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Vandalism edit
Unfortunately, not everybody edits Wikipedia in a a good way. When editors make edits that are not appropriate, we call this vandalism. To counter vandalism, there are many tools one can use to revert it, or remove it.
Introduction to vandalism edit
To start off, let's get some background. Wikipedia is, as you have probably figured out by now 
, a wiki, meaning anyone can edit virtually any page. This is both a blessing and a curse, however, as while it does allow a wide range of information to be added and shared, it also allows people with less than benevolent intentions to come in and mess around with stuff. It requires a fair amount of work during every hour of every day to ensure that this vandalism does not run rampant and destroy the project. Fortunately, with a near-endless supply of volunteers across the world, this doesn't really cause a problem. The addition of various tools help aid our cause and make the "reversion", or removal, of vandalism happen within minutes (sometimes seconds).
What we define vandalism as is "an unhelpful or non-constructive edit" to an article or other page. Most commonly, these are pretty blatant - replacing a whole page or section with curse words, simply removing entire sections, and so forth. Occasionally, it's less obvious, like changing key words in a section to completely alter the meaning. Basically, anything that can't be helpful at all to the article should be considered vandalism, however you should always remember to assume good faith for questionable cases.
Special:RecentChanges edit
The most commonly used, and arguably the most critical tool in this respect, is Special:RecentChanges. Recent Changes is a special page that lists every edit made across the project within the last few minutes. You can find a link to it in the toolbar to the left in the "toolbox" section. The page is formatted similarly to a page's history, with a few differences. Here's how a standard entry generally looks:
- (diff) (hist) . . Shigeru Miyamoto; 14:32 . . (+28) . . 201.152.102.192 (Talk) (→Competition with Sony and Microsoft)
So that you can know all the terminology (which in some cases will be used across the site), I'm going to explain what all of this means. Feel free to skip this if you've already clicked the links.
A "diff" is the difference between two revisions. Wikipedia has a special feature that allows you to compare revisions to see exactly what was changed. This is particularly useful when on vandal patrol, as this is the best thing available to tell you if the edit was or was not vandalism. Clicking on the link above will only take you to the help page on diffs, unfortunately, however an actual diff link will bring you to a screen that looks like this one, an actual diff of another article. Content removed appears in red text in a yellow box on the left; content added appears in red text in a green box on the right. The "hist" link will bring you to the page's history. You can click on the "hist" link above to get to the help page for this feature. A page's history lists all edits ever made to a page, something which is required under the terms of the GFDL, Wikipedia's licensing. The next link is the article that the edit was made to. The time stamp will indicate when the edit was made. The time will appear in your time zone, as you have it defined in your Special:Preferences. Note that this is different from signature timestamps, which are always in UTC/GMT time. The green or red number after the timestamp will tell you how much was added or removed to the article in the edit. A green "+" number shows the number of bytes added to the article - a red "-" number indicates the number removed. In general, the number of bytes is equal to the number of characters, however this is not always the case: Certain special characters can contain more than one byte, and templates can completely mess this number up. Templates will be covered in another lesson later on, however you will be using some in your patrols later. This number will be in bold if a very large number of characters were removed, which is usually a good indicator of vandalism. The next part is the name of the user who made the edit, which will link to their user page. In this case, an IP address made the edit, so the link will instead go to their contributions. Since most vandalism comes from these anonymous editors, this serves as another convenience to those on patrol. The user name is followed by a link to their talk page. The last part of a RC report is the edit summary. When editing a section of an article, the title of that section will automatically be included in the edit summary, as you see above. Other special edit summaries include "Replaced page with..." and "Blanked the page". In general, these last two are dead giveaways for vandalism edits, however you will occasionally see an editor blank his own user or user talk page, so be careful about that.
Types of vandalism edit
There are 20 recognized types of vandalism, but the following are the ones you will run into the most frequently. The complete list can be found at WP:VANDTYPES.
- Blanking, illegitimate
- Removing all or significant parts of a page's content without any reason, or replacing entire pages with nonsense. Sometimes referenced information or important verifiable references are deleted with no valid reason(s) given in the summary. However, significant content removals are usually not considered to be vandalism where the reason for the removal of the content is readily apparent by examination of the content itself, or where a non-frivolous explanation for the removal of apparently legitimate content is provided, linked to, or referenced in an edit summary.
- Blanking that could be legitimate includes blanking all or part of a biography of a living person. Wikipedia is especially concerned about providing accurate and unbiased information on the living; blanking may be an effort to remove inaccurate or biased material. Due to the possibility of unexplained good-faith content removal, {{uw-test1}} or {{uw-delete1}}, as appropriate, should be used as initial warnings for content removals without more descriptive edit summaries.
- Page creation, illegitimate
- Creating new pages with the sole intent of malicious behavior. Includes blatant advertising pages, personal attack pages (articles written to disparage the subject), blatant POV pushes, hoaxes and other intentionally inaccurate pages. New users may sometimes create test pages containing nonsense or even autobiographies, and doing so is not vandalism, though such pages are normally speedily deleted. Also, creating a page on a topic that is simply not notable is not vandalism.
- Silly vandalism
- Adding profanity, graffiti, or patent nonsense to pages; creating nonsensical and obviously unencyclopedic pages, etc. However, the addition of random characters to pages is often characteristic of an editing test and, though impermissible, may not be malicious.
- Talk page vandalism
- Illegitimately deleting or editing other users' comments. However, it is acceptable to blank comments constituting vandalism, internal spam, or harassment or a personal attack. It is also acceptable to identify an unsigned comment. Users are also permitted to remove comments from their own user talk pages. A policy of prohibiting users from removing warnings from their own talk pages was considered and rejected on the grounds that it would create more issues than it would solve.
- User and user talk page vandalism
- Unwelcome, illegitimate edits to another person's user page may be considered vandalism. User pages are regarded as within the control of their respective users and, with certain exceptions, should not be edited without permission of the user to whom they belong. See WP:UP#OWN. Related is Wikipedia:No personal attacks.
Undoing vandalism edit
Undoing vandalism is fairly simple. When you see something in recent changes that could be vandalism, click on the diff link. You will then see two columns. The one on the left will be yellow, while the one on the right will be green. If the one on the left is vandalism, click on a link to the side of the green sections heading that says (undo). Check carefully before undoing an edit, though, because some edits that appear to be vandalism are not vandalism. I must warn you that you will find some cases of vandalism that will offend you. Don't take it seriously.
Homework edit
Go to Special:RecentChanges and find five places where there is vandalism. If you find vandalism, undo it. Pay extra attention to IP edits, for vandalism is done almost exclusively by IPs. Try to be very lenient on sort of bad new pages (these will be distinguishable in Recent Changes by the giant N next to the entry). If you don't see three examples of vandalism in one set of recent changes, just refresh the page and look for some. Please tell me the names of the pages you cleaned up on my talk page, as well as why they are considered vandalism. Good luck! pluma Ø 02:48, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
