Wikipedia:Vandalism is pointless

Because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, we are therefore of course going to receive a minority of individuals who are here just to vandalize, troll, blank, be uncivil and generally create a mess. Unfortunately for them:

VANDALISM IS 100% POINTLESS

Now this is some sort of unspoken rule or anything, it's nothing short of blatant fact, allow me to explain:

Why is it so pointless?

There is countless reasons it is so pointless, here is a few:

Page history

• ALL PRIOR PAGE REVISIONS ARE SAVED. You may think that by deleting a section of content, adding gibberish or doing whatever to the page that we can't do anything about it. WE CAN, it could have taken you 10 minutes to vandalize the page, whilst it takes regular contributors seconds to change it back. Is it really worth the effort?
• Not only that tools exist to do that very quickly and we can select a revision to restore if we choose.

Recent changes patrol

• Contributors greatly out number vandals, on a wiki as large as this one. Somebody or probably multiple people will review every single edit made and know whether or not its vandalism. Your edit is very unlikely to be un-noticed.
• Filters exist that can detect certain types of edits, and they show on Recent changes as to whether the edit may or may not have been harmful. These sort of edits get reviewed and reverted very quickly.
• People get notified if a page on there watch list gets changed, and will most likely check that edit, so see what it was.

Rollback, twinkle, huggle and administrators

• The rollbacker right can be edited to just about any trusted editor that asks for it, in fact as it stands thousands or users have the right. And administrators have it by default. One click and something that may have taken you ten minutes to do is changed back in a flash. Again s it really worth trying?
• Any editor can enable Twinkle, which allows vandalism to be reverted in a couple of clicks.
• Huggle can also be enabled for some editors and will also revert it very quickly.
• Administrators can see whats going on and there is a page to report users that constantly vandalize. So really, you're going to get banned very quickly. Then you hit the autoblock which prevents you from making another account for 24 hours, why bother?
• If you constantly make vandal socks, some users can check your IP address and block that as well. Meaning you can't contribute again until the block expires, which may take months, years or never happen at all. What is the point?

Bots

• Some bots are programmed to detect vandalism. You aren't wasting any human resources in most cases, it's taken care of automatically

Consequences

You'll be banned I can't put it more simply than that. Your IP address may be banned or even your IP range if your stupid and persistent enough.

Also see

• Wikipedia:Vandalism
• Wikipedia:Blocking policy