"Removed per WP:BLP — unsourced, contentious, living person." That edit summary needs no discussion behind it, no waiting period, and no permission from anyone editing the page. The person who wrote it does not have to justify the removal unless someone reverts it — and reverting it without a solid source is treated as the violation, not the removal.
Everywhere else on Wikipedia, the default runs the other way. Under the ordinary sourcing rule, content stays until someone bothers to challenge it; the burden then falls on whoever wants it restored. Biographies of living people work under the opposite presumption. An unsourced or weakly sourced claim that could embarrass, endanger, or otherwise harm a living subject can be pulled on sight, by any editor, on the article page and on its talk page alike, before any conversation about it starts.
The mechanism shows up constantly in practice. A logistics executive's biography picked up a paragraph one afternoon asserting he was 'under investigation,' cited to a forum post quoting an unnamed tipster. A patroller who had never touched the page before stripped it within four hours, citing BLP in the edit summary. No deletion discussion, no request for comment — one editor's read of the sourcing carried the page.
Contentious material about a living person that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion.
The rule runs in both directions. An unsourced sentence claiming a founder 'revolutionized' an entire industry gets removed with the same speed as an unsourced accusation, because BLP judges a claim purely on its sourcing. Editors who invoke it selectively — stripping only the unflattering material while leaving unsourced praise untouched — draw scrutiny of their own; the policy exists to protect the subject's accuracy, and comfort was never part of the bargain.
For anyone managing a living client's page, this is real leverage, used narrowly. A genuinely unsourced or poorly sourced contentious claim can be removed on sight, with a citation to the policy in the edit summary. A pattern of removals that only ever target unflattering-but-sourced material looks nothing like BLP enforcement, and administrators who patrol these pages know the difference on first read.
The exception exists because Wikipedia treats errors about a living person as a different order of mistake than errors about a defunct company or a historical event — one that a week-long discussion is too slow to fix. It buys a subject nothing beyond the removal of what should never have gone up. Nothing here rewrites the record; it only keeps unsupported claims off it while a proper source, or its absence, gets sorted out.
