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Vandalism is indisputably bad-faith addition, deletion, or change to content, made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia. The largest quantity of vandalism consists of replacement of prominent articles with obscenities, namecalling, or other wholly irrelevant content. Any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism. Apparent bad faith edits that do not make their bad faith nature explicit and inarguable, are not considered vandalism at Wikipedia. Committing vandalism is a violation of Wikipedia policy; it needs to be spotted, and then dealt with – if you cannot deal with it yourself, you can seek help from others.
A 2002 study by IBM found that most Wikipedia vandalism is reverted within five minutes. [1]
Types of vandalism
[adiht fruman]These are the most common forms of vandalism on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:How to spot vandalism for details on each of these and tips on how to find such edits.
- Spam
- Adding inappropriate external links for self-promotion, such as [2]
- VandalBot
- A script or "robot" that attempts to vandalize or spam massive numbers of articles (hundreds or thousands), blanking, or adding commercial links.
- Childish vandalism
- Adding graffiti (e.g. [3]) or blanking pages (e.g. [4]).
- Silly vandalism
- Users will sometimes create joke articles (e.g. [5]) or replace existing articles with plausible-sounding nonsense, or add silly jokes to existing articles.
- Sneaky vandalism
- Vandalism which is harder to spot. Adding misinformation, changing dates or making other sensible-appearing substitutions and typos (e.g. [6] which was reverted because the source material is easily available).
- Attention-seeking vandalism
- Adding insults, using offensive usernames, replacing articles with jokes etc. (see also Wikipedia:No personal attacks)
- User page vandalism
- Replacing User pages with insults, profanity, etc. (see also Wikipedia:No personal attacks)
- Image vandalism
- Uploading provocative images, inserting political messages, making malicious animated GIFs, etc.
- Template vandalism
- Adding any of the above to templates.
- Page move vandalism
- Moving pages to offensive or nonsense names. Most infamous example was the Willy on Wheels.
What vandalism is not
[adiht fruman]Although sometimes referred to as such, the following things are not vandalism and are therefore treated differently:
- Newbie test New users who discover the "Edit this page" button want to know if they can really edit any page, so they write something inside just to test it. This is not vandalism! On the contrary, these users should be warmly greeted, and given a reference to the Sandbox (e.g. using the {{test}} template message) where they can keep making their tests. (Sometimes they will even revert their own changes.)
- Extended newbie test Some users (especially the young ones) want to check out if they can make an article look really stupid, or radically change it to become unreadable. They simply want to test the limits of the wiki; they will stop when you revert their changes, and will feel embarrassed when you write them a message. Continuing such "testing" after this point is vandalism.
- Learning Wiki markup and manual of style For some users, it takes a while to learn the wiki-based markup, and will spend a little time experimenting with the different ways to make external links, internal links, and other special characters. Rather than condemning them as vandals, just explain to them what our standard style is on the issue in hand—perhaps pointing them towards our documentation at Wikipedia:How to edit a page, and the like.
- NPOV violations The neutral point of view is a difficult policy for many of us to understand, and even Wikipedia veterans occasionally accidentally introduce material which is non-ideal from an NPOV perspective. Indeed, we are all blinded by our beliefs to a greater or lesser extent. While regrettable, this is not vandalism. See also: NPOV dispute.
- Bold edits Wikipedians often make sweeping changes to articles in order to improve them—most of us aim to be bold when updating articles. While having large chunks of text you wrote removed, moved to talk, or substantially rewritten can sometimes feel like vandalism, it should not be confused with vandalism. That said, the wise Wikipedian tempers boldness with WikiLove.
- Bullying or stubbornness Some users cannot come to agreement with others who are willing to talk to them on an article's talk page, and repeatedly make changes opposed by everyone else. This is a matter of regret—you may wish to see our dispute resolution pages to get help. However, it is not vandalism.
- Harassing or making personal attacks We have a clear policy on Wikipedia of no personal attacks, and harassing other contributors is not allowed. Some forms of harassment are also clear cases of vandalism, such as home page vandalism. However, harassment is not in general vandalism.
- The unexpected Just because someone is editing in an unusual way doesn't make him or her a vandal. If someone is making solid edits but writing, "Hi, Mom!" in his or her edit summaries, this doesn't make them an oddball vandal; it makes him or her a newcomer. By all means have a friendly chat about the proper use of edit summaries. Don't blanket revert him/her. Don't block him/her.