Wikipedia:Obvious vandalism

Obvious vandalism is a term used in several policies, such as the three-revert rule exceptions, limited ban exceptions, and in the instructions for pages like Administrator intervention against vandalism.

Definition
Both the 3RR exceptions and the ban exceptions give a basic definition of obvious vandalism. BANEX says "The key word is 'obvious', that is, cases in which no reasonable person could possibly disagree." 3RRNO says obvious vandalism consists of "edits that any well-intentioned user would agree constitute vandalism, such as page blanking and adding offensive language."

Another way to define obvious vandalism is by exclusion:

Edits that are obvious vandalism

 * Adding profanity or nonsense characters
 * Ex: "pen15", "eat shit", "owieugoiuoweririofodiwueuw"


 * Adding statements directed at an individual, especially (but not always) someone other than the article's subject
 * Ex: "Mrs. Johnson is a witch", "john smith is gay", "Obama sucks", "Brad Pitt is soooo hot", "Janie has big b00bs"


 * Other clearly non-constructive additions
 * Ex: "Wikepidea sux", "if u r reading this u are stoopid", "haha i can change this website", "I love u"


 * Unexplained page blanking, section blanking, or other significant content removal
 * Adding categories that clearly do not apply to the article in question:
 * Ex: adding to George Washington

Edits that are vandalism but are not obvious
The following are not considered "obvious vandalism" because they require investigation to detect or resolve:
 * Deliberately introducing factual errors or what appear to be errors
 * Ex: changing height/weight/age in a biography, changing sports statistics, climate data, etc.


 * Adding plausible sounding hoaxes, such as a celebrity pregnancy
 * Signing an edit to a talk page with another editor's username or IP
 * This does not include using an unsigned template to mark another editor's contribution for identification purposes


 * Deliberately reverting other users' good edits in an effort to hinder the improvement of an article
 * Adding or changing internal or external links on a page to disruptive, irrelevant, or inappropriate targets while disguising them with mislabeling
 * Repeated uploading of copyrighted material
 * Bad-faith placing of non-content tags such as afd, delete, sprotected, or other tags on pages that do not meet the tag criteria
 * Genre warring

Edits that are not vandalism

 * Page blanking or content removal with a plausible explanation provided
 * Adding categories that plausibly apply to the article, or removing those that clearly do not
 * Disruptive editing
 * Edit warring
 * Everything else listed at WP:NOT VANDALISM

Application and proper reports
Making this distinction is often necessary when deciding where to report a user who is editing disruptively. There are several specialized noticeboards for taking action to stop disruptive editing. These include Administrator intervention against vandalism, Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents, Administrator's noticeboard/Edit warring, and Sockpuppet investigations.

Only cases of obvious vandalism or obvious spam should be reported at AIV. That noticeboard is not set up to allow community discussion or input on the cases reported there, and thus each case depends solely on the judgement of the investigating admin. Community consensus is that discussion must be allowed for cases that are not clear-cut abuse of editing privileges. Therefore, any case that isn't obvious vandalism or spam is not appropriate for AIV.

You can report cases of edit warring to ANEW (some people call it AN3), but please be aware that your own contributions will also be scrutinized and if you were also edit warring, you may also end up blocked.

Cases where you believe an editor is abusing multiple accounts should be reported to SPI. Editors are allowed to have more than one account, but are not allowed to abuse them. Please do not post to AIV saying "X is a sock of Y", that's what SPI is for. That page is better set up for investigation of multiple account abuse, and the admins who patrol it may be more familiar with relevant sock puppetry cases. However, if X is clearly vandalizing or spamming, a report at AIV is appropriate so an admin can intervene quickly and stop the vandalism.

Anything else that requires administrator intervention, but isn't clear-cut vandalism, edit warring, or sockpuppetry, should be reported to ANI, so the community can weigh in on whether the behavior is acceptable and what remedy should be taken, if any.