Unreferenced articles backlog drive

WikiProject report

Unreferenced articles backlog drive

Did you know?

Once upon a time, there were over three hundred thousand articles — 8.9% of the encyclopedia — tagged as unreferenced! Thanks to WikiProject Unreferenced articles volunteers searching out and adding references over the years, we are now at about an eighth of that number — 0.6% of the encyclopedia.

You can help too!

Introduction

The MAR26 backlog drive run by WikiProject Unreferenced articles is well underway, with over 150 participants. During these drives, we focus on reducing the number of articles that contain no references, by searching for and adding inline citations to reliable sources that verify claims made in the article.

Over the years, we have made enormous progress in getting sources into articles. Fifteen years ago, there were over 314,000 articles tagged as unsourced. At the start of this drive, there were only about 39,000 left to go, and a shrinking number of articles that have yet to be tagged. The backlog drives are a key part of our success. Please sign up and help us get the total number down to zero.

Drive goals

Our goals for this drive are fourfold:

Add inline citations to at least 6,000 unreferenced articles
Bring the total backlog to below 60,000 articles
Clear the backlog of unreferenced biographies of living persons completely
Finally clear the Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2009 backlog!

History

This chart shows how the backlog (that is, the number of articles in Category:All articles lacking sources) has changed over time.^[a] The highest recorded point was an eye-watering 314,663 articles on 15 December 2010. That was partly due to a bot that was run at the end of 2009, which added some 110,838 articles to Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2009.

Thankfully, it has been on a decent downward trend since then, and we have been able to make a good dent in the backlog in all our past backlog drives.

In WP:FEB24, we went from 111,643 tagged unreferenced articles to 97,343, a net decrease of 14,300.
In WP:NOV24, we went from 80,645 tagged unreferenced articles to 72,134, a net decrease of 8,511. We also (temporarily) reduced the number of unreferenced biographies of living persons (BLPs) to zero.
In WP:JUN25, we went from c. 58,500 tagged unreferenced articles to 49,028, a net decrease of 9,509 which surpassed our goal of getting under 50,000.
In WP:NOV25, we went from 47,658 tagged unreferenced articles to 40,259, a net decrease of 7,399. And again, we brought the number of unreferenced BLPs to zero.

There is more historical data that shows the size of the monthly backlog categories over time.

Current status

Since the end of September 2025, we have been tracking both tagged unreferenced articles – that is, articles not undergoing a deletion process that are tagged as {{unreferenced}} or a variant – and probably unreferenced articles – that is, those articles that are likely to be unreferenced but are not tagged as such, as determined by ARandomName123's excellent bot, which runs once a day. For more information on the latter set, see this discussion.

The chart below shows that tracking; for context, it equates roughly to the little dashed box on the bottom right of the historical chart above. At the beginning of the day (UTC) on 30 March 2026 there were:

32,316 tagged unreferenced articles, a change of −244 since the day before
26,573 probably unreferenced articles, a change of −14 since the day before
That is, a total backlog of 58,889 articles still to deal with, a change of −258 since the day before

At the current average rate of 156 articles per day, it will take 378 days to clear the backlog, finishing on 12 April 2027. (raw data)

Oldest unreferenced articles

We recently added a source to Tile-based game. That may have set a record for the longest period of time an article has remained unreferenced - the article had no sources when it was created on 13 March 2001, and remained that way until Cielquiparle added an inline citation on 1 March 2026, nearly 25 years later!

Here are a few of the oldest articles that are still tagged as unreferenced. Please do cite 'em up, and join the drive if you'd like to help out more!

Footnotes

^ With thanks to ARandomName123's original idea and code

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10 March 2026 (all comments)

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I like to measure Wikipedia by content instead of by articles; one article with fifty sentences has the same number of claims as it would if you split it into five articles with ten sentences each. So I'd be interested in seeing what percentage of content is unsourced alongside the percentage of unsourced articles. But I don't know if it would even be possible to calculate that. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:26, 10 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
- You might find part of what you're looking for in https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09764. Looking at it another way, User:BilledMammal/Average articles shows a sample of 10,000 articles with a total of 268K sentences and 86K refs, or one ref for every third sentence. I've heard that it's closer to one ref for every two sentence; the difference may lie in which articles are being measured (e.g., How are you detecting sentences? Do you include stubs? Do you count sentences in the lead?), but that should give you a rough idea. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:00, 10 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  Sometimes the number of refs don't reflect how well-sourced the article actually is: take, for example, John Anderson Hartley, which had been tagged since 2021 for lack of references... despite the fact that the vast majority of it was copied, word for word, from the cited source. I've also been doing some archive.today cleanup, recently, and I keep running into a wall because... yes, this sentence has a reference. The reference has sod all to do with the content, though.[1] GreenLipstickLesbian 💌🧸 06:36, 10 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Close to twenty years ago I saw a complaint on one of the project pages that the number of 'citation needed' tags was growing too fast and would eventually overwhelm Wikipedia. I was able to point out that the number of new unreferenced articles was growing even faster. It does my heart good to see how far we have come. - Donald Albury 15:40, 10 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There's some interesting history behind the bot that tagged those articles back in 2009. Chess enjoyer (talk) 20:41, 11 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

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