Wikipedia talk:Cleaning up vandalism

Godmode light?
Sorry if I´m wrong, but the Godmode Light link appeared RED on my WOT (Web Of Trust). I read all the comments and people say it´s a shock site with malware. I'm just asking you to verify that link. Hope you can stop vandalism, Wikipedia. Thanks, the FinalMapler from the Spanish Wikipedia Wikinomo. --200.106.3.170 (talk) 03:17, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Dangers
Guess we need something on the dangers. i.e. WP:AGF etc. Also to note that POV issues aren't vandalism and you should avoid getting into edit wars since WP:3RR also applies to you in such cases, also the test templates are inappropriate in such cases... --pgk( talk ) 22:43, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, I think I've mentioend the 3rr bit already. -- ( drini's page &#x260E;  ) 22:08, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Should we add something like Maintained by the Counter Vandalism Unit or something? Tito xd (?!? - help us) 02:53, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
 * it's not maintained BY the CVU, although we have pointers back to them.
 * Let me elaborate on that. Wikipedia pages are maintained by whoever edits them. so in this case, this page is maintained by whoever that wants to maintain it. Any cvu user or not can edit it and improve it. -- ( drini's page &#x260E;  ) 21:52, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not talking about owning pages. The CVU is just a WikiProject, and WikiProjects use templates to indicate where centralized discussion about theme-wide pages is held. (An example I can think right off the bat is hurricane). I'm saying something like that, not "The Counter Vandalism Unit's Portal" or anything of those sorts. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 21:59, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
 * oh, seems good :) -- ( drini's page &#x260E;  ) 19:24, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I also fixed the template inclusion 8the box within box looked funny. However, it may be good idea to remove pieces of it, as the same information is already found at greater depth at other boxes. -- ( drini's page &#x260E;  ) 04:24, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok. Some of those links are repetitive. Tito xd (?!? - help us) 04:25, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
 * For isntance, the "tool" links are explained at depth at the "tools" gren box, and "resources and assistance" are shown at "pointers". I see that template as some sort of "quick index", we do plan of having them explained in depth-- ( drini's page &#x260E;  ) 04:27, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
 * We also need a "what NOT to do" box -- ( drini's page &#x260E;  ) 04:29, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Schism
There is a proposal to move several processes; among others, the proposal would move Cleaning up vandalism to Vandalism in progress. If you would like to comment, please do so at WT:VIP. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 09:57, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Assuming no opposition, the following moves will be performed Friday, 10 March 2006.

// Pathoschild (admin / talk) 15:48, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Proposed changes

 * How about moving the "What to do if you spot vandalism" section to above the "Tools" section? The reasoning being that it would be useful for anyone visiting this page to know how to warn/report vandals, however only the more interested will want access to the dedicated vandal fighting tools. Petros471 10:40, 7 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Change title "Pointers" to "Quick links"? Petros471 10:44, 7 March 2006 (UTC)


 * In light of no comment, I've gone ahead and made the changes. Petros471 13:51, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Living people
Shouldn’t there be a mention of the Living People Category, Related changes page (  see  Category:Living people and  Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people) here. This category was set up to make it easy to keep a look out for libel on living people it needs to be patrolled just like the recent changes list. Lumos3 15:31, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Further changes
As you can see I've been bold and have made/will be making some further changes. I asked someone I came across reporting vandalism to WP:RFI what their suggestions were to improving this page. One of them was ''the focus is pretty much just a seminar on warning. Make a brief and then link to the outline.'' So I'm taking this and other ideas into account with the focus helping this page be a starting stop for people thinking "I've found vandalism, what do I do about it?".

Comments, suggestions, etc always welcome! Petros471 18:43, 2 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I've commented out the Did you know, news, and articles on watch sections. This is because they don't seem to be updated, and are not really needed to fulfil the proposed purpose of this page suggested above. Petros471 18:50, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Read the instructions on biographies
All those involved in "counter vandalism" or "RC patrol" should read WP:BLP. The Wikimedia Foundation receives many complaints from people who have seen their biography (or that of a family member) on Wikipedia, have found libellious or personal information in the bio, removed it, only to have the same information reappear.

Remember, removing content deemed undesirable as per WP:BLP is not vandalism. It is a legitimate act. Please do not blindly revert, especially on biographies or when a living person is discussed in a possibly libellious way. David.Monniaux 15:53, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

What if...
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what if someone gives someone else a warning on their talk page for no reason (say, e.g. for the fun of it to increase the chance they get blocked later)? I used to have this problem, but it's gone now... Insanephantom 14:13, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

What to do
Another step that should be included is to check the other contributions by that user, especially those marked top. Perhaps it says this somewhere, but I didn't spot it. JMcC 07:57, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Proposal: ability to Watchlist contributions list of an editor
As it stands now, one has to go through the last vandal edit to reach the contributions list of the vandal. This would reduce the cost of vandalism identification, the better to warn the vandal and stop him. If this proposal holds up to scrutiny, how can it be implemented? Thx. Thomasmeeks 12:50, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Allow watching of Special:Contributions/username

e.g. to watch me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Frank_Lofaro_Jr.&action=watch

Currently it ignores the parameter action=watch and just displays the current contents of that page. Special pages don't support watching, likely since it would require code to handle each case.

That being said, your suggestion is a good one, but likely requires changes to the MediaWiki code. Hopefully a developer (e.g. Brion Vibber) will implement it, it shouldn't be that hard for that particular special page. --Frank Lofaro Jr. 18:10, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

WP:RFI gone
The paragraph referring to WP:RFI needs to be reworked, since that page is now closed.

I don't know enough about what goes where and what the current distinctions between the different kinds of vandalism are considered to be, so I'll let someone more knowledgable do the reworking. --Frank Lofaro Jr. 16:53, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
 * How's that? I've done a quick edit of the page, there might still be more things needing updating. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Petros471 (talk • contribs) 17:38, 9 February 2007 (UTC).

counter counter-vandalism
As an early stage contributor (but long time user), it seems to me that Wikipedia has lots of over-zealous anti-vandalism folks. For years, I have already double or triple checked any information I found on Wikipedia but it was when I came across wikis that were obviously just malicious posts that i decided to contribute. So, I decided to contribute because I saw a factual error in an article -- it seemed inoccuous because it was about an online retailer. I made changes that I knew to be correct. They were reverted. So i reverted the reverts and explained why I had made the changes. Then I looked more at articles in areas where I have some expertise and I found the wikis to deviate from reality beyond the point of acceptability. This seems to be especially the case when the wikis are about companies or individuals.

When an "anti-vandalism" user reverts a change back to the wrong information without any form of fact-checking, it really makes me feel that Wikipedia needs some procedural changes. And so I dug further to find out how "good" the anti-vandalism person was at their function. Not very good at all -- wikipedia "anti-vandalism" has become a form of Inquisition on the web -- you are an "anti-vandalist" who willingly reverts posts and the culprit is guilty unless the culprit proves otherwise.

There's no successful country that allocates power to people of this mentality and I truly hope there is no meaningful web property that assigns power to people of this mentality. I'm a novice contributor but it appears to me that, for some reason, the people attracted to anti-vantalism are the least qualified to do it -- maybe that's a function of poorly design AV software, maybe of personal traits -- but AV's too frequently behave like militants or agents of the inquisitions.

Hey -- AV's -- please substitute quantity of reverts for quality of reverts.

There may soon be a need for a 3rd party site to administer contentious Wikipedia artickles or Wikipedia could become irrelevant -- sure it's returned high in Google's results but what does that really say about the authenticity of information? I'm not going to create that 3rd party site to resolve contentious articles but I do think that such a site would be valuable at this time. But where does the chain of monitoring end? Besides, if there are better practices, shouldn't Wikipedia simply incorporate them?

My suggestion -- start off postive and assume the original article is correct upon first posting. First edit is fine. However to revert any edit thereafter, a source must be cited -- if a source cannot be cited, it should go to a poll.

The truth (in the form of journalistic equanimity -- by which I mean accuracy and basing reports on similar institutions on the same benchmarks) is worth striving for but it is fundamentally challenging to achieve so it takes a lot more rethinking and updating of the roles of users to achieve validity.

Update: discussed this with some friends and it seems that the conscensus (among that small group) is that comtemporary articles on Wikipedia are the ones perceived to lack objectivity. I note this only as a small and statistically irrelevant sample of perception about Wikipedia. However, my experience shows subjectivity affects many more areas of Wikipedia (and other publications too!!). Many people assume that history, mathematics, and science are not subject to serious disagreements. That is simply not true -- academics across many disciplines (even the most arcane) are frequently at loggerheads with their colleagues as to what the "truth" really is. This partially explains why universities have been quick to discourage students from citing Wikipedia as a source. The more significant element to the Wikipedia-citing ban that some universities have instituted is that students are citing Wikipedia as a definitive source, i.e. an accurate one. The "definitive" aspect is key: because on Wikipedia (at the time of any person citing it), definitive is essentially the opinion of the last contributor/editor/anti-vandal/vandal, etc. It's definitive today but not tomorrow when someone reverts it because they want to/ understand why it should be/ thinks the editor is making too many changes by sheer volume and so on.

Permanent deletion
How do we permanently delete sensitive information? I put someone's name in an edit summary at 4am that I shouldn't have, and he'd like me to remove it. — kwami (talk) 00:47, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Minor edit
I have been trying to determine if the minor edit button should be checked or not when reverting vandalism. The section on "What to do if you spot vandalism" sub section "Revert" makes no reference to the minor edit button. I do realize that Rollback does mark edits as minor. But is is rather confusing when the section dealing with cleaning up vandalism makes no comment on the subject. Dbiel (Talk) 03:40, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Need a consistent change log
It seem that when the title of a page is vandalised, the changes are not just reverted, but instead are completely deleted from the change history. I've read that this is because people erroneously "revert the revert".

Our company (like many others) relies on [DBpedia] to notify us of changes to a node, in order to update our controlled vocabulary system which is based on Wikipedia pages. The lack of a consistent revert history means that we cannot easily revert vandalism to page titles, the titles in question remaining vandalised on our dependent systems until we manually fix them.

I might not have all the details correct here, but you get the general idea. Please could someone at Wikipedia consider how to help alleviate this problem for users of DBpedia? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.185.144.123 (talk) 11:25, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

A recommendation for a new tool.
I have a swell idea. How about this. It would have a scrolling list, like huggle, but, if an edit was made by a user/IP that has been warned before, it would show a red icon. Those who haven't been warned, give out a white icon. How is that? rtucker913 (talk) 01:15, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Huh?
A variety of students are classified as "Vandals". Such as "Vandal Twitch" "Vandal Vladimir" "Vandal Gragas" "Vandal Sona" and "Vandal Brand" What the hell does this mean? -- Brainy J  (previously Atlantima) ~ ✿ ~ ( talk ) 01:48, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Um, yeah? By the whiskers of kûrvi-Tasch! --75* 22:04, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

It was actually vandalism. another vandal attacked right after, and the next user didn't notice. Went undetected for ages. On a page about vandalism. Embarassing, is it not?--75* 16:30, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

Lupin's anti vandal tool
It says it works only in Monobook. That is a lie. I use Vector and it works just fine. Antiv31 discuss 04:26, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

AVC
Can I add a link to my "Wikipedia army", the Anti-Vandalism Corps? - ZLEA (talk) 17:42, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Cleaning up vandalism/Intro
I would like to suggest a change to Bullet Point #4 of the Introductory box, which is currently very confusing and reads as follows:
 * Edits that appear to be in bad faith should not be considered vandalism until they can be proven such at a later time.

How about something clear and to the point, like:
 * If you aren't sure if an edit is vandalism, then assume 'good faith' and leave it alone for now.

Thoughts anyone? Nick Moyes (talk) 15:08, 14 April 2020 (UTC)