Wikipedia:Vandalism
From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.
Wikipedia is a target for vandals. Instead of making useful changes, vandals do some or all of these:
- Add text or pictures that may offend people
- Add lots of nonsense
- Add information that they know is wrong.
- Remove information from pages
- Make personal attacks: they insult other people on Wikipedia
- Move pages to other names, usually names that make no sense.
Vandalism is a very serious problem, and people who vandalise may be blocked from making changes to Wikipedia.
[edit] How to fight vandalism
Only administrators can block users, but you can still help! To find vandalism, become a newest changes patroller!
- Click the 'New changes' link on the left bar.
- Check some of the edits by pressing the (diff) link to see the changes. Look out for anonymous users - most vandals contribute with just their IP address rather than a user name.
If you see that a page has been vandalised:
- Revert the page
- Warn the vandal by putting {{subst:test}} ~~~~ on their talk page, or {{subst:stopvandal}} ~~~~ if they have vandalised many pages.
- Check their contributions by clicking their name on the 'history' tab. They may have vandalised pages before.
- If they continue to vandalise pages, do not continue to fight with them by reverting -- report them to administrators here.
- If there are no administrators online to block the users, try to contact them through their other Wikipedia talk pages if they have one, or through the email links on Wikipedia:Administrators.
In addition to New changes, users may also watch for vandalism in #vandalism-simple, an IRC channel dedicated to fighting vandalism on Simple Wikipedia and Wiktionary.
