. If anyone is inclined to start a draft, please be bold! Thanks, as always, for the amazing work. We're doing it! I'm calling it now - under 50,000 by the end of the year, if not sooner. All the best, Kazamzam (talk) 16:28, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hooray! Just wanted to quickly acknowledge everyone who contributed in January 2025 – every reliable citation is appreciated – and recognize the Top 10 editors adding references to completely unreferenced articles last month (more or less). Some impressive stats here:
Also - the next update will be in May 2025 so not to interfere with a) my vacation in the Japanese alps and b) the June drive. Hopefully we will knock through the better part of 2009, and then we can start to figure out how to scale Mount December 2009. Kazamzam (talk) 18:46, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm aiming to kill off December 2024, I've been spending all my time working through there mostly alphabetically. So we'll hopefully have another non-chronological wipeout soon! SilverserenC23:15, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Are these in-between drive month leaderboards still tracked using edit summary hashtags? Or are we able to get user names without that somehow? I'd like to participate! --Engineerchange (talk) 14:31, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
ARandomName123's awesome bot does it without your having to sign up. Just cite some unreferenced articles, remove the {{unreferenced}} template (maybe replacing it with a different one like {{refimprove }} if necessary) and that counts as one point to you. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 14:58, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The bot counts it whenever an unreferenced article tag of any form (including norefs or nosources or any of the other variations used) is removed from an article. SilverserenC17:26, 16 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Quite humbling that there is a delta of ~200 between 1st place and 10th place. Mad respect to Silver seren in 1st, and well done to Kazamzam who managed to leapfrog Significa liberdade who was in 2nd for most of the month. Also impressive that Coldupnorth and Turtlecrown took 4th and 5th place, respectively, after taking a break in January.
To track where we are for the year to date, see the 2025 WikiProject Unreferenced articles Leaderboard, where you can sort by month. To join this friendly competition in March, add at least one reference to any article tagged as Unreferenced this month, and remember to remove the tag(s) after you are done; your stats will show up in the 2025 leaderboard once you've hit the 5 article mark.
Could I beg for some help from this group? Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine has been working for years to get at least one source into every article tagged by the group. We just have this short list left:
Most of these are organizations or other non-technical subjects. If you could please add sources to some and remove the {{unref}} tags, we would really (really really) appreciate it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:37, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wondered if there was any general good practice I should be following around sports databases (the likes of Cricinfo, Soccerway, Olympedia etc.) and where best to have them in articles about sportspeople. Up until now I have adding or moving them to the "External links" section, reserving the "References" section for inline citations from decent sources with significant coverage of the subject (e.g. news reporting and the like). But it occurred to me recently that they could also reasonably be placed in "General references", provided of course they're reliable sources, because they cover a lot of the tabular information that is often the majority of content in poorly-referenced sportspeople BLPs. I'd be grateful for any thoughts on this. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 14:41, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've been going through a lot of tennis tournament articles that are in the November 2024 category and I've been actively avoiding using any databases such as that. I don't personally consider them reliable sources and I do remember something about them not counting as proper coverage for sportpeople biographies, from the big re-organization of notability in that area a while back. So even if the databases are reliable, I'd rather be adding a source that does contribute something to notability for the subject. So I've largely been aiming for news coverage of the events in some fashion. SilverserenC17:08, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh yeah, I always make sure I add one or more inline citations to a decent source. I personally don't count adding just a database source as proper referencing. It's more, if I'm there, and it's a football player, I might as well add in {{Soccerway}} somewhere if it's not already in the article, and whether that's better as a "General reference" or an "External link". (I use Soccerway as an example because an admin who does a lot of football content recommended it). Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 17:39, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Like (probably, I assume) many of the people participating in this project, I've been on occasion taking a stab at Category:Articles lacking sources from June 2009. Starting from the earliest letters in the ABCs it what gets the most attention, and the first 8-ish or so are waiting at PROD or AFD, but we've hit a block. Ayrshire Football League failed AFD because sources exist at the British Newspaper Archive, but because it's paid, nobody who wants to go about adding the sources has access. Technically speaking its not any more important than any of the other articles, but aesthetically, this is annoying. Anyway, if anyone wants an easy article to ref, and has access to the Newspaper Archive, that would probably be helpful. Mrfoogles (talk) 02:44, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In the course of looking up a specialized database for the AfD that few others have access to, adding in one of those references would have been more beneficial than just mentioning their existence. Otherwise the article ends up in the same ignoble state it was in originally with little to show from the discussion. SilverserenC06:24, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Just a tip that I just learned: British Newspaper Archives does have some items that are free to view - and you can limit your search to such items by ticking the "Free To View" box under "Access Type". A search for "Ayrshire Football League" turned up five; I'll add one or two of them to Ayrshire Football League later today when I'm on a decent computer. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 07:04, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hope everyone is doing well. Many of us have probably seen the banners for WikiConference North America 2025, which is going to be held in New York in October. Since this project seems to be bucking the trend of declining WikiProject activity and has made substantial progress on our target goals (overall backlog clearing, unreferenced BLPs in particular) and some high-visibility successes (turning unreferenced stubs into DYKs), would anyone be interested in pitching some kind of discussion/talk to the WCNA organizers? I've never been to a conference but I think I'll be able to make this one and if we continue at the good clip we've been maintaining, I think it would be cool to spotlight our successes, discuss challenges (paywalls, language barriers), and maybe get some new members. If anyone has either the interest or the experience to get involved, I would much rather do this with someone else than fly solo. And if anyone has been to one of these events before, please share your vast wisdom. Cheers, Kazamzam (talk) 15:02, 11 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I searched the lists in the Progress section for food and drink articles, and didn't find any in any of these, so I checked here and still came up with zero. Which unless someone has been systematically working on that category seems unlikely. Did I screw up the search, or is it actually true there are no food and drink articles that lack sources? Valereee (talk) 12:15, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think it wold be possible. Each one would probably need doing individually because it's working on subcategories, and the choice of category depth and starter category affect what is included and left out in rather arbitrary ways, due to factors like different nesting depths and the fact that they are not strictly hierarchical. At least it's easy to see how it works, unlike articletopic, and to tweak it if needed. There's a few already prepared, labelled 'Petscan query (Category)', on this now-archived discussion from last year. (On a side note, it would be interesting to see what progress has been made on those topics! [Edit: it was not interesting]) Turtlecrown (talk) 15:26, 20 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Appreciate that you did this anyway. We can all appreciate the uninterestingness, together (I wonder why the total # of article in the categories consistently decreases significantly, though -- are articles being deleted, or just recategorized? Categorized more deeply? That is interesting.) Mrfoogles (talk) 03:21, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking only for myself, I've gone through probably the first 100 of the 518-article depth 5 food and drink petscan. A very large portion weren't actually food related (for instance, a fishing village and dinnerware items got caught), or were tangential (a Canadian food ministry) or just not really in my interest/skill set (commercial producers/products), but for the ones that were actually about food and drink, I've fixed a few articles by finding sources, but I think I've converted to redirects more than anything else. The petscan now has 492 articles, so I've done something with about 25. When I spend a session on the list, I can get through about 30-35 at a time, so I'm thinking after another ten or twelve sessions, I'll come back here and get advice on whether I should do a depth 4 or a depth 6 next. :) I don't really understand category depth very clearly. It's a nice little to-do list for when I feel like this kind of work. Valereee (talk) 13:26, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Category depth is how many sub-categories of Category:Food and drink the PetScan looks into. For example, at depth 5: Food and drink (0) -> Drinks (1) -> Non-alcoholic drinks (2) -> Tea (3) -> Tea varieties (4) -> Green tea (5) -> Japanese green tea (6). Then repeat this for all subcategories. Which means you also unfortunately get, for example, Food and drink (0) -> Food politics (1) -> Agrarian politics (2) -> Peasant revolts (3) -> Popular revolt in late-medieval Europe (4) -> Tudor rebellions (5) -> Nine Years' War (Ireland) (6). Maybe starting from a food and drink subcategory more specific to your interests would be more useful, but it's never going to be a perfect solution due to how the categories are structured. Another useful tip is to add negative categories (eg Politics) if the same ones keep popping up and 'polluting' your list. Turtlecrown (talk) 08:16, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Mrfoogles The reduction in the number of unreferenced articles per category since the last time they were counted is in line with the average reduction in the unreferenced article total (about 27%) since then. I think this is largely due to the work of this group, considering that there was about a 11% net reduction during our last backlog drive, despite us referencing more than that (due to the constant influx). However, articles in these particular categories have actually become a larger proportion of the articles that are tagged as unreferenced. That might be a caused by a greater influx of new articles/tags in popular categories than the average, or by less work being done in these categories (eg due to waning enthusiasm for referencing endless villages and albums). Turtlecrown (talk) 13:33, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hello 2025 Unreferenced Article Marathon participants. Thanks for your dedication. As of right now, we have 13 editors who have at least 90 points on the 2025 leaderboard (January through March, total).
All editors with 90 points recorded by the end of the day on March 31 will receive barnstars in April, as that's the equivalent of 1 per day over a 3-month period. So if you're close and you have the time...try to get to at least 90 if you can. Cielquiparle (talk) 21:23, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And don't forget to remove the {{unreferenced}} tag if you've added a reference. (That's how the bot is tracking and assigning points.) You can replace it with another tag like {{refimprove}} or {{more citations needed}} or {{single source}}, or add {{citation needed}} within the article body if you're doing a quick "ref-and-run". (This means you, @LucasJanssen4444!) Cielquiparle (talk) 22:32, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't realize I had referenced this many articles and now am oddly noting my total is listed as 99. I'm now considering whether I have perhaps been spending more time doing this than I thought. That is a lot of Wikipedia articles. Mrfoogles (talk) 01:09, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, I had no idea this was going on! So, per above I figured I must've "fixed" 26 articles, but the bot is counting 17. I was just using the sheer change in numbers on that petscan, does this mean 11 of the articles that were originally on that list were probably handled by someone else? Valereee (talk) 13:34, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That could have happened -- I often look at the category counts and see it's gone down more than I fixed. If you want to really find out, you can probably go back and look at your contributions (although that'll take a while). Mrfoogles (talk) 05:10, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The project on the french-speaking side of the Wikipedia world is going very well, and we just discussed yours.
Currently, we only have around 2,000 categorized articles with the template. In fact, we need to track uncategorized articles (is "untemplated" a verb?) that effectively have no sources. Two months ago, our query identified about 200,000 uncategorized articles with a high probability of lacking sources. Now, that number is down to around 160,000, thanks to a nice little bot (a cute turtle) that checks whether these articles in the query have useful items in Wikidata to automatically link them. We manage to process around 1,000 articles manually per month.
We're still trying to find new ways to automate or semi-automate the process. For example, our tech team is planning to test a "soft" sourcing method, where the bot would add references in the article’s Talk page, so verification and integration remain human-driven.
So, when I see that nearly 67,000 articles are categorized here on EnWiki, I'm truly impressed—kudos to all of you! I have a few questions:
Are all unreferenced articles categorized? (By that, I mean: are there any missing templates?)
I ran a quick PetScan and found 30 articles that appear in both your category and ours. How can we help you the best ? Because we’ll have sourced them within about six months at most. I think there's more and my PetScan query is bad. I'll also ask our tech team to check the query—there are probably more articles to be found.
Following my second question, with Battle of Khankala (1994) as an example, i did some "hard" sourcing showing that the old version contained few wrong information. I won't try to translate it into a non-native langage. I applied a trad template... But maybe there's a better way to help you ? Nanoyo88 (talk) 09:21, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Nanoyo88, putting the {{expand language}} template on the enwiki article after you have done the hard work finding references in frwiki is very helpful. If you were feeling especially keen, you could also put {{refideas}} on the Talk page; this is a way to actually list out the references you found. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 09:49, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
First, terminology: I'm going to assume that when you say 'categorized' you are referring to articles tagged with the {{Unreferenced}} template, and therefore added to an unreferenced maintenance category. And 'uncategorized', therefore, means unreferenced articles that don't have a tag (or as you say, 'untemplated'). This might seem like a picky clarification, but on en.wiki we also have the uncategorized taskforce for generally uncategorized articles, which might be what most people first associate with the word. For simplicity, I'll use tagged or untagged.
Second, my questions: Is the fr.wiki project responsible for referencing the fr:WP:Atelier de relecture, or is there a more specific one? And do you need to track untagged articles that effectively have no sources in order to tag them, or for some other reason?
Third, to your questions:
Question 1: Are all unreferenced articles tagged? No. Tags are added by editors by hand or using semi-automated tools, usually not by us. Several hundred tags are added each month. Predecessors of this project seemed more involved in adding the tags, whereas our current WikiProject is mainly involved in resolving them. 111,000 unreferenced articles were found and tagged by a bot in December 2009 (see notes under Historical data).
Question 2: How can the French language referencing project support the English language one? Adding {{expand French}} as you did at Battle of Khankala (1994) is probably the easiest way. It lets us know there is more going on at the French page and that we might want to look for sources there. There are also many other unreferenced English articles that are perhaps easier referenced by someone who can speak French (I often do this!) such as those found in this (again, imperfect) Petscan.
Thanks for the terminology clarification. Let's use tag and untagged. The Wikiproject "Atelier de relecture" does not aim on referencing. It's the same as Wikipedia:Peer review. The french project i'm talking about is Projet:Articles sans sources (also nammed PatASS for "Patrouille des Articles Sans Sources [Unreferenced article patrol]"). You can see here it's quite young but growing. Btw, i see you're using a bot for your stats, it may interress us (ping @Mr Tortue, our "turtle tech"). For the track question, see below.
Q1 - thanks for the data. That's huge ! We also had a long history of tagged article with no real project handling them since november 2023. We have managed to handle all the banners so that the oldest category is now from August 2024. In addition to that, we have untagged articles that we manage to find with a long query (see here), the widest (with few false result) is around 160K. We use a bot on these query to directly find in the wikidata if items can solve the unrefferenced problem (the bot did 40K+ referrencing in a month). I hope you don't have too much untagged articles. So to answer your question on why we track them : because there was no project like yours in 2009 in the french-speaking WP. The unrefferenced french template was only created in 2015 ! So we track them to tag them because we're actually referencing 10x quicker than the "natural tagging" by the community (around 100/150 per month without our tags).
Q2 - Ok. I'm not sure everyone will put the template as i did, but helping with the subject of the petscan could be a good idea. Nanoyo88 (talk) 10:33, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You probably know this already but PatASS is a good name for a project, if you might not be able to get away with it in English. Mrfoogles (talk) 05:14, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We have a template "Liens" that automatically put links from wikidata based on items linked (such as dictionnaries, encyclopedia, thematic ressources, authority, etc.) See for example in french Osei Tutu I. In the bottom, you can see "Liens externes" which links to BlackPast, Britannica, etc. All those links are from the template "Liens". The bot is just looking in the query of untagged articles without the template "Liens" if they have a usefull item in wikidata for referencing. If yes, it simply add the section + template... And voilà :) Nanoyo88 (talk) 09:34, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Came here to this talk page to say two things. First, June 2009 is down to 3 articles that aren't under deletion discussions! Teemala, Kalwas, and Stored energy printer. There seem to be a lot of small Indian villages. Second, does anyone have any advice on how to handle the small Indian villages? Many appear to exist but not show up in the census.gov.in Population finder. E.g. Kudkelli -- oh wait, nope, there's a typo in that article name, the source I wasn't sure about lists it as "Kudkeli", and the population finder apparently only finds the exact correct name. In any case, does anyone have any advice on sources other than the population finder for Indian villages? And does it make sense to nominate them for deletion if no sources can be found and they don't appear in the population finder? While some are misspelled in Wikipedia, all the various websites, such as the current source on Kudkelli mentioned above, derive from censuses anyhow. Mrfoogles (talk) 04:57, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I located Teemla/Teemala/Timla based on the description in the article and added the coord to the article and the Open Street Map way ID to Wikidata. Turtlecrown (talk) 14:50, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Back to the question about Indian villages, I often add a site:gov.in (or the state's url ending) to Google searches, or look for it on the district's website, or search for it together with nearby places on the News tab, which often helps with finding alternate transliterations. And a lot of other steps too, depending on level of desperation. Turtlecrown (talk) 23:15, 29 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you can't find it on the Census finder, or other reliable source, it makes perfect sense to just send it to AfD/PROD. Either references turn up, or it's deleted/redirected. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me!21:35, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I just graphed the number of articles in June 2009 over time -- see File:June 2009 unreferenced articles graph.png, and there's a fairly constant slope until about February 2025, when the slope (rate of referencing) massively increases. This is the exact time when it became the oldest unreferenced articles category -- May 2009 was deleted on January 31st. So, it looks like people really do focus on the oldest category. Mrfoogles (talk) 01:18, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, that graph has an error. All the data points after the first one should be shifted two months to the right. But it's mostly the same. Mrfoogles (talk) 01:26, 30 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting. I tend to focus on the oldest categories (month/year) but then sometimes choose by subject too, as I think you need to also keep the search for references interesting to you. Great to see all this progress being made. Coldupnorth (talk) 07:19, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well done to all who contributed citations to articles tagged as Unreferenced last month. Here are the editors who made it into the Top 10 in March 2025:
@Silver seren continued to dominate the leaderboard in March, but @Cakelot1 was not far behind. @Turtlecrown came in a respectable third, with a strong performance for the second month in a row. In an exciting development, @Mrfoogles debuted with a leapfrog into fourth place, while @Coldupnorth bested February by joining the ranks of the monthly 100+ pointers in March.
To track where we are for the year to date, see the WikiProject Unreferenced articles leaderboard for 2025. You have to add references to at least 5 different articles before your stats will show up in the yearly view; however, if you click on "Apr" you'll see the full list of editors who have been active this month, with links to their edits.
And I do still mean to distribute barn stars this weekend to the 14 editors who hit 90 by March 31 (equivalent of 1/day in the first three months of the year). Cielquiparle (talk) 09:44, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you both. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:19, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
