User:WhatamIdoing/WPMED all sourced

Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine, one of the most active groups of editors, would like to share good news: Every {{Unreferenced}} article tagged by the group has been addressed. This is the first time in the group's long history that we have seen zero unreferenced articles in our searches.

Like the broader community, we have been working for years to reduce the number of within the group's scope, and like the broader community, the backlog has been steadily declining. Five years ago, we had about 500 articles to go. In November 2024, we realized that we were down to about 135 articles, and we decided to get the job done. Here's what we did:

Put selected lists on the group's talk page, and ask everyone to help out. Aim for something that's not too long and not too homogeneous, so everyone has a chance to help out.
Keep a central list, and advertise it through any newsletter or other group communication channel you use. This doesn't have to be fancy. In our case, Ajpolino made a list in his userspace. We updated the list via PetScan every now and again (example of PetScan query). If you don't want to maintain a list directly, then try https://bambots.brucemyers.com/cwb/index.html Once your group has signed up, the Bambots list automatically updates once a week.
Invite newcomers to help. Find newer editors who have been editing articles within your group's scope. I occasionally run a script to get a list of new names, but you can do this by looking in article histories or with Special:RecentChangesLinked on a list of key articles. Adding a source is something that many newcomers can do, so instead of inviting them to just join the WikiProject, invite them to help with this specific project. Be sure to check back to see if they did, and click the thanks button when they help out!
Identify interdisciplinary subjects, and ask related WikiProjects to help. We got help from other projects, including Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals. The last handful were quickly solved by Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles.

One thing we didn't do is keep track of who helped out. A contest format would let you do a better job of tracking participation, and tracking would let you thank people individually afterwards. For example, I know that 23impartial and Iztwoz steadily chipped away at the list for months, because I happened to see many of their edits, but I don't know how many people contributed to this goal in previous years or how many articles each editor addressed. What I do know is that I'm really happy to have this backlog down to ordinary maintenance mode, and that I appreciate every person who helped, whether in big ways or small, so that WikiProject Medicine could reach this milestone. Thank you!

WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:33, 8 March 2025 (UTC)