Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Unreferenced GA task force

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference.
Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

The Unreferenced GA task force, comprised of editors experienced in WikiProject Good articles, has been created to find articles that are of GA quality, but lack citations and add them so that these articles may qualify for GA status.

Objectives

Promote the use of citations in articles that go to WP:GAN.
Compile a list of GA-class quality articles that need references, then add them.
Encourage giving page numbers when large textbooks are being cited
Develop tools to clean up references
Advocate use of {{cite science}} where appropriate

Participants of this project are also encouraged to actively add references to articles, or prevent them from becoming unreferenced by removal of references. One good way of achieving this is to find competent editors in the edit histories of the articles concerned, or related articles, and contact them to ask their help.

When you feel that the references of an article have been sufficiently improved, and the article has no other serious failings, please feel free to (re)nominate it for WP:GA.

Nominations

Please nominate pages that have been rejected from WP:GAN on the grounds of not being sufficiently well-referenced, on the Nominations page. You may also make direct nominations of articles that have not passed through WP:GAN.

Referencing styles

Example of citing page numbers (citing page numbers is recommended, for easier verification)
An example of Harvard references

Tools

LotLE's Citation Tool

Features

Please feel free to add additional requested features to list.

Diagnose issues related to content in non-first named references.
- ✔ Identify cases where multiple same-named references contain content. In such case, the non-first content will not be rendered by <references/>.
- ✔ Identify cases where an empty named reference occurs before the one (or more) with content, and <references/> renders that note as empty.
- ✔ Propose revision of article source with named reference content in first position. If multiple occurrences have contents, provide a manual choice of which one is the "authentic" note content.
In a user-guided manner, convert m:Cite.php references that look like citations to either Harvard or Label reference templates.
- What's the criterion for "looks like"? Maybe start with ones that are entirely {cite XXX} templates.
- Any better idea of what a citation is (as opposed to a footnote), from a robot perspective?
Create separate "Footnotes" and "References" sections for the two types of notes.
✔ Put the whole thing on a web interface that lets users make the necessary decisions with checkboxes and the like.
- ✔ The final result should be text that a user may copy into an article. I definitely don't want to have some errant bot make bad decisions without human guidance.
Convert bare references (i.e. [http://example.com/page.html]) to full {{cite web}} citation templates by following links and extracting metadata.
Automatically "WebCite" (cache/archive) cited URLs. WebCite has a relatively straightforward XML-based ASP for this, see http://www.webcitation.org/faq. Caching cited URLs with WebCite prevents Link rot and archives a snapshot of the URL an author meant to cite. The cited URL can either be replaced by a WebCite link (which contains the cited URL and caching date, or a unique snapshot ID) (note that this should be done only for new articles, otherwise we can't be sure if the page has been updated or disappeared), or the WebCite link could be added to the originally cited URL.
Identify reference strings that are out of chronology and allow for a quick fix.

Cyde's Ref Converter

Todo

Nominate articles from Category:Former good article nominees and Category:Delisted good articles.

Examples

Geographic information system permalink (IN PROGRESS)
Bird permalink
Tuatara permalink
Insect perm (some general references given, but inline references and page numbers would really help, see Trade and usage of saffron perm)
Nile crocodile permalink (needs cleanup)
Chameleon permalink (not quite GA, but lack of references the most serious failing)

Participants

This page was redesigned at the edge.

A page that knows where it met you.