When Wikipedia started, references were few and far between. But since then, our standards have gotten much higher. Hundreds of thousands of articles were left unreferenced, and in 2007 WikiProject Unreferenced Articles was started to fix them. Now, there are less that 50,000 left, but our work still continues. Join our backlog drive this August to help clear the backlog!

IN PROGRESS

In the beginning, Wikipedia's quality rules were much more relaxed. The encyclopaedia as a whole read more like a blog, with authors providing their own personal insights into subject. When reading through examples of "Brilliant Prose", a pre-2003 directory of (for the time) well-developed articles, one finds that a source, reference, or citation is few and far between. Even being very generous, by my count only about 1 in 4 articles from this list had any references whatsoever. And these are the Brilliant articles — the articles you might be searching for in daily life were, while good work for 2001, not quite up to par with our modern expectations. By 2005, citing your sources had become expected of well-written work. But even so, there were still many thousands of older articles out there in need of referencing.

The lack of sources naturally presents several problems, the most acute of which is the lack of verifiability. Now a core tenet of Wikipedia policy, these articles struggled with this due to their unreferencedness. Without sources to point to, it is intrinsically difficult to trust an article. In addition, many of these early articles relied heavily on original research, disallowed since 2003. Most long, formerly unreferenced articles have since been sourced and sent on their long journey to eventually reach FA. But what remains are the stubs; the short, niche articles; and the lists carefully compiled decades past that just need some TLC.

To help solve these issues, WikiProject Unreferenced Articles was created on 16 May 2007. It rapidly gained traction, with over 15 members by the end of the year.

Email the founders (still active!) soon, see if they can provide insight...

Likely a blockquote around here...

The graph below shows the tracking of unreferenced articles since September 2025. (colours explained, something about the downward trend, specifically of "probably unref" articles...) At the beginning of the day (UTC) on 29 July 2026 there were:

• 42,103 tagged unreferenced articles, a change of −21 since the day before
• 5,039 probably unreferenced articles, a change of 26 since the day before
• That is, a total backlog of 47,142 articles still to deal with, a change of 5 since the day before

At the current average rate of 134 articles per day, it will take 352 days to clear the backlog, finishing on 16 July 2027. (raw data)

The number of unreferenced articles peaked in late 2010 at a staggering 315 thousand pages and has been coming down since.

This August, WikiProject Unreferenced Articles is holding a backlog drive to help add sources to unreferenced articles. In our last backlog drive in March, we cleared 8,954 articles from the backlog, bringing it down from