Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced articles

After Kazamzam brought it up in the July update, I ran a program over all articles on Wikipedia which tried to identify all unsourced articles, that were still untagged. Any of the following were counted as a reference:

Anything within Category:External link templates and its subcategories (minus {{Authority control}} and {{Authority control (arts)}}). This contained a lot of stuff that can't really be counted as references, but I gave up trying to manually sort through useful and not useful ones after like an hour or so.
Any line containing "==External links==", "References==" or "sources==" followed by a *. This is for those bulleted references that don't use any specific reference templates
Any URLs
The standard reference things, like <ref>, {{sfn}}, {{harvnb}}, {{cite}}, {{refn}}.
Already tagged articles with {{unreferenced}}
Any template ending in "index}}", or starting with "{{list of lists" for those list articles
Some other misc. templates I came across (like {{surname}})

The results are at User:ARandomName123/unref1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. (split up so it was easier for me to copy-paste them in). The total count is 65957. There are quite a bit more templates that contain sources, or can be used to exclude articles, so if you do come across one in my lists, please let me know and I'll filter them out across all 8. A spot-check shows a decent amount of the list still contain some sort of reference through some random template, so more filtering would definitely be helpful. Any other suggestions/improvements are also welcome. Cheers, ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 02:15, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks ARandomName123. I had a look at a few at random:

Seems to be finding a few which have already been tagged “Unsourced” and “Unref” and "No sources" - I don’t know how to find what else redirects to “Unreferenced”

Some already tagged "BLP unreferenced"

Does Imdb count as a cite?

Do we want to list those tagged “no footnotes”?

Does having a bibliography count?

Michael Budde is a soft redirect

Methoxymethylenetriphenylphosphorane has a hash rather than star

Might be worth asking the Wikidata wizards if there is a way of detecting refs brought from Wikidata such as population of Mihăileni, Sibiu

Suggest Main Page is hardcoded

Not sure why a few redlinks such as Mauritius in the Eurovision Song Contest are being listed

Some stuff I found in curly brackets “Larissa div” "Polygyros div" (therefore I suspect some other Greek divs might be similar) “US-airport-minor” “MinorPlanetNameMeaningsFooter” "Animal common name" "Plant common name" (maybe are others like fungi)

I am not a member of any of the Category:Health WikiProjects but I think it would be really useful if you could run this for real to tag all health articles which might be uncited as uncited. I am sure it is better for some of these to be mistakenly tagged as uncited than for uncited medical articles to lurk undetected.

If you are nervous to run live on that entire category first please run live on WP:Turkey once you have fixed the above points and let me know so I can check. https://bambots.brucemyers.com/cwb/bycat/Turkey.html#Cites%20no%20sources currently lists 12 but I might fix some now. Chidgk1 (talk) 14:25, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, the stuff you mentioned has been added, and I'm currently running it again. Imdb would probably be counted. No footnotes would also be counted. Bibliography probably not, since they are sometimes just listings of the authors works. Michael Budde and Methoxymethylenetriphenylphosphorane: added {{Short pages monitor}} and {{ref}} to the exclusion criteria. Red links were deleted between the run through, and me posting it here. I will look into the other templates. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 17:01, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding "No footnotes", does this not sweep in a lot of articles which are not actually unreferenced but just lacking inline citations? (a common feature of translations from de-Wiki, & doubtless others). Ingratis (talk) 17:55, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My main concern was that "No footnotes" might be incorrectly applied. You can see which of the listed articles have that template through petscan:37243882, though I'm still culling the lists with some other criteria. I'll check it once it's completed, and if there's a large false positive rate, I'll add it to the exclusion criteria. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 18:45, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reply - unfortunately that link doesn't seem to work for me. Ingratis (talk) 08:54, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It just takes a while to load, but try this instead: https://pagepile.toolforge.org/api.php?action=get_data&id=85633 ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 16:46, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that works! thanks very much. Ingratis (talk) 17:28, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a specific wikiproject in mind for the health one? Not sure how I can get Petscan to work with that (maybe @SunloungerFrog can? you're pretty experienced with Petscan)

WP:Turkey: the petscan for this is petscan:7257972, try this if the link takes too long to load. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 02:31, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chidgk1 try petscan:37260206 for your health related articles query. I couldn't do anything clever with the category, had to paste in the individual WikiProjects. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 06:29, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @SunloungerFrog. @ARandomName123 This contains a lot of lists - do lists actually need cites? Chidgk1 (talk) 16:36, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Lists that are primarily navigational in nature do not traditionally contain citations. As an example, I see the List of Turkish physicians in the Petscan results for Turkey, which contains nothing except an alphabetized list of links.

Citations are typically added if there is some overriding rule requiring universal citation. That will mostly happen for lists involving contentious matter for BLPs (e.g., List of people with bipolar disorder). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:06, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have asked for views at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/WikiProject report#comments Chidgk1 (talk) 17:55, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ARandomName123 Apart from lists - what do you think about them? - this looks excellent. I checked ALL the non-lists: Index of Turkey biography-related articles does not need ref, 2003–04 Beşiktaş J.K. season has a dead link, 2014–15 Trabzonspor season has refs within footnotes, not sure what happening with Turkey at the UEFA European Championship, Serpil and Mercan and Erkal might not need ref, Nuray Lale and Latife Bekir unclear and Independent regulatory agencies in Turkey and Warrior relief of Efrenk have refs but if those are too fiddly to pick up without missing stuff then I think it is an acceptable level of error. Can you exclude “This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain” such as Lycus (river of Cilicia). Please could you run this for real (once you have decided about lists) and actually tag the articles. Chidgk1 (talk) 16:44, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We can't tag the articles immediately, because we'd need to get bot approval first. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 16:52, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, @Chidgk1. See below for an evaluation of the false positives. If you'd like, I can also provide a list of non-list pages in the Turkey list. As for running it for real, we could just manually tag them, since a bot would take a while to get approved.

Index of Turkey biography-related articles: Added Wikipedia indexes to exclusion criteria
2003–04 Beşiktaş J.K. season, 2014–15 Trabzonspor season, Turkey at the UEFA European Championship are all transclusions, added {{: to filter them out.
Serpil, Mercan and Erkal: Added names]] to the filter
Nuray Lale: I wouldn't really count this as a reference.
Latife Bekir: Contains no citation template, or something that could tell the reference is a reference, so this'll have to be an error
Independent regulatory agencies in Turkey: Same as above, but someone added a link yesterday so it should be filtered out on the next runthrough.
Warrior relief of Efrenk: Same as above, but I'm not sure if I want to include Bibliography as an exclusion criteria, it could also refer to an author's list of works.
Lycus (river of Cilicia): Added {{SmithDGRG}} to the exclusion criteria. The template it redirects to should already be excluded, but it wasn't caught because it used a redirect.

ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 18:00, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ARandomName123 Thank you but I am against manual tagging because WP:Turkey was just an unimportant test. Whereas the medical stuff could have bad effects in the real world. So given the very small proportion of wrongly tagged articles on WP:Turkey I strongly support running your excellent creation to really tag anything on the whole of Wikipedia we suspect might be uncited. I contend that the benefits of flushing out unsourced medical articles will greatly outweigh the harm of wrongly tagging some cited articles as uncited. Chidgk1 (talk) 07:01, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@SunloungerFrog Looking forward to your thoughts on lists Chidgk1 (talk) 07:06, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Should we remove red links, and ones we tag so it becomes a working list? Secretlondon (talk) 19:43, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Feel free to remove the links as you see fit, but I've also been updating it whenever a new template/criteria to exclude is discovered. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 21:21, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just poking about in the list. Zinc finger ZZ-type and EF-hand domain-containing protein 1 is referenced, but the refs are for things in the infobox. Secretlondon (talk) 19:53, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm looking at the health-related Petscan list. 60% are lists that I would not expect to be sourced.

Nitrosoproline is an edge case; technically, there are external links on the page (in the {{chembox}}; in this case, the PubChem link verifies half of the first sentence) but I'd expect ordinary citations as well. The same is true for Hydrocortisone phosphate, which has {{drugbox}}.

Alveolus looks almost like a disambiguation page. (BD2412, would you like to take a look?)

Most of the others (about 100) look like 'true positives'. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:57, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@WhatamIdoing: Alveolus is more of a WP:BROADCONCEPT than a dab, since it basically lists things that share a specific characteristic (an anatomical or biological concavity). This can be sourced. I'll have a look this evening. BD2412 T 21:23, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You can filter out most lists by excluding the templates for WikiProject Lists and WikiProject Indexes on petscan, see petscan:37346408. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 00:59, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ARandomName123 Thanks for all your hard work. Are you able to remove lists in the original code? I think this should be run as a bot so that everyone can see what is uncited not just people who end up here. I have never done a bot before but if you don’t want to go through the bureaucracy could you let us see the code so I can try to get it approved? I have some (extremely out of date) coding experience so may be able to tweak it. Chidgk1 (talk) 08:10, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chidgk1: I can remove the lists if necessary. GreenC below mentioned that they already went through the approval process back in 2019, so we could just try using their bot to skip the approval process. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 17:14, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pardon me if it's referenced above and I missed it, but GreenC did a bot run with this purpose in 2019. I believe all the relevant info is linked from this VPP thread. GreenC purposefully took a relatively conservative approach to tagging, but you may find his notes helpful. The final BRFA is here. Ajpolino (talk) 11:21, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping. Yes I did make a program that detects articles with no refs. It is conservative and went through extensive manual testing with multiple editors helping. How many it tags is a fuzzy recipe of what constitutes an "article" and what constitutes a "reference". It managed to tag about 10,000 articles in 2019, and AFAIK nobody complained of false positives. It worked. Getting RfC approval was very difficult, many editors were strongly against, fearing it would go haywire. Between resistance from the community, difficulty of the code with endless edge cases, the difficulty of testing, I vowed to give this project a rest! However if there is a request to run again now, 6 years later, I probably still have permission. The first run proved it worked. -- GreenC 16:27, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenC: Oh, that's great! Would it be possible to do a non-editing run of your bot to get an idea of how many pages match your criteria? If we were to run it again, I think we would prefer it to be trickled in rather than in one big dump (see below for what we're doing for BLPs). ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 17:18, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ARandomName123: Checking the code, apparently I made some options (memory is hazy):

  # 0 = post results to test page
  # 1 = live run and post test results
  # 2 = live run only
  # 3 = save list of articles to filename G["static"] "list"
  # 4 = live run and save list of articles to filename G["static"] "list"

  # Remove template
  # 5 = save list of articles to filename G["static"] "list-opposite"

  # If 0, continue to end
  # Otherwise number of hits to discover before stop processing
  MaxCount = 0

Looks like out of the box it could do what you want. Do you prefer #0 or #3? The later would be a text file. There is also the intriguing #5, which essentially is the opposite: pages with the template that may not need the template anymore (according to the bot's criteria). As for MaxCount, it would stop after a certain number of edits. When it runs again, it picks up at the same spot, so it doesn't process the same articles early in the list. This way it could be setup to run from cron automatically once a month, each month gets a maximum number of edits then it stops for that run. -- GreenC 18:42, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@GreenC: #0 would be preferable, thanks. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 18:56, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OK. It downloads 7+ million articles and does various regexing routines. It will likely take weeks to finish, linear not multithreaded. How about 500 results and check it out before doing the whole enwiki. To make sure it's still working correctly after 6 years. I'll post when the 500 are done so you can check it out. -- GreenC 19:15, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, yea 500 sounds fine. Also took my program over a week finish running as well. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 19:19, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ARandomName123: User:GreenC/data/noref/July2025restart .. It found 16 in 167,000 pages before I stopped it. At this rate (the article feed list is randomly sorted), it will be a total of about 700 in 7 million pages. Assuming these 16 look OK - I have not looked yet - suggest letting the bot run through to completion in live mode. -- GreenC 16:38, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I had a quick look at them. They all look legitimately unreferenced to me. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 16:45, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Heads up – I've BLARed Guatemala at the 2011 Parapan American Games. I've checked the rest and they're all unreferenced. I'd support running the bot on the whole project. Toadspike [Talk] 17:14, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@GreenC Thank you very much. Running your “conservative” bot all the way through again live is a great first step I think. After that it would be very interesting to run @ARandomName123s bot in dummy mode and see how many it still finds in total and check a sample manually to estimate what proportion it then thinks are unreferenced but are actually referenced.

Also we could maybe compare the criteria of the 2 programs and see how they are different.

The long runtime does not matter I think. Is the environmental impact such as carbon footprint significant? Seems unlikely it would be nowadays, but if it is then given your “green” user name is it possible to tell the bots to run at times to minimize their environmental impact? Chidgk1 (talk) 06:20, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chidgk1: I believe the environmental impact of us running these programs is pretty much negligible. The thing about the long runtime is that I run it locally on my computer, so I need to leave it on for it to run. I should probably move it to toolforge or something.

Regarding criteria, I mentioned mine above (have since added Category:Specific source templates, any alphabetical character below a reference header, outlines, and some other misc. templates). GreenC's is at User:GreenC bot/Job 11/How. Mine is far more liberal with tagging, and as such, is more likely to find false positives. I believe our template filtering is somewhat similar, he says he has 6k+, and mine is currently a bit more than 6185. I believe one of the main differences is that his bot also skips stubs and matching section headers. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 02:25, 24 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Great, thanks. Running through to completion in live mode sounds fine to me, just try not to have it dump all 700 tags at once. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 21:16, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It might be interesting to look at 5 as a quick cleanup project. Rublamb (talk) 21:05, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Rublamb, I ran it on 200 articles that have the template, and it found 200 hits. I think the reason is my program is so conservative in determining when to add the template ie. the opposite of extreme conservativism is extreme liberality. -- GreenC 17:09, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@GreenC Sorry I don’t quite understand what you did here and your reasoning - could you explain more simply for me please? Chidgk1 (talk) 06:25, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chidgk1 GreenC is saying that the bot thinks nearly all articles tagged as unreferenced actually have references, because its definition of a "reference" is very broad. Toadspike [Talk] 10:11, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thanks for the succinct explanation. It's kind of a brain twister when you start thinking about it. Ultimately the considerations for adding the template, versus removing it, are different. When it's a bot doing the adding and removing. — GreenC 14:41, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Follow up: I found Ancient Asian history, which is a list that I tagged as unsourced. Based on this discussion, I'm going to de-tag this and other lists that I run across. Bearian (talk) 07:23, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Help needed: Unreferenced BLPs

With an average of 10 BLPs per day being tagged as "Unreferenced" as part of our controlled release program, we have now accumulated a backlog of 92 or so Unreferenced BLPs. Please take a moment to look at [[Category: Unreferenced BLPs from July 2025]] and add some citations where you can. (Or deal with in another way after your best WP:BEFORE search.) Cielquiparle (talk) 06:19, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@BeanieFan11 There seems to be a surprisingly large supply of notable NFL player bios which remain Unreferenced. They are generally very easy to find references for via Newspapers.com, etc. There were several of us during the June backlog drive who tried to stay on top of them, but it would be great if we could have support from the American football WikiProject as well. Cielquiparle (talk) 06:25, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unreferenced American football BLPs should be a useful petscan to sieve out unreffed NFL players etc. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 08:04, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Busy right now. Can leave a message at WT:NFL about it. BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:11, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just to update everyone on progress - as of right now there are:

some 557 probably unreferenced yet untagged BLPs left from @ARandomName123's original search returning 938 articles
some 95 unreferenced and tagged BLPs that are not already undergoing a deletion process

Quite a lot of the articles do seem to be related to American football sportspeople. Most of those are sourced in the infobox to Pro Football Reference - there is a field pfr that takes an ID for that site, so for example Alvin Reed has a pfr value ReedAl00, and that generates an external link thus https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/R/ReedAl00.htm. However there are no inline citations in the content body, just an external link in the infobox. At the moment I tag such articles as {{BLP unreferenced}} and {{No significant coverage (sports)}}. If people disagree with that - maybe {{BLP no footnotes}} is more accurate than {{BLP unreferenced}}? - I'll happily change my practice. Which would probably reduce the increase in backlog. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 08:38, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Progress update on the controlled release program - as of right now there are:

318 probably unreferenced yet untagged BLPs left from @ARandomName123's original search returning 938 articles
177 unreferenced and tagged BLPs that are not already undergoing a deletion process

Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 13:06, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Progress update on the controlled release program - I've now gone through all of @ARandomName123's original search that returned 938 articles and tagged them appropriately. There are now some 399 unreferenced BLPs that are not already undergoing a deletion process. Let's get referencing! Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 11:31, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Roughly what proportion of unreferenced articles have no active projects?

Hopefully there is an easier way to estimate this than getting a complete list of the 625 active projects and pasting into Petscan “Has none of these templates”? Chidgk1 (talk) 08:43, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure how you would get around active vs. inactive vs. semi-active WikiProjects. Of course, having an active WP does not mean that someone is actively looking at reports and prioritizing unsourced articles. I have noticed that there is a great deal of overlap between articles with no sources and articles that are stubs, articles with no short description, and sometimes articles without any WikiProjects listed. With the latter, there usually is not a TalkPage which might be a better approach for your query. However, this may take you to more of an AfD list, than a list of articles to improve. I guess it depends on why you think such a list would be useful. Rublamb (talk) 21:30, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Rublamb Thanks - so to simplify the question is it possible to estimate how many articles are:

Unreferenced

AND

over a year old

AND

have no talk page

The point of this would be that if there were a large number (say more than a thousand) to put in a proposal to have them all deleted, which would hopefully be less effort than you guys checking them individually. Chidgk1 (talk) 06:03, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Of course such a list could be first notified to all active projects to give them time to add their project to articles before I or someone else puts in a bulk AfD for the reminder. Chidgk1 (talk) 07:04, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ARandomName123 Thank you for showing us your excellent code at User:ARandomName123/BLP.py. I like that it is short and in Python so more people have a chance to understand it and figure out whether it could do stuff like I want above.

Would you put this somewhere more official (not sure where) so that others can suggest changes and options? Also I would like to add more comments to the code as I don’t fully understand it yet. Chidgk1 (talk) 06:52, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chidgk1: Feel free to copy it wherever, or add comments as you see fit. Just give me a ping for suggestions/options/questions. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 02:28, 24 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Chidgk1 (talk) 09:41, 25 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Top 10 URA leaderboard for July 2025

It was always going to be hard to recover from the June 2025 unreferenced article backlog drive, in which the indefatigable JTtheOG topped the charts with 1397 points, followed by Frost with 1061.5 points, and Davidindia with 650.5 points.

Nevertheless, in the end we had solid participation in July – all the more important since we are at a critical juncture given the discussions above which I won't recap here. Let's take a look at the July 2025 marathon leaderboard, shall we?


Rank	User	Total articles in July 2025
1	Bearian	318
2	Boleyn	243
3	JoeNMLC	155
4	Coldupnorth	150
5	Cielquiparle	123
6	JTtheOG	106
7	ARandomName123	87
8	WikiOriginal-9	81
9	Nayyn	62
10	FictionWitch	58

Hats off to the mighty Bearian who reached the top of the leaderboard early in the month and inspired the rest of us to hang in there and keep at it. (Incidentally, Bearian is now in 8th place for the year.) Thrilled also to see the return of Boleyn who powered through to a second place finish in July.

The next four users are in the 100+ club as well – JoeNMLC, Coldupnorth, JTtheOG, and yours truly. It was good to see some of our most competitive June backlog drive participants return in July with a top 10 finish – this includes JTtheOG and Bearian, but also Nayyn and FictionWitch. There is something to be said as well for editors such as JoeNMLC and ARandomName123 who show that steady participation over time matters (7th and 14th place, respectively for the year to date). Finally, welcome WikiOriginal-9 to the URA 2025 marathon!

Remember: It's easy to join in the fun in August. All you have to do is add at least one citation to articles tagged as Unreferenced (if needed), and remember to remove the Unreferenced tag (and replace it with another tag if needed). The overall 2025 marathon leaderboard is here and you will show up in the monthly column for August once you have removed Unreferenced tags on 5 articles. If you are diving into the trove of articles discussed above that are not yet tagged as Unreferenced, feel free to tag it as Unreferenced first, and then add a citation to a reliable source in a subsequent edit. (And equally...if you find mistagged articles that actually do have references, fixing those tags totally counts, unlike the monthly backlog drive rules.)

Many thanks to everyone who contributed in July and who are adding references in August. Let's keep at it. Happy referencing! Cielquiparle (talk) 01:09, 5 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for organizing this and for your kind words. Bearian (talk) 01:13, 5 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, it looks like some of the citations I made are not registered with the bot?

Not that I would be on top but seeing number "0" in August feels a bit disheartening when I made some efforts. Arutoria (talk) 11:31, 19 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Arutoria, if you have dealt with fewer than five articles, it doesn't show on the leaderboard. But as soon as you've done five or higher, the correct number will appear. (I think that's right, anyway!) Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 12:45, 19 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for answering! Appreciate the effort! Arutoria (talk) 00:23, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for reminding me. I've had this on my to-do list to fix for a while now, and finally got around to it today. It should now show your stats, including those less than five, as long as you were over five in any one month. @Arutoria's, for example, now contains the three from August, for a total of 16. The individual monthly leaderboards always shows all edits, regardless of count. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 03:42, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your hard work! Arutoria (talk) 04:42, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fixing the months counter

Is there any way to fix the months counter of Unreferenced articles, so that it only counts the actual months?

I see that many editors are now manually tagging Talk pages as "Unreferenced" and obviously the months counter is now counting each of those Categories as months, driving up the number of months of Unreferenced articles up to 250 (up from 196).

Pinging @ARandomName123, @SunloungerFrog, and @Kazamzam. And also @The wub. Cielquiparle (talk) 05:15, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well. This is rather beyond my knowledge - categories are still a bit of a dark art as far as I'm concerned - but I might hazard a guess that the issue exists because, for example, Category:Unreferenced Albania articles is itself a member of Category:Monthly clean-up category (Articles lacking sources) counter, and if the unreffed Albania cat were removed from the monthly clean-up cat, it would not then appear in Category:Articles lacking sources and get counted, incorrectly, as a month. But I didn't want to start editing to do that in case I'm entirely wrong and it started messing up other things! Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 07:10, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Cielquiparle manually tagging Talk pages....oy vey. I know that was a thing for articles for WP Hawaii using their project template that is theoretically useful but often doesn't get updated when references are added because it's not standard practice and/or most editors don't know about it. We might have to manually untag them, or perhaps our intrepid @DreamRimmer wants to take a crack at running a bot for this issue. I like the idea of tagging talk pages but in practice it's much more of a headache than it is a tool, in my experience. Also sorry to be away for so long but we rise. Thanks for the ping CQP! Kazamzam (talk) 16:05, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Having investigated a little more, I think there are two problems.

The code that makes Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles/Progress should be changed to count items in Category:Monthly clean-up category (Articles lacking sources) counter not items in Category:Articles lacking sources
Anything that isn't a monthly clean-up category relating to articles lacking sources needs to be removed from Category:Monthly clean-up category (Articles lacking sources) counter. Just to note that I tried this on the Albania category, but @Catfurball reverted the change, I'm not sure why. But maybe they can join the conversation

In any case, I think it should be fixable. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 16:11, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have made many new unreferenced categories by country, since my new categories are not connected to templates if I remove the category from them will this take care of the problem. And later I could add it back when they get added to a template. @Cielquiparle: @SunloungerFrog: Catfurball (talk) 16:23, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Catfurball just don't add your unreffed articles by country categories to Category:Monthly clean-up category (Articles lacking sources) counter, and I think that should help fix the immediate problem. The wider question of whether it is desirable to add maintenance categories pertaining to articles to the corresponding talk pages (which sounds a bit bizarre and duplicative to me when one could run a petscan to get the same result) I leave to others wiser than me. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 16:40, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Cielquiparle, I think the months counter should look OK now. It now correctly counts things in Category:Monthly clean-up category (Articles lacking sources) counter which has been pruned of subcategories that aren't of the form Articles lacking sources from Month Year. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 21:19, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @SunloungerFrog! (Yes the 185 looks correct as I always wondered why were counting those few random Talk page categories as their own "months".) I noticed some time ago that there were ~200 Talk pages marked as "unref=yes" for articles of interest to WikiProject Hawaii, but that pretty much all of them actually already had refs...and then someone finally went through and removed them all (possibly manually?). It is a big problem because no one can easily "see" that the Talk page is tagged as "unref=yes". Even worse, there seem to be some WikiProjects (specifically Cities), where "unref=yes" isn't recognized as a parameter, so all their tagged Talk pages end up appearing as their own separate categories. Cc: @Awkwafaba. Cielquiparle (talk) 22:29, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Cielquiparle: I was the one who removed almost all of the Hawaii articles, for almost all of them had references. And yesterday I did the same thing with Michigan, there were 42 marked as being unreferenced, when actually there was only 4. I have doing this cleanup since last year of the talk pages. Catfurball (talk) 15:29, 23 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

imo the subject specific stuff in Category:Monthly clean-up category (Articles lacking sources) counter should be moved out of the category. Also, the wording for the talk page note is "This article lacks sufficient references and adequate inline citations.", which would better fit {{More citations needed}}, rather than {{Unreferenced}}. I would be in favour of just untagging the talk page ones, as Kazamzam suggested. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 16:58, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Superb! Thank you so much for your work! Kazamzam (talk) 12:41, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unreferenced music album articles

Hi All, there seem to be quite a few unreferenced music albums. I sometimes struggle with references for these even though clearly the albums exist as they are on a variety of platforms to listen to. Sometimes there are news articles although its harder for older or lesser known albums. I am wondering what experience other users have in references for these? In most instances, Discogs always seems to have an unreferenced album but Talk:Discogs seems to say its not sufficient to be a reference as its user generated content, which I get but then isn't Wikipedia... ? Anyway I was just wondering what other users do for albums here? Thanks Coldupnorth (talk) 21:46, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect we have loads of music articles which fail the notability criteria. Secretlondon (talk) 22:09, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Album reviews are great to use, either from newspaper articles or music review websites/webzines. JTtheOG (talk) 22:34, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to assume you are not talking about albums that made Rolling Stone. Try Pitchfork, "Americana Music Magazine", NPR Music Reviews, Paste magazine, The Wire, The Quietus, and PopMatters. For pre-2000 albums by local and regional acts, you can probably find newspaper reviews (Newspapers.com). And remember, just because an album exists doesn't mean that it is notable. You can always merge into the article about the band/artist and turn the album's name into a redirect. Rublamb (talk) 23:29, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Try ProQuest as well, through TWL. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 00:02, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you all Coldupnorth (talk) 07:32, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've primarily been using Newspapers.com while going through the albums backlog. Though that only helps with the English ones. There's a ton of German, Swedish, and Finnish death metal albums that I have no idea how to reference. I doubt the metal specific websites would be covering those either, even with them being on the subject genre. Silver seren^C 22:56, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Future backlog drives schedule

The next big Unreferenced articles backlog drive is in November 2025 (per previous discussions).

For 2026, I have presumptively grabbed March 2026, August 2026, and December 2026 for now on the WP:DRIVES annual calendar. (At first I grabbed April 2026 which remains completely empty but remembered ARandomName123 might have exams and a lot of people tend to disappear in April anyway.)

But please let me know if these timings don't work and we should adjust. I mean, I know it's far in the future and it's hard to predict that far out, but it's a bit competitive, so... Cc: @ARandomName123, @SunloungerFrog, @Kazamzam. And if 3 is too much in a year, we could always let go of one later. Cielquiparle (talk) 04:10, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for considering my exams! March and August 2026 work for me. I have fall-term exams in the first two-thirds of December, but we're still over a year out from that so we can deal with it when we get closer. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 00:39, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Top 15 URA leaderboard for August 2025

Hats off to everyone who added citations to Unreferenced articles in August 2025! It was a tough month, as we battled the flood of newly tagged articles...but we somehow made it to the other side.

In August, we had a whopping 8 editors who logged 100+ points, with 2 editors ahead of the pack at 200+. They were followed by 7 more editors who each had 31+ points, the equivalent of 1 a day.


Rank	User	Total articles in August 2025
1	Silver seren	290
2	Bearian	249
3	JTtheOG	176
4	Cielquiparle	167
5	Rfl0216	156
6	Coldupnorth	150
7	GünniX	132
8	JoeNMLC	105
9	Secretlondon	74
10	ARandomName123	61
11	Miraclepine	56
12	SunloungerFrog	50
13	Cakelot1	42
14	Elite words2	34
15	Eva UX	34

The race for the top spot seemed rather intense, as @Bearian appeared to be keeping the crown for the second month in a row, but was ultimately surpassed by @Silver seren. Congratulations to both.

Speaking of people who don't like to lose: It was great to see serial backlog drive champion @JTtheOG back in action to claim bronze for the month – and incidentally, for the marathon year-to-date. (And yes, I noticed this especially because there was a fleeting period when I managed to climb to third place myself, only to get knocked back down.)

Well done to @Rfl0216, @Coldupnorth, @GünniX, and @JoeNMLC, who all made the 100+ club in August. Delighted as well for @Secretlondon and @ARandomName123 who made it to the Top 10 with some solid work.

And finally, a shout out to @Miraclepine and all other editors who joined in on the action for the first time last month. Welcome! English Wikipedia still has 47,000+ articles tagged as Unreferenced (and many more that have yet to be tagged). Sorting through these articles, trying to verify facts, and adding citations to reliable sources wherever possible is important work, and we need all the help we can get.

Thanks again, keep going, and happy referencing! Cielquiparle (talk) 04:03, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Since I was pinged: I wanna note that all I did was fix a recurring error with these tags in Category:Set index articles on titles of nobility; set indices should not have unreferenced tags because they're not articles but rather exist purely to point to existing ones. ミラP@Miraclepine 04:07, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's still important work, @Miraclepine. Thanks for fixing all those tags. (And also...the ambiguity between DAB pages vs. set indices vs. lists is challenging to deal with. I am also coming across pages which don't seem to it well in any of those categories which seem to be padding the overall count.) Cielquiparle (talk) 09:23, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You were really in a battle for your life there at the end, Cielquiparle. That four way fight was kind of intense for a bit. Silver seren^C 04:13, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm in awe of your dedication. Bearian (talk) 04:36, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. It's only going to get harder from here on out though. I'm running out of straightforward lists to go through. We're eventually just going to have only an eclectic mix of article subjects that are annoying to reference. Silver seren^C 05:14, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]