Note: This article should be released around the end of February to coincide with my previous article's release date, February 27, 2025.

One year ago, I put forward a challenge to the English Wikipedia community: In one year, every remaining article will have a short description (or will be marked as not requiring one due to a self-explanatory title). At that time, the count of articles not meeting this was ~770,000. As of March 2026, the number is ~538,000. Unfortunately, we did not meet this goal. But not to worry! I still have confidence that the community will come together to reduce this count to zero. I would like to introduce some new ideas and strategies for the community, from my new experiences and from others who commented on last year's article.

(Note: when the article is released I would like to ping the users who brought up these ideas in last year's article)

• In my article last year, many commented that the number often increases due to new articles being created and not being provided with a short description. Articles for Creation has done a great job of providing short descriptions to new articles created through AFC. In addition, the New Pages Patrol states that articles being reviewed can be provided with a short description if they weren't given one by the article's creator. I urge Wikipedians to join both communities if they haven't already, not just to add short descriptions but to clean up the many new articles added to Wikipedia.
  • However, I need to stress that in the new article creation and review process, short descriptions are not a priority.
• Some users also mentioned using LLMs (large-language models) to generate descriptions. However, AI can create inaccuracies and utilizing it requires articles to be marked as containing LLM generated content.
• There are a number of helpful tools available for the purpose of adding short descriptions to articles and I encourage everyone to consider these for the purpose of adding short descriptions.

I think my initial challenge was a little too lofty, but we have made progress since last year at this time! Since then, we've added short descriptions (or marked articles as not needing one) to ~232,000 articles. Dividing the number remaining (538,000) by 232,000 leaves us with a value of about 2.32 years. My new challenge to the English Wikipedia community is to have added short descriptions to every article on Wikipedia by March 2029. I think this is a more reasonable challenge and I intend to make updates every year on this goal until we have accomplished it!