Wikipedia:WikiProject Sweep

Background
In Wikipedia's early days (very roughly prior to 2010), there were few and ill-defined notability and sourcing standards, leading to the creation of many pages that, by today's standards, should not exist or need extensive cleanup. However, because many of them are on very obscure subjects with few pageviews, they have avoided deletion or tagging with maintenance templates to alert readers about their issues. Under our prior ad hoc approach, we were unable to know how many undiscovered non-notable or otherwise deficient pages remained.

In response to this problem, a WikiProject proposal was made in November 2020, and this project was launched in March 2021.

Stages

 * 1) Build set of articles to be checked
 * 2) Affirm community consensus for the sweep
 * 3) Build tools and templates needed to conduct the sweep
 * 4) Establish process for editors to become sweepers, including criteria and instructions
 * 5) Recruit and motivate sweepers until all articles are swept

Progress
Articles swept: 0 / Unknown

Participants
Add your name to the list at: Participants & News

Templates

 * Swept – box or prefilled talk page section that will indicate that a page has been swept

Resources

 * Database reports/Forgotten articles
 * Special:AncientPages – 100 neglected pages

Related WikiProjects

 * WikiProject Cleanup