User:Thanoscar21/CVUA/Oughtta Be Otters

Hello Oughtta Be Otters, and welcome to your Counter Vandalism Unit Academy page! Every person I instruct will have their own page on which I will give them support and tasks for them to complete. Please make sure you have this page added to your watchlist. Your academy page has been specifically designed according to you and what you have requested instruction in - for that reason, please be as specific as possible in your answers, so that I know the best ways to help you (and do not be afraid to let me know if you think something isn't working). If you have any general queries about anti-vandalism (or anything else), you are more than welcome to raise them with me at my talk page.

Make sure you read through Wikipedia:Vandalism as that's the knowledge which most of the questions I ask you and tasks you do will revolve around.

How to use this page

This page will be built up over your time in the Academy, with new sections being added as you complete old ones. Each section will end with a task, written in bold type - this might just ask a question, or it might require you to go and do something. You can answer a question by typing the answer below the task; if you have to do something, you will need to provide diffs to demonstrate that you have completed the task. Some sections will have more than one task, sometimes additional tasks may be added to a section as you complete them. Please always sign your responses to tasks as you would on a talk page.

The CVUA curriculum

There are several sections of the training course. In some of them, will be asking you to do perform practical exercises; in others, I will ask you to read certain policies and guidelines, and then ask you some questions about their content. To be clear, it is not a problem if you give the wrong answer to any of the questions - making mistakes and discussing them is a crucial part of the learning process. For that reason, it is important that you do not attempt to find previous users' training pages in order to identify the 'right' answers to give: all your answers should be your own, so that we can identify and address any misconceptions that you might have. There is no time pressure to complete the course: we will go at whatever pace works for you, and you can take a pause or ask questions at any point along the way.

Communication

Counter-vandalism work can result in very large watchlists, which can make it more difficult to monitor pages using that alone. For this reason, I will ping you whenever I update this page with some feedback or a new task; I would also ask you to ping me when you have completed a task, so that I get a notification telling me that it's ready for review. See WP:PING for details on how to do this if you aren't sure. Thanoscar21^talk_{contributions} 17:52, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

The start

RedWarn & Twinkle

RedWarn and Twinkle are very useful tools when performing maintenance functions around Wikipedia. Please have a read through WP:RedWarn and WP:TWINKLE. Please note, I'll only be using Twinkle for WP:CSD, which will come later in the course.

Enable Twinkle and RedWarn (if you haven't already) and leave a note here to let me know that you have enabled it.

Good evening, Thanoscar21talk. I have read and installed as instructed. Look forward to working through this program. Thank you again! Oughtta Be Otters (talk) 03:48, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Oughtta Be Otters, great, next section below! You can ping me by copy-pasting this: {{u|Thanoscar21}}. Thanks, Thanoscar21^talk_{contributions} 12:38, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

​ Try pinging again. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:22, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanoscar21 Hi, so sorry. Workload and back injury have partnered up to make editing challenging for the past few weeks. Still all in, and hope to be back to this soon. Was hoping this week would be a chance to dig in, but now have to see what happens with my back/ability to use computer. Oughtta Be Otters (talk) 15:28, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Oughtta Be Otters, of course, don't worry! Take care of yourself first; Wikipedia can wait. Just one small tip: the <nowiki></nowiki> tags will make any shortcuts fail (such as '''bold''' to bold, ~~~~ for your signature, etc.). Take care, Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 23:32, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanoscar21 ug, I see how I carried over the <nowiki></nowiki> tags. Bit of an edgecase in the techie world, but I get there eventually. ;) Ok, slightly chatty homework below. Super interesting to do, though! Oughtta Be Otters (talk) 15:28, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Good faith and vandalism

When patrolling for vandalism, you may often come across edits which are unhelpful, but not vandalism - these are good faith edits. While it is often necessary to revert such edits, we treat them differently from vandalism, so it is important to recognize the difference between a vandalism edit and a good faith edit. Please read WP:AGF and WP:NOT VANDALISM before completing the tasks in this section.

Please explain below the difference between a good faith edit and a vandalism edit, and how you would tell them apart.

Originally I wrote: Divining intent and noticing patterns of behavior are at the heart of determining most instances of vandalism. While malicious behaviors such as adding expletives, personal attacks, or other radical reformatting of images, visible and invisible text, etc. may fall under vandalism immediately, it strikes me that looking for repetitive activities of a disruptive and intentionally nasty nature -- especially after being warned in the past -- is the best way to determine something is actively vandalism. More than anything, experimenting in the mainspace when it should be done in the sandbox, poor quality information or writing, or disagreements still constitute good faith -- even in the case of first-time copyright violations.

Revision after working on Part II: I need to learn more about sock-puppetry and tracing multiple lives of one human on Wikipedia. Clearly, malicious can be fairly obvious and can appear to come from a new user. Unlike other new users, it seems that the spammily named FreeHelp4U, who has made some inappropriate edits to Flood control channel, once that got reverted and once that the editor self-reverted is perhaps in the process of learning, and has not yet grokked either use of a sandbox, Wikicode, or any of the culture on the site.

I'm fascinated by the edit summaries that some vandals use, and what clear signposts they are to vandalism.

Y — you've obviously put much effort into this! A quick, short summary of this would be, if the intent behind the edit is good, it's a good faith edit. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Please find three examples of good faith but unhelpful edits, and three examples of vandalism. You don't need to revert the example you find, and I am happy for you to use previous undos in your edit history if you wish. Place diffs below

Vandalism

1. IP address: 174.84.21.168 has made one edit, to Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This edit does not, therefore, meet standards of vandalism for repeated actions by the editor. However, since the editor removed a section of text and images, and replaced them with the text "hehe," the malice of the edit feels quite clear.

   Y -- You actually don't need to write all this down! To find edits you've reverted, you can go here for edits you've reverted yourself. Where it says, "[time] [date] (diff|hist)", pressing on the diff brings up a diff, or difference between two revisions. For edits that you haven't reverted, or edits you find on Special:Recent Changes, you can just press (diff) from there. Hope this helps! Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

2. Gender studies, where Mcsadw1008 (talk | contribs) changed the first sentence to read "Gender studies (which is a fake study which will bring you nowhere) is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation." (Edit italicized) Once again, appears as a first edit by the user, but clearly has malicius intent.

   Y, correct. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

3. 212.129.76.139 (talk) added the following to Joe Kavanagh: "lord mayor of cork and lord of the flies I'd deck that lanky boy he cant wipe his own arse" (Edit summary: "Factual content"). All three edits this IP address has made have been reverted. FWIW, this appears to be the same editor as Franklampard420 talk .

   Y, correct. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Good faith but unhelpful:

1. Must admit that the AfD on Westpac Outstanding Women Award felt like it was in good faith but unhelpful, since the nominator's standards were based on US media, rather than taking a short while to understand the Papua New Guinean media landscape.

   Y -- AfD nominations are generally discussed no matter what, unless it's a vandalising IP. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

2. One edit back on Trevor Phillips -- not in line with WP:BLP, but not malicious: "Phillips married Asha Bhownagary, a Parsi child psychotherapist, in 1981 and they have two daughters. They separated in 2008.^{[citation needed]} He remarried in September 2013.^{[citation needed]"}

   Y — there should always be a source for a BLP. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

3. Trombone, last sentence of first paragraph: "(Trombone is love, Trombone is life)" -- inappropriate and obnoxious, but not malicious. Tipped off by edit statement: "I added the truth" -- this is user Williwamoo (talk block log uploads logs filter log) only edit. Great place for kind intervention, acknowledgement of enthusiasm, if not precisely good faith, and definitely WP:DNB. Thanoscar21, wondering how you chose to word this type of reversion? Go to their talk page, or just in edit summary?

   N, obnoxious would go under vandalism. About the reversions, warning a user will be coming later. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Looks like vandalism/I have questions

• Family of Kamala Harris#Douglas Emhoff ends with "Subscribe to ddplays This on YouTube" added by 2601:644:8200:12F0:15F7:AC02:7A37:D539, from which there seem to be no other edits on Wikipedia. Cannot see any reason this might have been added in error, because it does not appear to be an attempt to add a citation, and the only other action taken in this edit is removing the vertical pipes within the citation for the previous sentence, which broke the templated layout, resulting in this citation: " Template:Cite news last=Siders"

  This would be considered vandalism, there are a lot of people who insert, "subscribe to [channel name]," and they're all advertising their channel. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

  • Just to be sure, I both searched using Wikipedia's search box and doing a site: search in Google and did not see any other occurrences of "ddplays This" within the Wikipedia.org domain

• There is an edit war brewing on War of the Confederation over the "Results" -- 12 edits in the last 24 hours as to whether "Argentina. Bolivia loser." or "Argentinian stalemate." Looks like verging on vandalism -- now the IP address that has reverted all the edits have been blocked, but one of the main people involved in doing so (User:Tali64^2) just got a warning from you on another page, and has a ton of warnings on his talk page. So, I'm a bit baffled about how this one should play out?

  An old version had Victory of Chile and Peruvian dissidents, and that's what's there now, so it's fine. As for the warning, that was a WP:CSD tag (basically, the editor made a promotional advertising page), which we'll get to later on in the course. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

• Note to self: I'm curious about hidden text: RE: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seijuu_Sentai_Gingaman&diff=1006740980&oldid=1006740515 -- Hidden text is not, in itself, vandalism, right? Can you please talk to me about appropriate use? Nor is this text vandalism-level malicious () , despite the unkind tone of the edit summary ("adding a hidden comment for those who neglect to use edit summaries or read the talkpage")

  No, that's a normal comment, as many people do unhelpful "drive-by" edits in which they come, change something without using an edit summary, and leave, probably never editing that page again. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Oughtta Be Otters, great job, next section below! First, here's a note. Thanoscar21^talk_contribs 16:43, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

A note about RedWarn

Use either the green, blue, or red "rollback" links, since they save a more relevant edit summary

Hopefully you'll have noticed that RedWarn allows you three options for performing a rollback - green, blue, and red links (see the screenshot). All three will revert all of the most recent consecutive edits made by a single user to a page. The orange button should only be used when a user blanks a large portion of the page without an edit summary.

Try to use these buttons where possible. The green and the blue ones allow you to add an edit summary - it's described as 'optional', but you should not treat it as such - always leave a brief edit summary, even if it's just 'Rv test edit', or 'Rv unexplained removal of content', or whatever. Use the green one when you think it's a good faith mistake, and the blue one when you're not sure. Only use the red one when you are certain that it is unambiguous vandalism - it saves time, because it leaves a generic edit summary, and all of them will take you directly to the talk page of the person you have reverted, to allow you to use the 'Warn' option to give them a warning. (Also note that you can use the purple "restore this version" button when you need to revert edits by multiple users.)

Warning and reporting

When you use RedWarn to warn a user, you have a number of options to choose from: you can select the kind of warning (for different offences), and the level of warning (from 1 to 4, for increasing severity). Knowing which warning to issue and what level is very important. Further information can be found at WP:WARN and WP:UWUL. Please note that most of this is automated on RedWarn; you'll need to pick this only if you pick the blue button.

Please answer the following questions

Why do we warn users?

When would a 4im warning be appropriate?

Should you substitute a template when you place it on a user talk page, and how do you do it? (Hint - read the link before answering!)

What should you do if a user who has received a level 4 or 4im warning vandalises again?

Find and revert some vandalism. Warn each user appropriately, using the correct kind of warning and level. For each revert/warning please fill in a line on the table below. If you have trouble with the wiki markup, tell me and we'll get it sorted out.

#	Diff of your revert	Your comment. If you report to AIV please include the diff	Trainer's Comment
1	diff	comment
2	diff	comment
3	diff	comment
4	diff	comment
5	diff	comment
6	diff	comment
7	diff	comment
8	diff	comment
9	diff	comment
10	diff	comment