Category talk:Articles lacking sources

This category was nominated for deletion. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination:

undelete, August 20, 2006, see discussion.
delete, July 21, 2006, see discussion.

This category was nominated for deletion on 8 September 2009. The result of the discussion was keep.

Question[edit]

Shouldn't this be Category:Articles that lack sources? "Which" should be preceded by a comma... ugen 64 03:44, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes, indeed it should. See Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language/FAQs for an explanation of "which" and "that". Zeromacnoo 17:10, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Decategorisation[edit]

How do you remove an article from this category once references have been added?--shtove 09:28, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You can simply remove the {{unreferenced}}, {{Unsourced}} and/or {{Primarysources}} tag in the article. --Hurricane111 00:29, 2 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I added a further reading section to the article Lz x-ray. The book I added is a source that can verify the entire article, but I wasn't sure if that was the proper way to source the article, so I did not remove the tag. Can a more experienced editor please take a look at it, and remove the tag if appropriate? I also created a talk page. Crockspot 00:32, 30 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Record Label Citations[edit]

How do you cite sources for a record label that has no sources other than the records themselves? I made a page for a record label but there is just scattered info online about it and I made the page just from the records i own. I just took from the record label number on the LPs themselves.

Renaming category[edit]

Has anyone given thought to renaming this category? I noticed that our featured article today (Lothal) has lots of footnotes sprinkled throughout, but at the bottom of the page is "Articles lacking sources". It doesn't "lack sources" - it would simply be even better if a source was found for a particular statement.

Suggestions:

Articles needing more sources
Articles with unsourced statements

Stevage 08:11, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking along the same lines as you were and was trying to come up with a good category name when I found your comment. So I stole Category:Articles with unsourced statements :) Articles that contain {{Citation needed}} (or its many redirects) now point to Category:Articles with unsourced statements, while those containing {{Unsourced}} (or its many redirects) continue pointing to this category. —Seqsea (talk) 05:28, 9 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We might need more than one template for different situations. Besides the above, I think a good one might be "Articles lacking reliable sources". I put articles in this category sometimes if their sources are things like blogs or personal websites (such sources may be appropriate, but are usually not). -- Kjkolb 12:57, 6 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Deletionism vs cleanup and cite, facing (Judaism) articles ==[edit]

Hi, I have just place the following on the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Judaism. Thank you. IZAK 09:55, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Shalom to everyone: There is presently a very serious phenomenon on Wikipedia that effects all articles. Let's call it "The New Deletionism". There are editors on Wikipedia who want to cut back the number of "low quality" articles EVEN IF THEY ARE ABOUT NOTABLE TOPICS AND SUBJECTS by skipping the normal procedures of placing {{cleanup}} or {{cite xxx}} tags on the articles' pages and instead wish to skip that process altogether and nominate the articles for a vote for deletion (VfD). This can be done by any editor, even one not familiar with the subject. The implication/s for all articles related to Jews, Judaism, and Israel are very serious because many of these articles are of a specilaized nature that may or may not be poorly written yet have important connections to the general subjects of Jews, Judaism, and Israel, as any expert in that subject would know.

Two recent examples will illustrate this problem:

1) See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zichron Kedoshim, Congregation where a notable Orthodox synagogue was deleted from Wikipedia. The nominator gave as his reason: "Scarce material available on Google, nor any evidence in those results of notability nor any notable size." Very few people voted and only one person objected correctly that: "I've visited this synagogue, know members, and know that it is a well established institution" which was ignored and the article was deleted. (I was unaware of the vote).

2) See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Berel Wein where the nominator sought to delete the article about Rabbi Berel Wein because: "It looks like a vanity project to me. While he does come up with many Google hits, they are all commercial in nature. The article is poorly written and reads like a commercial to me." In the course of a strong debate the nominator defended his METHOD: "... what better way to do that than put it on an AfD where people who might know more about the subject might actually see it and comment rather than slapping a {{NPOV}} and {{cleanup}} template on and waiting for someone to perhaps come across it." But what if no-one noticed it in time and it would have gone the same way as "Congregation Zichron Kedoshim"? Fortunately, people noticed it, no-one agreed with the nominator and the article was kept.

As we all know Googling for/about a subject can determine its fate as an article, but this too is not always a clear-cut solution. Thus for example, in the first case, the nominator saw almost nothing about "Congregation Zichron Kedoshim" on Google (and assumed it was unimportant) whereas in the second case the nominator admitted that Berel Wein "does come up with many Google hits" but dismissed them as "all commercial in nature". So in one case too few Google hits was the rationale for wanting to delete it and in the other it was too many hits (which were dismissed as "too commercial" and interpreted as insignificant), all depending on the nominators' POV of course.

This problem is compounded because when nominators don't know Hebrew or know nothing about Judaism and its rituals then they are at a loss, they don't know variant transliterated spellings, and compounding the problem even more Google may not have any good material or sources on many subjects important to Jewish, Judaic, and Israeli subjects. Often Judaica stores may be cluttering up the search with their tactics to sell products or non-Jewish sites decide to link up to Biblical topics that appear "Jewish" but are actually missionary sites luring people into misinformation about the Torah and the Tanakh, so while Googling may yield lots of hits they may mostly be Christian-oriented and even be hostile to the Judaic perspective.

Therefore, all editors and contributors are requested to be aware of any such attempts to delete articles that have a genuine connection to any aspect of Jews, Judaism and Israel, and to notify other editors.

Please, most importantly, place alerts here in particular so that other editors can be notified.

Thank you for all your help and awareness. IZAK 08:43, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This may be a problem but I seriously don't think it's ONLY for articles about Judaism. --Liface 22:55, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. And I don't see why it had to be posted here, anyway. wikipediatrix 15:09, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Everyone has an axe to grind; it is just that sometimes, those axes are ground on other people. <shrug>

→ P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 22:30, 13 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Canna 'Roi Humbert'[edit]

All material is cited from Dr Koshoos papers, which are referenced. There is no original research. Why say it is lacking sources?

The question is, rather- why are you asking *here* rather than at the article's discussion page?

→ P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 22:31, 13 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

References v See also and External links[edit]

I have just started getting involved in this project and would like to know where I can read up on a Definition of sources as I feel some articles have been unfairly targeted, two very different examples are [[Anal Sex]] which was brimming with references I left an entry on the talk page asking for feedback. The other was [[List of congenital disorders]] which has been listed since December 2005 I simply removed that and gave my reasons on the talk page, which in a nutshell are that in a list of that nature all the citations to establish it on that list should be in the article. It seems that some articles are targeted simply because the sources are provided but not numbered under the reference section, which means the tagger has seen what appears to be an unvalidated statement and simply tagged it because of the editing style. I have a preference for numbered references as it makes it easier to do follow up research, however both styles are acceptable--Matt 12:17, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Articles lacking sources[edit]

I am probably going to be sorry I brought this up,(deep breath) ok, here goes. It would seem kind of pointless to use {{unreferenced}} for article with absolutely no references and {{More sources}} or {{Refimprove}} for those that are poorly sourced if they all place article in the same category. As it happens {{Refimprove}} puts articles into Category:Articles lacking reliable references, so perhaps Category:Articles lacking sources should be limited to {{unreferenced}} and everything else like {{primarysources}} should go to Category:Articles lacking reliable references. Jeepday (talk) 13:23, 13 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I too noticed this. The category tag at the bottom seems to imply that the references already provided within the article are unreliable - which is absolutely not automatically the case, or the intent of the template! MadMaxDog 10:50, 25 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I made this comment on Template_talk:Unreferenced#Category:Articles_lacking_sources also which lead to a discussion at Template_talk:Unreferenced#Project_Proposal which lead to the project Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles. We made changes, and have a new project with the goal to ensure that articles meet at least the barest minimum of verifiability, by including at least one reference. Articles templates are changed to {{Refimprove}}, {{Primarysources}} and {{rs}} as appropriate to put the article in Category:Articles lacking reliable references. Jeepday (talk) 12:28, 25 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I really really hate this category[edit]

This category is outrageous and ridiculous as a category that goes on article pages. It totally clutters up the category space, and thus detracts attention from the categories that relate to the subject of the article, rather than to the state of the article. In general, I think that categories in the main space should relate only to the subject of the article, but this particular group of categories is really bad, especially since one message seems to add two or three categories to the thing. "Arizona" is not an "Article lacking sources". It is a state of the United States. The Wikipedia article about Arizona is the article lacking sources, and any categories relating to wikipedia articles, rather than to their subjects, ought to be in talk space. In general, the existence of messages on the article itself makes sense, since it warns the reader about potential problems with the article, but that's no reason to put a category there. And this particular message, even, is highly dubious - look at the absurd number of articles in these categories. Almost every article that's not a featured article could be put in these categories. What's the point? john k 17:57, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

{{unreferenced}} puts articles in this category so that editors working projects like Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles and Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check can find the articles and clean them up so that all the information in the article is verified. An article does not have to be FA quality to be referenced, A stub like Yelm-Tenino Trail can be short and well referenced. You may also notice that there are three sentences directly under the edit box where a an editor enters text the second is "Encyclopedic content must be verifiable", all editors are encouraged to remove articles from the category Articles lacking sources, by first adding references or removing unreferenced text then removing the tag. I do hear what your saying, and maybe the solution is to make clean up categories hidden so they don't display on the article, and or only display on the talk page. You could make the argument that clean up categories are generally only followed from the wikipedia space rather then the main space, so there is no need to offer them as paths from the article. Jeepday (talk) 23:21, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Of course you are right that I was exaggerating. Nonetheless, I do continue to think that this category is too large to be of much use. But that wasn't really my main point. If people want to have categories like this, that's fine. They just shouldn't be on the main article space - they ought to be on the talk page. Categories which are useful for readers ought to be in main space. Categories which are useful for editors ought to be in talk space. It is arguably useful to the reader to be reminded that an article isn't referenced. It is not useful to the reader for the article to be in an "unreferenced articles category - that is entirely for editors. The main name space ought to be for the convenience of readers, not editors. john k 00:11, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you about your two main points, this category would do better if it was listed on the talk page (or not at all) and that the template should (arguably) be on the article (main space). I think if you proposed that the category not post in the main space, by whatever method is technically possible and still allows the category to populate so it can be worked, you would find support. The category is large but is not to large to be useful as evidenced by the many articles that are clean up daily. Are you up to doing the research to see what is possible? Jeepday (talk) 01:57, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a short story for you: Last year I had made some changes to a kind of articles. After some days I've checked what changes were made since my edits. One article -only a stub of two sentences- had this very annoying {{unreferenced}} box (it was larger than the article text). I was pretty much upset and have added some sources but haven't removed the template since I wanted to know how long it takes till it gets removed. Guess what, it's still there.
This template and its categories are placed pretty much evereywere but I have the bad feeling there aren't really that much people who actively search for sources. Even Category:Articles lacking sources from June 2006 (as the oldest one) has more than 20 pages with 200 entries each. Having no sources is bad, I agree. But having such a template/categories is not really better as long as there aren't any serious projects and/or larger numbers of people who actively search for sources. --87.234.92.104 05:14, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The project Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles is working with the goal to ensure that articles meet at least the barest minimum of verifiability, by including at least one reference The project began on 16 May, 2007 working on articles in Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2005. In less then one month it cleared 6 months of backlog and since May 26, 2007 has helped to clear 18% of Category:Articles lacking sources from June 2006. There are also projects working from Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check with more robust goals. The back log for working {{Unreferenced}} is about a year. Please join us at Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles or one of the other projects at Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check. Jeepday (talk) 12:56, 14 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Even in the first flush of enthusiasm things are moving at a pace which supports the assumption that this backlog will never be cleared. There needs to be a complete rethink to enable resources to be deployed to the more important articles. Spraying these unreferenced tag over hundreds of thousands of articles just isn't worthwhile. Perebourne 16:04, 5 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a suggestion (that is compatible with Wikipedia policy)? Jeepday (talk) 01:38, 6 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

First, I'd move all the categories to the talk page, where they won't get in the way of navigation. Secondly, once on the talk pages (not before, or the clutter will get even worse), they could be subdivided by topic, by country, by era etc. Then a facility to sort by number of edits and/or number of incoming links and/or article rating could be added to the software. With these two features combined, it would be possible for editors to focus on the highest profile articles in each field. Perebourne 11:40, 8 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Moving this (and other project categories) to talk (or hiding them on the article) has been mentioned here before. I am not aware of any opposition to making that change. Would you like to lead the drive to make it happen? Jeepday (talk) 14:37, 8 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I'll be the first to voice opposition. Articles without any sources are the worst sort of articles on Wikipedia. When the {{Unreferenced}} tag is at the very top of the article, everyone knows that the article should not be trusted at all, that the content may not be encyclopedic, that it may be original research, that it may be factually wrong in obvious or non-obvious ways, ... and that the bad article is not in any way a representation of what Wikipedia should be because the article does not comply with the most basic Wikipedia policies. The tag will also encourage people who are knowledgable enough to add sources to the article. — Chris Capoccia ^T⁄_C 20:35, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Perennial proposals. Rich Farmbrough, 21:57, 22 December 2009 (UTC).[reply]

Slight change to Unreferenced template being discussed[edit]

There's a proposal to slightly change the Unreferenced template, so that when people use {{unreferenced|section}}, it will do the same thing as {{unreferencedsection}}, adding an article to Category:Articles needing additional references rather than Category:Articles lacking sources. Discussion here: Template_talk:Unreferenced#Section_parameter, proposal here: Template_talk:Unreferenced#Section_parameter:_specific_proposal. -Agyle 23:59, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Bot-created category[edit]

There is an ongoing discussion at CSD about Category:Articles lacking sources (Erik9bot) which is a bot-created category for all articles lacking sources (criteria here). It seems to indicate that the 104k or so articles listed there are not included in this category structure. Since User:Erik9bot is not going to be doing any more, and User:Rich Farmbrough is currently going through it, I would wonder about renaming it to Category:Articles lacking sources (bot identified) or something similar and incorporating it into this general project. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 08:38, 14 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Since User:Rich Farmbrough is working through them, and has reduced their number from 140,000+ to around 104,000, I propose to let him work undisturbed. No need to change the name of this category. Debresser (talk) 13:18, 14 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

December 2009[edit]

lol. Why does December 2009 have close to 100,000 unreferenced articles whereas all the other years have around 5,000? Devourer09 15:49, 7 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I can think of two potential reasons. The first is, that month just happens to be a time period where a huge number of IPs and new users went and created a bunch of articles (without any sources, clearly). The other possibility is that the other months did happen to have a bunch like that, but they were steadily removed as they were sourced and, for some reason, people stayed away from working on the articles on that specific month.

It's probably a combination of both of those and some other factors as well. Silver seren^C 15:54, 7 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. I was thinking something along the lines of a massive influx of users as well. Perhaps Wikipedia is growing exponentially. When the end of 2010 rolls around we'll see how the stats look. But there could be the trend that people are starting to source material more regularly. Food for thought. Devourer09 (t·c) 19:04, 7 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, we would have to factor in the new policy of deleting BLP's that don't have any sources. If they're deleted, they won't end up in this category, so our numbers could be underrated for what was actually made and subsequently deleted. Silver seren^C 19:22, 7 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a yearly database dump or something that started last year? I don't think your "new users" or "avoidance" ideas would cause a jump that large. Maybe something like that would cause a jump of around 2,000 or so but not 95,000! The fact that it happened at the end of the year rather than in another part of the year also suggests it was something preplanned. EDIT: Also, try looking at what's actually in the list for that month. Do a number of articles from that month have more than one "Unreferenced" template? Do a number of articles follow some sort of pattern? Are there a number of false positives? These may also point to it being the work of a bot. --vgmddg (look | talk | do) 18:10, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There was a bot that went through that month and tagged every page it could find without a references section. That is where that big pile comes form. - SimonP (talk) 15:38, 14 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Group Articles by Type[edit]

Can we please find a way to group the articles by type (i.e. articles about songs, articles about individual sports, etc.)? We should still keep date sorting intact, but make a separate subcategory for these categories. Once we do that we should make a bot that will categorize articles based on the categories it already has and/or based on manually input relationships between names and subjects (i.e. If the title has the word "Football" in it, then it probably has something to do with sports). This way, people who are good at finding sources for a particular subject (i.e. Sports) can do so without having to root around through the 280,000 other unreferenced articles. I've noticed a few subject-based subcategories have popped up, but these are mostly set up by individual WikiProjects, and as a result are not nearly comprehensive enough. We need a separate standardized subcategory that is at least partially added to by bot.--vgmddg (look | talk | do) 19:34, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Unreferenceable articles[edit]

Maybe I'm alone here, but I have come across articles that are virtually impossible to find a reference for. There are some articles about subjects that no third party has written a report, news article or book about. Sometimes I just leave it and move on, but I feel a bit guilty about it. But seeing some of these go back to 2006, it's likely they haven't been moved off the list because there are just no references. Just because someone wrote about something at WP doesn't translate into a guaranteed availability of refs. --THE FOUNDERS INTENT ^PRAISE 14:26, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, hello, does anyone else work here? *crickets* --THE FOUNDERS INTENT ^PRAISE 15:35, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is not the best place to raise such a question. Try the Village Pump. You might also want to look at WP:PROD which provides a mechanism for dealing with such articles. Note that one reason for deletion is "Articles for which thorough attempts to find reliable sources to verify them have failed".--agr (talk) 15:47, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are so many places to bring this up it's hard to know which is the best. --THE FOUNDERS INTENT ^PRAISE 16:10, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly Referenced Articles[edit]

Hello! I've done a scan of all pages in Category:Articles lacking sources and it's subcats that have {{reflist}} in them. There are a little over 25k articles in that list. It may be worth a quick look to see if the unreferenced tag is still needed on these articles. (Note: This does require a human eye, rather than a bot, as sometimes there is a {{reflist}} even when there are no references.) This list is at User:Avicennasis/reports/unref

Hopefully this is helpful. If you have any comments/suggestions, let me know. ^Avic_ennasis @ 22:43, 10 Adar I 5771 / 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Yea, I've been poking my nose in there from time to time looking to see if anything can be improved. A good time-waster if nothing else. :) ArcAngel (talk) ) 06:57, 15 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

New proposal[edit]

Hello, I've made a proposal, essentially that the software would prompt you to add your source before it lets you save an article in mainspace. Please consider offering feedback at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 24#Changes to article creation. Thanks, Boleyn (talk) 15:00, 28 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Split off monthly subcats and subject subcats[edit]

What do people think of the idea of moving the monthly subcategories (like Category:Articles lacking sources from September 2017‎) under a new Category:Articles lacking sources by date (or "…by month") subcategory, and the subject-area subcategories (like Category:Unreferenced album articles, etc.) under a new Category:Articles lacking sources by subject (or "…by topic")? As can be seen in the category itself, the list of monthly subcats will continue to grow without bound, while the subject-area subcats will be relegated to a less and less noticeable position—especially as the number of monthly subcats nears 200, which will start to push the subject subcats completely off the page [behind a "(next page)" link]. In contrast, having a very small number of direct subcats will make them all equally noticeable "forever". Comments? - dcljr (talk) 20:14, 14 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion of interest - Bot proposal[edit]

Hi all, the discussion here may be of interest to anyone watching this page. Cheers! Ajpolino (talk) 17:45, 14 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]