Welcome to the WikiProject Unreferenced Articles November 2026 backlog drive! In the days leading up to the drive, there were nearly 37,000 articles in the total unreferenced article backlog, including 32,000 articles tagged as entirely without references on Wikipedia.
Our goals for this drive are fivefold:
Add inline citations to at least X,XXX unreferenced articles
Bring the total backlog to below XX,XXX articles (stretch goal)
Reducing the number of unsourced articles improves the quality of Wikipedia as a whole, verifying accurate information in articles and helping to remove the inaccurate.
The referencing portion of the drive will run from November 1, 00:00 UTC until December 1, 23:59 UTC. Only submissions made in this period will be counted. The review period of the drive extended until December 7, 23:59 UTC to allow time for additional reviews.
No points for simply listing references in a section.
To keep this drive focused, no points for adding additional citations to one article, though editors are encouraged to do so whenever possible.
Primary sources are permitted so long as they are only used to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts. Please see WP:PRIMARY.
If the article is not fully supported by the new reference, add {{citation needed}} as needed.
0.5 points for reviewing submissions of the drive. See more at /Reviews.
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.
By search term: go to the search bar and type [search term] incategory:"All articles lacking sources".
By WikiProject: go to Bambot's WikiProject Cleanup Listings, find the project name and click "by cat", then scroll to find the category "Cites no sources".
By category: use WP:PetScan to find the intersection between "All articles lacking sources" and a chosen category by entering both in "Categories" on separate lines, without the "Category:" part.
By category or WikiProject, and popularity: use the pre-canned queries in Petscan filtering by category or WikiProject, or create Petscan queries of your own following this user-friendly guide – and even organize the output by popularity (or other criteria).
If at least one reliable source is found, follow these steps:
Cite it inline. Be sure to include all the needed citation data including the title, date, and author/publisher (see WP:CITE). Page numbers and ISBN are strongly recommended wherever present. Place the citation after the punctuation, with no space.
Add {{reflist}} and ==References== if not yet present (see MOS:ORDER).
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.
This is a lot to take in. And worse, sometimes you won't be able to find a source that meets these criteria! 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.
Books not under editorial control, print-on-demand, or self-published from groups such as Lulu.com, AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, Xlibris, PediaPress, etc. (tip: search Wikipedia for the publisher's name)
The {{Unreferenced}} template placed at the top of unreferenced pages contains many search links pre-filled with the article topic (and configured to exclude other Wikipedia articles).
On Google and some other search engines:
Use "" (double quotes) to search for the term exactly. This means that "pinnochio" should only show pages containing "pinnochio", not pinocchio (but note that sometimes quotes are disregarded and the wrong term is shown anyway).
Use - (dash) to exclude pages containing unwanted terms, e.g. -wikipedia.
Some articles, especially for more general topics, might have sources available with slightly different wording, e.g. "basketweaving" vs "basket weaving", "basket weaver", etc.
Search millions of old and new books at Google Books and Archive.org. For Archive.org, go to https://archive.org/search, click the search bar, then click the "search text contents" radio button to search inside over 10 million books.
Access to some pay-walled content, including academic journals, Newspapers.com and ProQuest, is provided to editors via The Wikipedia Library.
Check for sources in related articles on Wikipedia but do not simply copy the reference. Only after you've checked that the source is reliable and does indeed verify the text, you may use the citation.
Reading and parsing sources
Use the text searching feature to locate what you are looking for faster, such as Ctrl+F on Windows or ⌘ Cmd+F on macOS.
Translation for reading:
You can use machine translation, either at a website or as built in to your web browser. However, these translations may be rough and should not be used indiscriminately in Wikipedia.
To translate text that cannot be copied, for example on Google Books, you can take a screenshot of a passage and upload the image to Google Translate.
Processing articles
While you're there, you could expand the article with new information from your reliable sources, or clean up or tag other problems you find.
Twinkle might be helpful for cleaning up article banners and nominating articles for deletion
If you are familiar with AWB/JWB, you can use it to quickly add a "References" section and {{reflist}} template.
Popular articles
The list below contains some popular unreferenced articles. They are taken from Massviews analysis at Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS). Please remove entries once references have been added. This section will be updated regularly.
