His main achievement was as a cataloguer of manuscript collections. The rich Syriac holdings of the British Museum (now in the British Library) were mainly obtained in the 1840s from the monastery of Deir al'Syriani in the Nitrian desert in Egypt and contained a large number of previously unknown texts. Wright's catalogue included excerpts from unpublished texts, and is still a valuable reference even today. He also compiled a similarly valuable catalogue of the Cambridge University Library collection. The manuscripts in this collection came mainly from Anglican Missionaries based at Urmiah.