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Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of WushuWiki. Examples of typical vandalism are adding irrelevant obscenities and crude humor to a page, illegitimately blanking pages, and inserting obvious nonsense into a page.

Even if misguided, willfully against consensus, or disruptive, any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia is not vandalism. Edit warring over content is not vandalism. Careful consideration may be required to differentiate between edits that are beneficial, detrimental but well-intentioned, and vandalizing. Mislabeling good-faith edits as vandalism can be considered harmful.

Upon their discovery, revert clearly vandalizing edits. Then warn the vandalizing editor. Notify administrators of vandalizing users who persist despite warnings, and administrators should intervene to protect content and prevent further disruption by blocking such users from editing. When warranted, accounts whose main or only use is obvious vandalism or other forbidden activity may be blocked even without warning.

How to spot vandalism

Very useful ways to detect vandalism include:

  • Recent changes patrolling, using the recent changes link to spot suspicious edits
  • Keeping an eye on your watchlist
  • The edit history of an article may be checked for any recent suspicious edits, and compared with the version after any previous revert or cluster of non-suspicious edits. This method can check many suspicious edits at the same time. The article size, as given in bytes, usually increases slightly with time, while a sudden large decrease may indicate a section blanking.

In all the three methods above, examples of suspicious edits are those performed by IP addresses, red linked, or obviously improvised usernames. A good way to start is to click on every edit in watchlists, histories etc. with the least suspicion of being vandalism. Increased experience will probably give a sense of which edit descriptions are worth to check further and which may likely be ignored. IP editors should not be approached with the assumption that they are vandals. Although many vandals do vandalize without registering an account, there are many IP editors who are great contributors to WushuWiki. Always read the actual changes made and judge on that, rather than who made the changes.

  • Watching for edits tagged by the abuse filter. However, many tagged edits are legitimate, so they should not be blindly reverted. That is, do not revert without at least reading the edit.

How to respond to vandalism

If you see vandalism in an article, the simplest thing to do is just to remove it. But take care! Sometimes vandalism takes place on top of older, undetected vandalism. With undetected vandalism, editors may make edits without realizing the vandalism occurred. This can make it harder to detect and delete the vandalism, which is now hidden among other edits. Check the edit history to make sure you're reverting to a "clean" version of the page. Alternatively, if you can't tell where the best place is, take your best guess and leave a note on the article's talk page so that someone more familiar with the page can address the issue—or you can manually remove the vandalism without reverting it.

If you see vandalism on a list of changes (such as your watchlist), then revert it immediately. You may use the "undo" button (and the automatic edit summary it generates), and mark the change as minor. It may be helpful to check the page history to determine whether other recent edits by the same or other editors also represent vandalism. Repair all vandalism you can identify.

If you see that a user has added vandalism you may also check the user's other contributions (click "User contributions" on the left sidebar of the screen). If most or all of these are obvious vandalism you may report the user immediately to an administrator.

See also

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