Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced Article Cleanup

Duplicate project of Unreferenced Articles?
Greetings! I was wondering what the difference is between this WikiProject and the Unreferenced Articles. If the two projects only have subtle differences, could/should they be merged? I'm posting a similar question on that project's talk page as well. Thanks! Clifflandis (talk) 13:45, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Please note that the merger discussion is taking place here. Clifflandis (talk) 14:59, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Merged and Redirected to Unreferenced articles Jeepday (talk) 13:46, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Duplicate projects?
Hi Qarnos, could you maybe check if the goals of this project don’t overlap too much with the already existing WikiProject: Fact and Reference Check? Thanks. --Van helsing 10:54, 14 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I had already investigated that project. It seems more gears to verifying references in articles which already have them, rather than researching and finding references from scratch. This is more about clearing the massive backlog in Category:All articles lacking sources. I don't consider there to be much overlap, but thanks for the concern. -- Qarnos 11:00, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
 * All right. I like your focus on stubs in the hope that expanders will follow up on it. --Van helsing 11:07, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Tackle the problem sooner rather than later
I would argue that the reason why a lot of information goes unreferenced is because not enough effort has been put into making the referencing arrangements intelligible to new wiki contributors. Clearing up after the proverbial horse has bolted is a not a good use of time.

There is a LOT that could be done to improve WHY citing sources is important and HOW to do this quickly and easily. 83.217.168.45 03:16, 20 March 2007 (UTC) (Sorry that was me I'd forgotten I'd signed out! Cosmopolitancats 03:17, 20 March 2007 (UTC))

Allocating articles to appropriate WikiProject
This project could get a lot more help if unreferenced articles were assigned to the appropriate WikiProject. For example, if all the articles that had the unreferenced tag and had an environment-stub tag, "environment" in the category or article name then they could all be listed at WikiProject Environment. It would be a simple query of the database dump in order to get this info. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 02:59, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Help needed restoring a worthy deleted list
Since the list of anarchists article was deleted on the grounds of poor referencing, a few of us have been working on a sandboxed version at User:SwitChar/Anarchlist, building it back up from scratch with rigourous referencing. The problem is that we are few, and the putative anarchists we need to vet and find references for are many. We could really use some extra hands sorting through the potential additions here here, finding references for their being anarchists and adding their names with a brief description to the sandboxed version. If you could help, it would be really appreciated. On behalf of the Anarchism task force, the skomorokh  15:19, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Edit Summary
Membership in this project is currently small. I just joined and I'm the 20th member. As a way providing more visibility in addition to the article talk page banner, perhaps we should add a reference to the project in the edit summary. When removing the unref tag, perhaps something along the lines of: '' References added as part of Wikiproject Unreferenced Article Cleanup! '' would link back to the project and remain visible in the article history. Thoughts? -- Whpq (talk) 15:10, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Excellent idea, why don't you add it to the project page. Perhaps in the Hints and Tips section since this is where it talks about removing the unref tag.  Yes, this is a small but I think a very important project since good references as so important.  Glad you joined, we can use all of the help we can get.  I have some free time tomorrow and will be adding 2009 to the Number of Unreferenced Articles by Month table.  Feel free to re-work the project page or throw out any suggestions for ways to recruit more members or ways to improve anything.  When I joined back in June there were only about 90 articles referenced my members, and we are now above 300.  I am working on another personal project right now and have not had the time to do some more referencing but will be getting back to it soon.  BTW, what's your opinion of the Suggested Articles section on the project page?  Since I added the Where to Start table I was thinking that it might be redundant?  Glad to have you aboard.  --Captain-tucker (talk) 16:29, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Done. It appears the convention in tis project is to be fairly bold, so I won't hesitate to add to the project page in the future if a brilliant idea strikes me.  The suggested articles is redundant to the start table.  The start table looks to be the natural starting point.  I ignored the suggested articles and poked into the December and November 2008 categories directly.  My guess is that most editors would do the same. -- Whpq (talk) 17:30, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Centralized discussion directly related to this project
See Improving referencing efforts

Project Banner template change
I just changed the Project Banner template WikiProject Unreferenced Article Cleanup so that the edit this page link takes you to editing the article page and not the articles talk page as it did previously. Since we put this template on the articles talk page and the project banner tells you to cite your sources having the link edit the articles talk page made no sense. --Captain-tucker (talk) 15:43, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Unreferenced "Year" in music articles
I came across 1995 in music going through the unreferenced article category. I did some small cleanup and removed all the unreferenced tags littered through the article at the tops of sections in favour of a single refimprove tag. User:Alchemagenta owned up to be the one who added the tags in the sections for these types of articles, and for a very good reason. Uncited material is being added to these articles, and the contributors might not notice just the one tag at the top of the article as the years in music articles tend to be quite long. It's a way to try an encourage citing of information when adding it.

I've been slogging my way periodically through the Events section of the article providing citations. And I've been thinking about how we could better encourage the citation of entries when editors add information to these types of articles. What I was thinking was that people have a tendency to copy or use the same format for information that they add as whatever they see already there. This tendency can be re-inforced by using a template that can help emphasize the need for a citation by having a parameter for the citation. My idea is that the events section could be set up with each entry being a template entry consisting of parameters for the date, description text, and citation. If the citation were missing, the template could automatically flag itself with a citation needed tag. It would look something like this:

*

When editors adding new information see a string of templates, then they will add their entry with the template which includes having a reference present.

I'd like to get some others thoughts about this proposal. Your comments would be valuable. Thanks. -- Whpq (talk) 18:38, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I support the above proposal. I guess it's in the nature of the 'Years in music' articles that they tend to attract contributions from enthusiastic but less conscientious editors, so some way of reinforcing the need for referencing is needed. Alchemagenta (talk) 11:28, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * That's true. However, I would argue that, where the entry cross-refers to another wikipedia article that is likely to contain the answer, this is just as quick a way of checking the truth as going to an external reference. Deb (talk) 12:43, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
 * One would hope that would be the case, but my experience in working my way through the events of the 1995 in music article was that references are not in abundance, and the events did need specific referencing not available in the main article. -- Whpq (talk) 13:40, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

I wish it were possible to rely on references being available in the cross-referred articles but this is often not the case, as Whpq has identified and anyone who's spent a while with the 'Years in music' articles will have noticed that there are regular occurences of entries for bands being formed or disbanded, albums released and so on, that are not even in the right year. Promoting primary referencing would surely address this. I also think that there is a principle to be maintained that referencing should be a primary aspect of any article even if it's a list, rather than rely on (possible) secondary referencing in linked articles. This may seem pedantic but with the exponential growth of unreferenced articles (see Improving referencing efforts) it's clear that every effort needs to be taken to reinforce referencing as an editorial habit. Alchemagenta (talk) 14:42, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Icon Group International
Just a heads up for those referencing with books. Be aware of books published by Icon Group International. They create computer generated books trawled from other sources including Wikipedia. My thanks to User:Apoc2400 for letting me know about this. -- Whpq (talk) 14:15, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

List of unreffed articles by size
Is there any way of getting a list of BIG articles that are unsourced? It might show where the priorities lie.... UFUU (talk) 21:32, 11 October 2009 (UTC)