User:Marcgal/How do we actually encouraging vandalisms and how to fix this

Sorry for the length of this post. Still I think it is a worthy read.

As an ex-vandal (I sadly must confess) and an ex-admin I think I do have a considerable view of the problem of vandalism, from both sides of the barricade.

To clarify: as a vandal I mainly wasn't active on Wikipedia, but rather different smaller wikis not related to Wikimedia, and sometimes some forums. And I hope this was long before enough.

And I gotta say your methods dealing with it are ineffective at most! It is ridiculous that people got to stare in the screen for hours playing Whac-A-Mole with vandals to prevent the site being flooded; it is ridiculous that sophisticated tools have to be developed just for this purpose! Do not be deceived by 'Pedia's popularity – while this is undoubtedly a significant factor, I'm positive the current flood is far too large to be explained just by popularity.

No, all of those public discussions, info and intervention pages, complaints, RFCc, public logs… You're asking for this yourselves! You have wise and enlightening pages like w:wp:DENY, w:wp:TMOAV, w:wp:RBI, but you don't practise your preaches. In the dark times I was vandalizing myself, I'll tell you, when I was seeing a FRACTION of all of this I was bursting out laughing uncontrollably! Why do you think do vandals always keep their style and leave traces? Because they WANT to be recognized, of course. You're just a one huge canteen for trolls. And again, I'm telling this from the perspective of an ex-vandal.

As a result of this people have to direct a large fraction of their energy to combat trolls, rather than help newbs, fix errors on pages, etc. Vandals' harassment techniques and burdensomeness make some productive users to grow in frustration and eventually leave. Newbies are being scared off, some fraction of the sneaky vandalism passes uncaught.

As an admin, I've been fending off vandals long enough; and I don't really wanna to be doing this again. I simply have a too big feeling of the utter pointlessness of my efforts. I'm tired of fighting it in such a way that I know my actions are actually counter-productive.

In this case Wikipedia's openness works against it. Do understand that vandals really do crave to see any impact of their actions. That's their goal, their reason to vandalize! When I was vandalizing, I was waiting for the results and looking for them, staring at the RCs, reading certain meta-pages and users' discussions…

That's not the way at all. The vandals' actions, from their perspective, should go to a black hole or /dev/null. No impact of their actions should be visible to them. Reverting, Blocking, Ignoring is important, but it's not enough. All pages like w:wp:LTA or w:wp:AIV should be removed from the public and be made visible only to trusted users. Also any discussions, RFCs, etc about them should be held somewhere unreachable by vandals (but reachable by all good users, not only admins). There should be consensus not even to mention their nicks in the public, even less to complain about their disruptiveness. Obvious vandalisms should not only be rollbacked; no, the vandalized versions should be removed from the page's history, at least from the vandals' perspective. The right to do so could be granted to anyone with the rollback right. If you ask me, I'd say the vandals should not even see who has blocked or reverted them; also the block reason should be left empty. Again; when I was vandalizing, I was sticking to pages that responded in a Wikipedia-like manner. If I saw a page that was removing traces of my vandalisms and made it impossible for to witness the results of my actions, I was going elsewhere.

Please learn from the experience of other sites, where this is exactly what is happening. On StackExchange banned users do not see their deleted content. On many forums vandals are just being arbitrary banned by they-don't-know-who, and their posts are being deleted. By the way, perhaps StackExchange's privilege system is worth considering?

By the way, I know I'm somewhat not practicing my preaches myself by publishing this very essay. But I really think this must be brought to attention.

Finally, it is important that I was talking only about die-hard vandals. These methods should never be applied to hot-blooded users, users that are just suspected of being vandals in disguise, etc… I am aware of Bang Bang's case, AFAIK there was not only one such mistake in the history, and well, I am in no way promoting this kind of hasty administrative actions.