Wikipedia:Cleaning up vandalism

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For a very simple guide to fixing vandalism for newcomers, see Help:Simple guide to vandalism cleanup.
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Cleaning Up Vandalism

Shortcuts

This page offers an introduction to cleaning up vandalism on Wikipedia. For the WikiProject on vandalism cleanup, see the Counter-Vandalism Unit.

A few things for current and aspiring vandal-fighters to keep in mind:

  • Good-faith efforts to improve the encyclopedia are not vandalism, even if they are misguided or ill-considered.
  • Content disputes are not vandalism. They should be dealt with by following the
    dispute resolution
    procedure.
  • Most edits by new or unregistered contributors are NOT vandalism. Check out the content added or removed. Don't revert blindly, and remember
    not to bite the newcomers
    .
  • Edits that appear to be in bad faith should not be considered vandalism until they can be proven such at a later time.
  • Learn about what motivates a vandal.
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How to help

  • Anyone can help! Whenever you spot a page that has been vandalised, you are encouraged to edit it and clean it up, and/or warn the vandal using an appropriate warning template. See What to do if you spot vandalism below.
  • If you find yourself cleaning up vandalism frequently, you might be interested in patrolling recent changes. Note that participation is entirely voluntary. Also, you are not required to enlist anywhere.
  • There are various tools to help you. See the Tools section below.
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What to do if you spot vandalism

This guide only applies to
official policy
.

1. Revert the vandalism by viewing the page's history and selecting the most recent version of the page prior to the vandalism. Use an edit summary such as 'rvv' or 'reverted vandalism' and click on the button "Publish changes".

See also the section below for tools to help with reverting.

2. Warn the vandal. Access the vandal's talk page and warn them using an appropriate template.

See
this table
for a wider selection of warning templates.

3. Report vandals who continue to vandalise after having received a final warning. Most cases of vandalism should be reported to

sockpuppets
).

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Keep in mind...

Some useful reminders:

  • Don't fall for that
    !
  • Don't bite the newcomers. Not all bad edits are necessarily intentional vandalism. Some of them may just be test edits by newer editors.
  • On many ISPs, IP addresses are shared by many users, so be extra-careful not to be rude in your messages, as people seeing them may not be the same ones who vandalised.
  • Content disputes are not vandalism: If a user is adding biased content or you disagree with the information added, that doesn't mean the editor is vandalising. This includes violations of
    resolving disputes
    .
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Tools

The following is a list of tools and resources available for those who want to clean up with a more systematic approach.

Things to review

Monitoring

Shortcut
Screenshot of Wikipedia recent changes IRC feed

The

living people, new accounts' contribs, IPs' contribs, mobile contribs (as these are more prone to vandalism, see Help:Recent changes), and even by likelihood of being damaging or bad-faith. Searching for pages by their namespace and specific tags
(e.g. VisualEditor, possible BLP issue or vandalism, etc.) can also be done. If they contain harmful edits, you revert to the previous version. However, the high volume of edits that occur each second makes this difficult to accomplish most of the time, and several tools have been created to simplify the process:

Rollback tools

These tools extend the

rollback
feature by allowing you to specify a summary when using rollback. They may also offer additional features:

Rollback-like scripts

These tools can be used to achieve the same effect as

rollback
if you do not have it.

  • RC patrol script gives non-administrators revert, filter, and popup tools while using the monobook skin.
  • Main page
    Please be aware that this program is not hosted on Wikimedia Foundation servers
  • Navigation popups are a set of utilities that appear when hovering over wikilinks. Particularly, hovering over links of old versions provides a "revert" link.
  • Twinkle
     gives both non-administrators and administrators three types of rollback functions. Other functions include a full library of speedy deletion functions, user warnings, pseudo-automatic reporting of vandals, and more.
  • RedWarn
    , like Twinkle, gives both non-administrators and administrators nearly twenty types of rollback functions, including a "rollback preview" and "quick rollback".
  • Ultraviolet also provides several different types of rollback functions for both non-administrators and administrators, like RedWarn.
  • mobileUndo (new version) a script which allows you to revert when using the mobile interface.

Special pages

  • User:Adam1213/warn is a page that simplifies the process of warning vandals by allowing warnings to be submitted to specific users directly from the page.

Task Forces

  • Wikipedia:Counter-Vandalism Unit A voluntary group who will provide assistance at times of high levels of vandalism and advice on counter vandalism methods.
  • recent changes
    for recently edited pages and intervene if necessary.

IRC channels

Note that these are not operated by or affiliated with Wikipedia.

Discord server

See also: Wikipedia:Discord

A Discord server has been started to help coordinate anti-vandalism response - please consider joining.

Vandalism Detection Score Services

  • WMF ORES is a web service and API that provides machine learning as a service for Wikimedia projects maintained by the Scoring Platform team. The system is designed to help automate critical wiki-work – for example, vandalism detection and removal. Currently, the two general types of scores that ORES generates are in the context of “edit quality” and “article quality.”[1]

Other

Green Alert. Any Wikipedia Security Personnel would be helpful.
[view • purge] 3.62 RPM according to EnterpriseyBot 19:10, 26 April 2024 (UTC) change[reply]
4
  • Template:Vandalism information, a tool used as an indication of the current overall level of vandalism that is taking place on Wikipedia. On the page, click the edit button below the vandalism meter to change its level from 5 to 1 and/or add a short comment; 5 indicates very low levels of vandalism, and 1 indicates extremely high. You can add the vandalism information template to your userpage to stay up to date. See Template talk:Vandalism information for different styles.
  • Countervandalism Network, volunteer group that operates the "#cvn-" channels. This group is not owned by or affiliated with Wikimedia Foundation.
  • Wikilink scripts enable you to double click on [[wikilinks]] within IRC clients. Useful if doing patrol on the IRC channels.
  • There are other scripts that may be handy while doing cleanup (not necessarily vandalism cleanup). Check them at
    WP:JS
    )
  • Template:Toolbar experiments, a tool to help with finding test edits in articles.

References

  1. ^ "ORES - MediaWiki". www.mediawiki.org. Retrieved 2019-07-24.
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Dealing with vandalism

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