Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles/Backlog drives/November 2024

__ARCHIVEDTALK__ Welcome to WikiProject Unreferenced Articles's November 2024 backlog drive! The referencing portion will begin on November 1 and run until December 1, 23:59 UTC. At the start of the drive, there were [insert] articles tagged as entirely without references on Wikipedia.

There is a very simple way to improve Wikipedia: add at least one inline citation of a reliable source to any article tagged as lacking sources. Fewer unsourced articles means the quality of Wikipedia as a whole increases, accurate information becomes more reliable and transparent, and inaccurate information can be removed. .

1 point will be awarded for sourcing. Mass deletion or tag removals are strictly prohibited, and will be subjected to disqualification.

If you need tips or guides, you can take a look at, the helpful guide at WP:CITE, or ask at the WikiProject's talk page. The drive will begin on November 1 and run until December 1. To encourage additional reviews, the drive will be extended for one week (December 1-8) as an additional review period. Only reviews will be counted during this period.

Rules (TBD)

 * 1) 1 point for adding at least one inline citation from a reliable source to an unreferenced article, usually tagged with Unreferenced or BLP unsourced.
 * 2) * No points for simply listing references in a section.
 * 3) * To keep this drive focused, no points for adding additional citations to one article, though editors are encouraged to do so whenever possible.
 * 4) *Primary sources are permitted so long as they are only used to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts. Please see WP:PRIMARY.
 * 5) 0.5 points for reviewing submissions of the drive. See more at /Reviews.
 * 6) * The point is less because reviewing submissions is easier than finding reliable sources. Nevertheless, reviewers have an extremely important job of verifying submissions and require a high level of trust.
 * 7) No points for deleting an article via AfD, PROD or blank and redirect.
 * 8) * Per this discussion, encouraging these actions would cause more heat than light and does not belong to the focus of the drive.
 * 9) All citing contributions without WP:NOV24 in the edit summary will not be counted.
 * 10) * If making multiple edits to an article, include NOV24 in only one edit summary.
 * 11) * If the editor forgets to put that summary, they may add it retroactively using a dummy edit.
 * 12) Problematic behaviors are grounds towards disqualification and blocks. Examples are:
 * 13) * Spamming articles to AfD/PROD/blank and redirect
 * 14) * Mass-removal of Unreferenced
 * 15) * Adding fake references and content
 * 16) * Being disruptive by being uncivil, wikilawyering, etc.

Detailed instructions
Find an article in Category:Articles lacking sources (Credits to User:Ajpolino and User:Ipigott).
 * Go to the search bar and type [search term] incategory:"All articles lacking sources".
 * Go to the search bar and type articletopic:[topic] incategory:"All articles lacking sources". The list of topics can be found at mw:Help:CirrusSearch/articletopic.
 * Take a look at
 * For WikiProjects, take a look at Bambot's WikiProject Cleanup Listings, click on your project's "by cat", then scroll down to "Cites no sources".
 * Use WP:PetScan and find the intersection between "All articles lacking sources" and your category.

Then, find a reliable source. Look for reliable sources, see for tips.

If at least one reliable source is found:
 * Cite it inline.
 * Please add all the needed author, title and date metadata (see WP:CITE).
 * For recent books, ISBN and page numbers are strongly recommended.
 * The inline citation should go after the period without a space, not before it:
 * Add reflist and ==References== if none are present (see MOS:ORDER).
 * Remove Unreferenced or BLP unsourced when you are finished adding citations.
 * (recommended) Add More citations needed to large parts of the article or add cn to short chunks of text.
 * Add an edit summary including: WP:NOV24

If no reliable source can found with the best of your effort, according to WP:BEFORE, there are a few options:
 * PROD the article if it is obvious that the article should be deleted.
 * AFD the article if it is not obvious that the article should be deleted.
 * Merge discussion and redirect the article if the article has some useful content but it is not notable.
 * Make a new thread at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced articles if you are unsure.

Progress
Goal: Bring the backlog down by 15,000 (? to be confirmed) and clear Category:All unreferenced BLPs.

Milestones
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Oldest backlogs
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Leaderboard
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Reviews
All participants with experience in citing sources are encouraged to perform reviews. Reviewers will be awarded 0.5 points for each review. A tool is available to locate unreviewed submissions and simplify wikitext formatting.

Determining what sources are usable
Even though we are just citing one source to the article, that source must be chosen. That source needs to:
 * verify information in the article,
 * reliable enough to be trusted.

This is a lot to take in. And worse, sometimes you couldn't find such a source! It can be very hard to determine whether you should go forward to cite the article or ask for its deletion, even for experienced WikiGnomers, and sometimes you have to follow through with your gut feelings.

Some suitable sources may be found at WikiProject Unreferenced articles/Resources or Reliable sources/Perennial sources. Examples of common not suitable sources include:
 * Tabloids – Daily Mail, listicles at Hindustan Times, etc.
 * Blogs – Wordpress, Blogger, personal websites
 * Wikipedia mirrors, substantially duplicating existing content
 * Books not under editorial control, self-published (tip: search on Wikipedia the publisher's name)

Some tricks
Searching sources
 * Use "" (double quotes) to search for the term exactly. This means that "pinnochio" will only show up articles with words matched with "pinnochio", not pinocchio (although some websites will disregard this and show the wrong search term anyway).
 * Some articles, especially for more general topics, might have sources available with slightly different wording -- "basketweaving" vs "basket weaving," "basket weaver," etc.
 * Search inside millions of old and new books at Google Books and Archive.org - for the archive, go to https://archive.org/search then click the search bar, then click "search text contents" radio button, it will search over 10 million books.
 * Access to some paywalled content, including Newspapers.com and ProQuest, is provided to editors via The Wikipedia Library.
 * For Google, use - (ie. dash) as a way to remove unwanted entries, like -pinocchio
 * See more tips at Advanced source searching
 * You can search for related articles on Wikipedia (as in other pages or other languages) and access some sources there. Do not copy the reference in verbatim. Only after you've checked the source and that the source indeed verify the text, you may cite it in the article.

Reading and parsing sources
 * Use machine translation, either at a website or as built in to your web browser, for reading foreign article texts.
 * For foreign texts on Google Books where their texts cannot be copied, take a screenshot, go to Google Translate and click on the "Images" button. Upload the image there and Google Translate will translate the passage inside the image itself.
 * Use the text searching feature to locate what you are looking for faster, such as Ctrl on Windows or Cmd on macOS.

Processing articles
 * Twinkle might be helpful for cleaning up article banners and nominating articles for deletion
 * While you're there, you could expand the article or clean up any other problems you see with it.
 * If you are familiar with AWB/JWB, you can use it to quickly add a "References" section and reflist template.

Popular articles
The articles below are some of the more popular pages on Wikipedia and thus might be easier to find sources. They are queried from pageviews analysis at Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS). Please remove entries once references have been added. This section should be updated every day.

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