User:TheQ Editor/Adopt/Vandalism

Wikipedia is, as you know, 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 even seconds).

Vandalism and Good Faith

Vandalism

What we define vandalism as is "an edit which is delibrately attempting to harm the encyclopedia" 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 was done purposely to harm the article is considered vandalism, however you should always remember to assume good faith for questionable cases.

Good Faith

Remember that a lot of users are new and does not know the Wikipedia guidelines yet. So they might be thinking that they are being helpful but the other way around. Please try to always assume good faith. For example, test edits, section blanking, unencyclopedia edits are all considered Good Faith. See What vandalism is not for the complete list. However, if the action repeats 3 or more times and has already being given warnings, you can safely announce bad faith.

How to Revert

It's all very simple. All you have to do is open up the difference of the bad edit and the good edit. Click the undo button and all you have to do is click Save! But, just a reminder. If you are reverting something that is not vandalism, please note that in the edit summary. (such as this one.)

Twinkle

Well, If you're using anything but Internet Explorer, I suggest using Twinkle. You can turn it on by going to My Preferences --> Gadgets --> Twinkle. saving your preferences and then holding shift while pressing the refresh button. Suddenly you have new things to play with! Each diff gives you 3 options to roll back. Go to here to learn more about Twinkle. Be careful though, if you abuse Twinkle, you may be blocked from editing.

Other Tools

There are also other tools that make fighting vandalism easy, but they require the user to have Rollback rights. They include, but may not limit to STiki, Huggle and Igloo

Warnings

After you revert vandalism, let them know on their Talk Page. Use the warnings below:

• Level 1 - Assumes good faith. Generally includes "Welcome to Wikipedia" or some variant. ({{uw-vand1}})
• Level 2 - No faith assumption ({{uw-vand2}})
• Level 3 - Assumes bad faith; stern cease and desist ({{uw-vand3}})
• Level 4 - Assumes bad faith; strong cease and desist, last warning ({{uw-vand4}})

In general, you will escalate up those levels from 1 to 4 as the vandalism continues. If it's nothing clearly malicious (see below), you should always assume that it was a careless mistake (in short, assume good faith, one of Wikipedia's foundation principles), and just let them know that you fixed it. As it continues, it becomes more and more obvious that they intend to cause trouble, so the warnings get more and more stern. Occasionally, you'll get the vandal, who despite all logical reasoning, continues to vandalize after that final warning. When this happens, we have no choice left but to block them. Since we're not administrators, we lack this ability, so we must report them to those with that power at Administrator intervention against vandalism. That page provides complete instructions on how to file a proper report. If you ever re-install Twinkle, you can report a user to this page by clicking the "arv" tab at the top of any of their user pages. Usually, an administrator will take action within minutes, but until that happens, you need to continue watching the vandal's contributions and reverting any further vandalism. The Three-Revert Rule does not apply when dealing with obvious vandals.

Twinkle

As I mentioned before, Twinkle is a really useful tool when dealing with vandalism, especially warning them. Twinkle has a whole collection of warning templates ready for you to use. They include warnings for Talk Page violations, Vandalism, Good Faith edits and more.

Task

Read over WP:Vandalism and WP:What vandalism is not. Then find 3 examples of vandalism and 3 examples of good faith edits.

Vandalism

Good Faith