Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Mass blanking/Task explanation

What is happening
is blanking all of the articles in a list of old biographical articles that don't explicitly cite any good, reliable, sources at all. There are about 1,000 articles in this list.

Why this is happening
This is being done in order to bring all of our older biographies up to the same standards that we require for newly written biographies, and to review old biographies for policy-violating content. As you may or may not know, in the past administrators have taken it upon themselves to simply delete such articles.

Instead, now, we have opted for a process where articles are blanked and the editor community in general is asked to diligently and carefully review those articles that interest them, and bring them up to scratch.

The articles are being blanked. They aren't being deleted. The edit history remains. All that the blanking does is prevent the publication of the contents of these biographies, and their indexing by WWW search engines and re-publication by Wikipedia mirrors, in the meantime before they are reviewed, cleaned up, rewritten from scratch, or otherwise dealt with.

What happens next
What happens next is you. You can help. We want you to help. If you came here because a link to this page turned up in an edit summary on your watchlist, we'd like you to review the articles that you are watching. The idea is that if everyone cleans up even just a few articles, this mountain ends up being moved by a thousand teaspoons all digging together.

Please read the instructions for what to do and help.

Where this was discussed
This has been discussed all over the place, from arbitration cases to the Village Pump, over the past few years. The most recent discussion, that led to this, can be found at Administrators' noticeboard/Unsourced biographies of living persons, where we discussed compromise solutions that would not involve mass deletion but that would instead take advantage of the not inconsiderable power of you, the Wikipedia general editorship, acting in concert.