Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Article Cleanup/Guidelines

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These guidelines are currently under construction.

[edit] Experts: Use caution

Sometimes an editor will add massive amounts of information to an article on a subject they consider themselves to be experts, or at least knowledgeable, on. Whilst these kinds of contributions can be constructive, there is a tendency for editors to use their expertise in lieu of references.

Try to remember that a piece of information you, as an expert, may consider to be trivial, might not be so trivial to a non-expert. Avoid falling into the trap of "I don't need to reference this because I know it's right".

Nobody, for one moment, would question the contribution of experts to the encyclopedia, but if you find yourself getting tired of referencing statements you consider to be trivial, take a break! Work on something else for a while to allow yourself time to "get back in the zone". A short, referenced article is of more academic value than a large, unreferenced one.

[edit] Use web archiving services

When citing information from a website, use an archive service such as WebCite to create a permanent copy of the page being cited. This has two main advantages:

  • If the website ever goes offline, the cited source will still be accessible through the archive.
  • The archived content remains the same, even if the content of the original page changes.

The cite web template has archiveurl and archivedate parameters just for this purpose. If you are using a citation template which doesn't currently use these parameters, include them anyway, since they may make use of them in future.

[edit] Can't find web references?

If you can't find any references on the web, then here are some steps you can take:

  1. Does it seem likely that the article has references in print media, such as books? If not, then WP:PROD or WP:AFD using WP:VERIFIABILITY.
  2. Otherwise, check the talk page to see if there are any related WikiProjects.
  3. If there are, leave a message on the project talk page asking for someone to provide some references.
  4. If there are no responses after a reasonable (~2 weeks) time frame, reduce the article to only the information you can reference.
  5. If there is little to no information you can reference, WP:AFD.
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