User:Cyphoidbomb/Marhc Vandal

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Overview[edit]

The Marhc Vandal has been active since at least April 2014. They seem most into adding extraneous dates (2015), submitting fake categories, corrupting formatting, and other numerical vandalism. The vandal's disruption is focused almost exclusively on the genre of children's television. It is unclear if they are a human, or a bot. They tend to use edit summaries that generally differ from one another in subtle ways, although they do re-use edit summaries. Most of their edit summaries contain either a month, a year, a combination of month and year, or some corrupted version of a month or year, like Marhc 20157. For lack of another reason to name them, their misspelling of March as Marhc is why I call them the Marhc vandal. The vandal has also been referred to as the "(2015) vandal" because they often append "(2015)" to article content, like here.

Behavioral traits[edit]

Often uses edit summaries that contain years, (2014, 2015) sometimes well into the future, (2019) sometimes butchered (20119). User also sometimes combines months and years like March 20157, and they often misspell March as Marhc.[1][2][3][4]. Sometimes other words appear in their summary, like Mashed, Mahesh, or Mane instead of March. Blanking, category additions not supported by article prose that are in many cases completely wrong. [5][6] Vandal tends to focus in the world of children's television and they have been active since at least April 2014.

User also tends to append "(2015)" randomly in articles.[7][8] and I've seen indications of the vandal changing days like Saturday to "monday-friday", often in lowercase, like here and here. At times, though rarely, the vandal has been observed making apparently valid and constructive edits.

(My edit history with Marhc tags)

There is also an Elmhurst/Astoria/Jackson Heights/Jamaica New York based IP vandal that does category vandalism, for example 108.6.108.129 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) but it is unclear if they are related. This vandal doesn't usually employ edit summaries.

IPs used[edit]

Articles affected[edit]

The vast majority of the vandal's targets are articles on children's television programs. Recent examples of heavy attacks include:

and more...

Examples in the past include:

Admin interventions[edit]

If IPs are observed clearly displaying these behaviors, please report to Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism and supply a link to this page. Alternatively, many editors have recently chosen to report the vandal at User talk:Materialscientist. It is here where the name "(2015) vandal" is often used in the section heading [15]. User:Materialscientist is familiar with the vandal and has issued several blocks in the past, sometimes extremely quickly. If MS is online, this is the quickest and most effective way to handle it.

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