User talk:Ccgleason

Okay, this is fairly easy to figure out, and it's appreciated that the heart's in the right place to do something about it. Here's the explanation, and as I don't know how much you know I'll start from the basics, and explain what happened, how and why it happened -- and also try to explain enough that if it happens again you can have an idea how to trace it and fix it yourself too :)

I don't know what you know so I'll start at the beginning.

Wikipedia is a Wiki (click on that link to find what a wiki is). What that means is, anyone can contribute, and everyone is encouraged to. Overall Wikipedia gets hundreds of times more well-meaning editors than bad ones, so the bad ones rarely get much of a foothold.

The main editorial control is not that "only approved editors" can update and improve articles, but anyone can. The main editorial control is not so much that "all except accredited editors are excluded", it's more that even bad editors can edit -- but any vandalism and errors they add rarely get much of a fotohold and their bad edits are very rapidly spotted and reversed by others.

To ensure this is the case, Wikipedia has some very powerful controls to allow editors to peer-review each others edits, and immediately undo or flag any edits which seem dubious.

An average time to revert edits is usually a few minutes on most articles, and if an article is hit with repeated vandalism then (like an immune system), more editors will tend to notice, and start to actively watch the article to reduce the risk of recurrence (or "lock" it if it becomes necessary).

An article such as Global warming might get 30 edits a day, and included in that will be 2 or 3 that are very quickly reversed as being poor quality or similar in the view of some other editor. More popular articles (especially current affairs) might get hundreds of edits a day, and be reviewed by dozens of editors out of the several hundred thousand on Wikipedia. That makes it hard for vandalsim to get established in an article such as Global warming.

This is what happened to the edit you spotted. The edit was added by user Arnold19 at 04:55, January 7 (UCT). It was reversed by Raymond arritt at 05:11, 16 minutes later. A warning was added to Arnold19's user talk page at User_talk:Arnold19 just three minutes later at 05.14, by another user, Amos Han, who also spotted it. So by the time you came back, the vandalism had already been fully removed and the user warned, by two separate people.

You can actually see the "differences" of those two edits, known as "diffs", here (vandalistic edit) and here (fixing edit), which highlight the changes made in the vandalistic edit, and in the rectifying edit, respectively. These diffs are the authoritative version of "who changed what with which edit". If there is ever any question of bad editorship, you'll see people requesting (or citing) "diffs" as evidence of who did what to an article.

In the two DIFFS linked, you'll see the text you saw, added in the 1st and then removed in the 2nd.

You can look up the editing history of an article youself, and the list of edits, by clicking "HISTORY" at the top of the article page, which will list the history of edits to the article. Clicking on DIFF next to any edit, will show you the details of any changes made at that time, old text on the left, new text on the right.

You also have a "watchlist" on Wikipedia. Its a way to keep an eye on articles you are interested in. It will list changes to those articles. You can list and delist articles that way for your own personal interest. See Wikipedia:Watchlist for more.

The following pages contain further information and resources, since this form of editorial control is probably one you don't see much outside electronic collaboration systems: About Wikipedia, Researching with Wikipedia and Reliability of Wikipedia might all be useful. For dealing with vandalism see Wikipedia:Vandalism. For editing Wikipedia yourself to fix obvious vandalism and errors, see the section Contributing to Wikipedia on the 'About' page.

I hope this helps, and look forward to seeing you contributing your knowledge for others. If you see vandalism again, you can yourself fix it. If you make a mistake, others will fix your mistakes if you can't work out how.

if you have any more questions please do not hesitate to ask! All the best, and hope this has helped. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 22:00, 7 January 2007 (UTC)