Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Darius Dhlomo/Task explanation
What is happening
Uncle G's major work 'bot (talk · contribs) is reverting or blanking all of the articles with significant contributions from Darius Dhlomo (talk · contribs), based upon a list supplied by VernoWhitney (talk · contribs) and a CCI investigation. There are about 25 thousand articles in this list.
Why this is happening
This is being done because, after investigation, it was determined that Darius Dhlomo had been violating copyright on a number of occasions. It turned out that this was happening on quite a large scale, and with a regular pattern. As a consequence, every article that xe has created is now suspect and has to be reviewed for potential copyright infringement. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a huge number of articles, too many for the normal contributor copyright investigation process, where a small number of dedicated editors manually look through a list of a few hundred articles, to scale to. The number of articles to review is over thirteen thousand. A handful of people cannot cope with that amount of work.
Instead, 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 for copyright problems.
The articles are being blanked as a precautionary measure. They aren't being deleted, note. They are being rolled back to the revision just prior to Darius's first edit, or (for the 10,000 or so articles created by Darius himself) completely blanked. The edit history remains. However, we cannot legitimately continue to have Wikipedia publish the text of what we suspect will be a fair number of copyright violations, until we get around to reviewing each article.
Where this was discussed
The contributor copyright investigation case page for Darius Dhlomo can be found here. You will see some discussion there. There was additional discussion at the administrator's noticeboard for incidents, which you can find at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Review of unblock request and discussion of possible community ban, where we tried to come up with a means for managing such a huge investigation.
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 reviews 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.