Saying that the Aral Sea might "recover" is slightly misleading. The North Aral Sea is about 5% of the size of the Aral Sea as a whole. It's like saying that the whole of the US sank into the ocean except for Wyoming and Utah, but it might recover.

Really? I would say that is not the case based on my experience with Wikipedia. Having just done a rough count of those articles in the articles lacking sources category, roughly 4% of all wikipedia articles are tagged as having no sources. And using an admittedly small sample of 20 random articles (discarding the disambiguation pages), only five were sourced - and that's including three stubs with one source apiece. I'm sure YMMV with that standard, however, as I came across 2 articles in the aforementioned category, which would be a disproportionally large.