Source-a-thon is a Wikipedia developmental concept coined by User:Encyclopædius in March 2020. It refers to a contest/editathon in which rather than individual articles being the primary focus, the focus is on improving the number and consistency of inline sources and verifying the material. The idea is to run a contest/editathon and reward the editors who verify the most claims in a given period, typically 10 days to 2 weeks.

Goals[edit]

Goals of this development concept are as follows:

To run a series of contests/editathons dedicated entirely to improving sourcing and verification in articles.
With each contest aim to add a minimum of 5,000 or more sources to existing Wikipedia articles.
Primarily target articles for a given area or topic tagged as unsourced or needing more sources for verification, though sources can be added to any article with unsourced claims needing citations even if only one or two.
Any article of a given area or topic may be targeted but to place weight on fully sourcing core or important articles as well as all other articles.
To strongly encourage "nuking" all claims which can't be verified. With higher profile/core articles to encourage editors to remove material which cannot be easily verified and replace it with clean, well-sourced material. This practice overlaps with the "de-bloat-athon" concept but may be a necessity to improve sourcing and overall quality.
There is no minimum number of sources required per article, meaning that potentially minor improvements could be brought about to thousands of articles.
To avoid reference "bunching" to verify the same claims.
The ultimate goal is to remove the ugly "sources needed" or "citation needed" tags from articles, though all sources for unverified claims are welcome.
Editors simply list the articles they edited and the number of sources added to each.

Contests[edit]

Wikipedia:The Great Britain and Ireland Source-athon
Wikipedia:The European Source-athon
Wikipedia:The Great Wikipedia Source-athon - a big contest targeting any article needing sources and verification on Wikipedia.

v t e The Challenge series
Concepts: De-bloat-athon, De-stub-athon, Source-athon
The 50,000 Challenge	United States: Northeast Pacific Northwest California/Nevada
The 10,000 Challenge	UK and Ireland Europe Africa Asia India Latin America Oceania Canada
Destubbing	The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge The 1000 Destubbing Football Challenge The Great Britain and Ireland Destubathon (March 2020) The Africa Destubathon (October–November 2016)
Other	The 5000 Challenge (Australia) The 1000 Challenge (Nepal) (completed) The 2500 Challenge (Nordic) (extended) The 1000 Challenge (Turkey) (completed) The 1000 Challenge (video games) (completed) Awaken the Dragon (Wales) and The Anglesey-Gwynedd Challenge (April–June 2016) The West Country Challenge (August 2016) The Months of African Cinema Edit-a-thon (October–November 2018) WikiChallenge Venezuela The World Contest (November 2017)