User:Banaticus/Adoption/Vandalism 101

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Vandalism 1.1[edit]

Warning[edit]

IMPORTANT WARNING: Due to the very nature of vandalism on Wikipedia, it is possible you will encounter something that will offend you. Let me point out Wikipedia's Content Disclaimer, which basically says that you can find just about anything on here and that it's not Wikipedia's fault. While you may find something offensive in your searches and subsequent vandal patrols (occasionally graphically offensive), it is best to simply brush it off and not take it to heart. Later on, when you are actually reverting vandalism, it is possible that your own user pages will be vandalized. Mine have been vandalized a number of times. Here the same thing applies - ignore it and simply remove it. I do not tell these things to scare you, or to imply that it will happen. I am simply pointing out that it is possible, although exceedingly rare. In many cases, these attempts to attack you are in fact rather somewhat amusing. If it occurs, just remember how intellectually superior you clearly are to the vandal and be glad that you actually have a life.

What we're going to do now is get you started with some basic vandalism patrols, and get you introduced to some of the tools available for helping with this. This is by no means something you will be obligated to do as an editor, however it is something you should know how to do due to the high risk of vandalism on Wikipedia. Should you ever become an administrator, you will likely be expected to deal with vandalism in some respect. Warning: again, some vandalism can be pretty graphic.

To start off, let's get some background. Wikipedia is, as you know, a wiki, meaning anyone can edit virtually any page. This is both a blessing and a curse, however, as while it does allow a wide range of information to be added and shared, it also allows people with less than benevolent intentions to come in and mess around with stuff. It requires a fair amount of work during every hour of every day to ensure that this vandalism does not run rampant and destroy the project. Fortunately, with a near-endless supply of volunteers across the world, this doesn't really cause a problem. The addition of various tools help aid our cause and make the removal (or "reversion" or revert) of vandalism happen within minutes (sometimes seconds).

Vandalism is defined as "an unhelpful or unconstructive edit" to an article or other page. The official Wikipedia definition is "any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia". Most commonly acts of vandalism are pretty blatant - replacing a whole page or section with curse words, simply removing entire sections of text, and so forth. Occasionally, it's less obvious, like changing key words in a section to completely alter the meaning or changing key dates. Basically, anything that can't be helpful at all to the article should be considered vandalism, however you should always remember to assume good faith for questionable cases.

RecentChanges[edit]

The most commonly used, and arguably the most critical tool in this respect, is the RecentChanges page. Recent changes is a special page which lists every edit made across the project within the last few minutes (well, ultimately you could find every change ever made, except those that had been deleted, but generally only the more recent are of interest). Recent pages is linked to from Special pages, which is linked in the Toolbox in that menu over on the left of the page. RecentChanges is formatted similarly to a page's history, with a few differences. Here's how a standard entry generally looks with links that explain what each section is for:

So that you can know all the terminology (which in some cases will be used across the site), I'm going to explain what all of this means. Feel free to skip this if you've already clicked the links. Below is a live example of one line of the recent changes feed. Feel free to click on this to show you where the real links go to.

List of abbreviations (help):
D
Edit made at Wikidata
r
Edit flagged by ORES
N
New page
m
Minor edit
b
Bot edit
(±123)
Page byte size change

25 May 2024

  1. diff A "diff" is the difference between two revisions. Wikipedia has a special feature that allows you to compare revisions to see exactly what was changed. This is particularly useful when on vandal patrol, as this is the best thing available to tell you if the edit was or was not vandalism. Content removed appears in red text in a yellow box on the left; content added appears in red text in a green box on the right.
  2. hist The "hist" link will bring you to the page's history. A page's history lists all edits ever made to a page, something which is required under the terms of the GFDL, part of Wikipedia's licensing.
  3. Shigeru Miyamoto‎ The next link is the article that the edit was made to.
  4. 14:32 The time stamp will indicate when the edit was made. The time will appear in your time zone, as you have it defined in your Special:Preferences. Note that this is different from signature timestamps, which are always in UTC/GMT time.
  5. (+28) The green or red number after the timestamp will tell you how much was added (green) or removed (red) to the article in the edit. A green "+" number shows the number of bytes added to the article - a red "-" number indicates the number removed. In general, the number of bytes is equal to the number of characters, however this is not always the case: Certain special characters can contain more than one byte, and templates can completely mess this number up. Templates will be covered in another lesson later on, however you will be using some in your patrols later. This number will be in bold if a very large number of characters were removed, which is usually a good indicator of vandalism.
  6. 201.152.102.192 The next part is the name of the user who made the edit. If the edit was made by a registered user, it would link to their user page, but if it was an anonymous IP address, it will instead link to their contribution page. Since most vandalism comes from these anonymous editors, this serves as another convenience to those on patrol.
  7. (→ Competition with Sony and Microsoft) The last part of a recent change report is the edit summary. When editing a section of an article, the title of that section will automatically be included in the edit summary, as you see above. Other special edit summaries include "Replaced page with..." and "Blanked the page". In general, these last two are dead giveaways for vandalism edits, however you will occasionally see an editor blank his own user or user talk page, so be careful about that.

Assignment #1[edit]

Please click here to leave me a new message.

  • Tell me what you know
  • Tell me what you don't know
  • Then tell me what you think
  • Always distinguish which from which

-- Colin Powell from It Worked for Me

Now that you know how to use Recent Changes, I want you to find some vandalism edits. I don't want you to remove the edit yourself just yet -- we'll get to this shortly and chances are another editor or bot will beat you to it. So before you go on, go to Special:RecentChanges and find three vandalism edits. So that I can check your work and we can discuss things, I want you to copy the links to the diffs of these three edits onto my talk page. (This is most easily done by copying the URL from your address bar while you're viewing the diff.)

  • Example Diff: [1] Adding random content "MUHAHAHA!"
  • Diff 1: [] Why you think this is vandalism:
  • Diff 2: [] Why you think this is vandalism:
  • Diff 3: [] Why you think this is vandalism:

How to revert[edit]

Now that you know how to recognize vandalism, we're going to have you start actually taking action against it. First off, and it's important that I show you this first, we're going to cover the "old school" manual form of reversion. The definition of "revert" is (according to Wiktionary, our sister project) "To turn back, [...] or, to change back." That's what we're going to do. It would take an horribly long time to remove vandalism if we had to re-write each article every time it was vandalized. Since we have a record of every edit ever made, however, it's very easy to simply "turn back" to a previous version. Let's try this out.

Assignment #2[edit]

So that we don't risk messing up any articles or my talk page, or having things not work, we'll be doing these tests in my sandbox. Go ahead and open that page in a new window (or tab or whatever you prefer). Once there, go to the page history. I use this page for testing various things, so what's there might look like nonsense, or it might look just fine. Perhaps the last person to edit was even a fellow adoptee. In any case, you're going to revert the most recent edit made to the page. Follow these steps carefully to make sure you don't miss anything:

  1. Click the "View history" link at the top of the article. This will bring you to the article history page, which lists all edits that have been made to the article.
  2. At the end of the first line of text, click the "undo" link. You'll be brought to a screen that looks like a combination between a diff and the edit screen. This shows you what changes you're making, and allows you to make other changes at the same time, however both reverting and editing at the same time is not generally recommended.
  3. Scroll down to the edit summary and enter a reason why you are making the reversion after the pre-loaded stuff. Usually "vandalism" will do - other variations include "rvv" for "ReVert Vandalism" and so forth. Even though this isn't technically vandalism, go ahead and enter that here and save the page.
  4. You're done! The page should now look as it did before I made that edit. Well done.

Popups[edit]

The problem with the undo button is that it does take some time to do. You've got to go through extra pages, click extra buttons, and so forth. Chances are, someone else will have already reverted what you were trying to revert before you are able to complete the action, resulting in either an edit conflict or you inadvertently re-adding the vandalism by reverting the reverter. So, to help out with that, you might want to install popups.

Popups are not what you might think they are - an annoying series of windows advertising junk that you can't seem to get rid of. Wrong! Rather, these popups are a useful javascript tool that you can install to your Wikipedia account that can help with a number of things - navigation, research, editing, and (in our case) vandalism patrol. With popups installed, you'll get this little yellow box to appear whenever you hover over an internal link that will provide a short preview of the page it links to, as well as the first image displayed on that page. While some people love this particular extension, it's not for everyone, and I'm not by any means going to force you into using it. I'm just going to show you how to use it to revert vandalism, and leave the rest up to you. Installation and uninstallation are remarkably easy, since they're already installed in Wikipedia. You just have to enable or disable it.

  1. Go to Special:Preferences.
  2. Click on "Gadgets"
  3. Under "Browsing gadgets", select "Navigation popups". You may also click any other buttons you feel like clicking.
  4. Once done, click the "Save" button down at the bottom.
  5. When you see the green box that says "Your preferences have been saved", go to your userpage.
  6. On your keyboard, press CTRL+F5 (Hold the Control Key while pressing F5). The page will reload. This bypasses your browser's cache to make sure the new setting takes effect.
  7. Now, hover your cursor over any blue link on a Wikipedia page. Wait a moment and see what happens! (If nothing happens, chances are you hovered over a link to a Special: page. Try another one.)

Take your time getting used to how this works, and go ahead and follow the instructions here to configure optional settings for the tool if you wish.

Now, then. Here's how this works for reverting stuff. Go back to my sandbox and click on the History tab. Now follow these steps:

  1. Hover your cursor over the topmost "last" link. This should correspond to the edit you just made a few minutes ago.
  2. The popup will appear, but instead of giving you a preview of the sandbox, it will display a shortened version of the diff. Anything you removed will be highlighted in red, anything you added will be in green.
  3. Look on your popup for a small link that says "rv". Click on it. (If you have only a few links at the top, hover over "Actions" and click "revert" - as far as I am aware, this should not be the case)
  4. DON'T CLICK ANYTHING AFTER "rv". The script will automatically revert your edit and provide an edit summary to that effect. Once done, your screen should display the sandbox as it was when you first saw it.

See how much easier that was? Not only did you get a preview of the diff, the script did most of the work for you. Cool, huh?

There's one last thing. When reverting vandalism, you should leave a warning message on the vandal's talk page to let them know what happened. This serves a double purpose. If the vandal is not a vandal, but just screwed something up, it lets them know why their edit is now gone and how to correct the problem in the future. Either way, though, it also provides a record for other editors, to know that the person you warned has a history of (possible) vandalism. When enough of these warnings are received, the vandal will be blocked for a period of time by an administrator.

While there are a large series of these warning templates, I'm going to start you off simple and give you the code for the most general set. If you want to expand your knowledge of these warnings, the full list can be found at WP:UTM. To use these warnings, type or copy the appropriate code into the bottom of the vandal's talk page. Start small - if this is a user's first vandal edit, give them the level 1 template. If they have received other warnings, go up as appropriate. (For example, if someone else has given them a level 3 recently, you should go up to the next level, level 4). If the last warning given was a level 4, just slap on another level 4 template. Don't worry about reporting them just yet.

  1. {{uw-vand1}} ~~~~
  2. {{uw-vand2}} ~~~~
  3. {{uw-vand3}} ~~~~
  4. {{uw-vand4}} ~~~~

Good luck going on patrol! Please let me know as soon as possible if you have any questions. If you are ever in doubt about what action to take in this situation, just don't take it. On patrol, there is always a more experienced editor just seconds behind you, so it'll be taken care of. As you do patrol, you'll become more and more confident about what is and what is not vandalism, and our next lesson on vandalism deals with those other kinds. Until then, happy editing as always.

For more information on vandalism patrols, see WP:CVU, headquarters of the Counter-Vandalism Unit, an unofficial, volunteer group of editors who spend some time roughly every day on patrol.

Twinkle[edit]

Twinkle is a set of JavaScript functions that gives registered confirmed users several new options to assist them in common Wikipedia maintenance tasks, and to help them deal with acts of vandalism. It provides users with three types of rollback functions and includes a full library of speedy deletion functions, user warnings, pseudo-automatic reporting of vandals, and much, much more. It may not work so well with Internet Explorer, though.

Here's how to install Twinkle. Go ahead and do this now, so that you can follow the tasks further on:

  1. Go to Special:Preferences.
  2. Click on "Gadgets"
  3. Under "Editing gadgets", select "Twinkle". You may also click any other buttons you feel like clicking.
  4. Once done, click the "Save" button down at the bottom.
  5. When you see the green box that says "Your preferences have been saved", go to your userpage.
  6. On your keyboard, press CTRL+F5 (Hold the Control Key while pressing F5). The page will reload. This bypasses your browser's cache to make sure the new setting takes effect.
  7. Go to the Main Page. If the script installed correctly, you should see an extra tab at the top that says "TW". This is Twinkle and the tab allows you to take different actions on the page you are viewing.

Go back to my sandbox and click on the page history. Now we're going to revert things the Twinkle way.

  1. Click the TW tab and select "Last". The new page should now correspond with the edit you made to the page a few minutes ago.
  2. In addition to all the usual stuff you see on a diff screen, now you've got more buttons! These buttons are the Twinkle version of rollback. On the left, you'll see a brown "Restore this version" link. This will undo all edits back to that edition of the page. This shouldn't be used too often, although may be necessary if multiple vandals hit a page all at once. The ones you'll be dealing with are on the right side. There are three forms of rollback within Twinkle. All three work essentially the same way, and identically to the actual rollback feature I mentioned before. The difference between the three is the edit summary left by the script. For what you know is vandalism, click the red "rollback (VANDAL)" button only. If you're pretty sure the editor made a genuine mistake, but it still needs to be removed, then click the green "rollback (AGF)" button (AGF stands for Assume Good Faith). The blue "rollback" button in the middle generally won't be used, but it goes neither direction (does not assume good or bad faith). A bunch of lines will load, telling you what the script is doing.
  3. Now, click on "View history" then click on the user talk page of the vandal (we'll be treating you as a vandal just for this demonstration). A page will load and begin spitting out a bunch of lines of text, telling you what the script is doing.
  4. At the top of your talk page, click the "TW" tab and choose the new top option which only appears on user talk pages, "Warn". Click on this now (don't worry, you won't be giving yourself a warning!)
  5. A blue box should appear. This form allows you to select a warning message to issue to the vandal. After you vandal-revert someone, the form will have some information already filled in for you. Leave this alone. What you are interested in are the two menus up top. The first one allows you to select the level of warning to issue. For a first-time vandal edit, you should usually select a "General Note (1)" warning. If the vandal has been given warnings previously, you can go to the next highest level they haven't been given yet. (If the last warning was a level 2, the next should be level 3, and so forth). In the second box, choose the most appropriate reason for the reversion and warning. "Vandalism" is rather general and vague, but sometimes is the best to issue. DO NOT CLICK SUBMIT. When you are done looking around, close the menu by clicking the red X up on the top of the box.

Other functions of Twinkle allow you to report vandals to administration for blocking, mark or propose pages for deletion, request protection of a page, and more. We can get into these more later - the reporting function will be handled in the next vandalism lesson. There is also Huggle to learn about later.

When using Twinkle or Huggle, be very careful about what you are doing and why. They are both very powerful tools, and because of this, it creates a great potential to cause great damage. Misuse of these tools, intentional or otherwise, can and will result in a block. You should not use the functions of this script until you understand how to do so. These will be explained to you in time. Even for those functions you do know how to use, if you are ever in doubt about what action to take in a situation, just don't take it. On patrol, there is always a more experienced editor just seconds behind you, so it'll be taken care of. As you do patrol, you'll become more and more confident about what is and what is not vandalism, and our next lesson on vandalism deals with those other kinds. Until then, good luck going on patrol! Please let me know as soon as possible if you have any questions. Happy editing as always.

Note regarding users removing vandalism warning templates from their talk page[edit]

Please note that the current policy states that users are allowed without penalization to remove vandalism warnings from their usertalk pages -- doing so indicates that they have read the warning template.

The final assignment[edit]

Please click here to leave me a new message.

  • Tell me what you know
  • Tell me what you don't know
  • Then tell me what you think
  • Always distinguish which from which

-- Colin Powell from It Worked for Me

Answer these questions on my talk page:

  1. What is vandalism?
  2. What are "obvious" indicators of a vandalism edit while watching recent changes?
  3. How do you revert vandalism?
  4. What warning template would you use if a user removed or blanked all the content from a page? (Use this page for help.)
  5. What warning template would you use if a user add the words "i really hate wikipedia!" to an article?
  6. How do you add an article to your watchlist?
  7. If you misuse such tools as Twinkle or VandalProof what could happen?
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