User:Bryceman99/Coaching/Vandalism patrol

One thing that anyone on Wikipedia can help out with, no matter good they are at writing or how much expert knowledge they have, is revert vandalism. Some people use RecentChanges to watch for vandalism, but I have never used RecentChanges so I won't try to coach you in that. I think it is important, though, to get practice recognizing what vandalism is and how to deal with it.

Your job for this task is to spend a little bit of time whenever you're on Wikipedia checking Special:Log/newusers. This is a page that shows the most recently-created new user accounts. Since a lot of the vandalism comes from new accounts, this is a good place to monitor (although you should always remember that a lot of new accounts are also good contributors and not vandals, so you should be welcoming for them).

Preparation

• Read Wikipedia:Vandalism to make sure you know what counts as vandalism and what doesn't.
• Look at, and bookmark, WP:WARN. This is one of the most useful pages on the whole project; it contains all the templates you can use for giving warning messages to people after they vandalize. Warning messages are important because a) the first time someone vandalizes, if you give them a friendly message you might be able to turn them into a good contributor; and b) if the person keeps vandalizing, you can't have them blocked until they have been appropriately warned.

Task

Do not start this until you have read both the pages listed in Preparation above!

• Check Special:Log/newusers periodically. Any time the "contribs" link for a user is blue, that means that account has made edits; you can click the "contribs" link to see the edits they've made.
• If you see any users that have vandalized, revert the vandalism (using the "undo" button and an appropriate edit summary) and give the users one of the messages listed at WP:WARN.
• If you see a user that is not vandalizing but is making good edits, you can welcome them by going to their talk page and writing {{subst:welcome}} ~~~~.

Eventually you will also learn about reporting persistent vandals (if someone is vandalizing a lot in a short period of time, you can have them blocked by reporting them at WP:AIV) and tagging pages for speedy deletion, but for now we will just focus on reverting vandalism one piece at a time.