How does a sysop determine the IP of a registered user for IP-blocking of vandalism? -- Zippy 05:53, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
He/she doesn't. Only a developer can do that. -- Someone else 05:54, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
From the Village pump
move to wikipedia:dealing with vandalism
Folks, what's our policy on "telling tales" (I can't think of a better term) on our misguided schoolkid vandals? Just as an example, I was looking at (porn-link) vandalism done my someone at IP [ http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=205.174.111.220 205.174.111.220 ], which resolves to a Pennsylvanian school district, and already reverted by the dedicated User:Ahoerstemeier :). Do we have a policy of sending the net admin for such an address a (hopefully mild) nastygram, or do we just let it lie? If we do, can someone point me to the policy page, and if we don't - should we? (In the latter case, I'd gladly draft a gentle nastygram for communal approval). Finlay McWalter 21:33, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)
"These blocks should last for a maximum of one month" -- Isn't it one day only? (See Wikipedia:Bans_and_blocks#Effects of being blocked) -- Menchi ( Talk) â 11:00, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)
"block the IPs of persistent vandals." -- How persistent? I may be mistaken, but it seems like sometimes vandals are blocked after 5 attempts. Which is admittedly very annoying already, and potentially damaging. -- Menchi ( Talk) â 11:00, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I don't understand why we don't all need to register before making edits. I'm sure this possibility has been discussed. Can someone direct me? (I've inadvertently edited while unregistered myself.) Is this a 'freedom' issue? Wetman 11:18, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)
The effort before wikipedia suffered from too many restrictions and wikipedia was begun as a radically open system to assist the other. Wikipedia became a huge success overshadowing and killing the former project. Various processes, semi-rules and so forth have been introduced into wikipedia to lessen the vandalism, but no one wahts to kill the goose that creates the gold. Anons contribute more than they vandalize and even more important, one edit becomes ten, they get hooked and soon another valued contributor is born. Stopping the anon edits could easily stifle that birthing process. 4.250.198.9 20:31, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
(from the village pump)
If a vandal disrupts a page and you revert it, and the vandal reverts your revert, have restraint and do not revert immediately. The vandal is trying to start a revert war. Do not take the bait. Leave the vandal hanging. Go back in an few hours and THEN revert. It is unlikely that the vandal will still be around.
More times than not, this strategy works. And you can spend your time editing things you want, rather than having your time sucked into a revert war. Kingturtle 06:15, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
How should one deal with bully editing that involves moving articles? The moving of an article can certainly be achieved by bold editing, but in the case where there is a discussion on the subject one ought to await taking action until consensus has been achieved. Moving ahead of consensus or even being unwilling to take part in a discussion would be considered bully editing, and as such a form of vandalism. Ordinarily, vandalism of an article can simply be reverted. Cut and paste moves are simply a variant of this, but the "Move this page" function may not allow such a move to be reverted if the originating page has been edited. I have recently been made an administrator and I'm looking for some advice on being able to use these powers for resolution without inadvertly setting a move war in motion. -- Mic 11:38, Mar 25, 2004 (UTC)
A study by IBM found that most Wikipedia vandalism is reverted within five minutes.
Is there a way to remove Vandalism from the edit history. My impression is that the general response to Vandalism is to just revert the edit, but I recently noticed a problem where the vandal also included the offensive text in the Edit Summary so that it continues to show up in the edit history. You can see an example on the page history for Ridley Scott or [4] --- Solipsist 06:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
There is another type of vandalism that isn't covered in the article, namely self-promotional vandalism. This would include unnecessary links to sites to try to increase traffic to them, or to influence Page rank. I think that the nigritude ultramarine contest guys would fall under that category as well. - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 21:40, Jun 4, 2004 (UTC)
Does removing vandalism count as a minor edit?
- RealGrouchy 01:14, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I removed Trolls from the vandalism section. Whatever one thinks about it, it is not useful to confuse the two things. Mark Richards 15:41, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There is no confusion. Trolling is vandalism. - Hephaestos| § 15:43, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Trolls try to provoke a reaction by deliberately damaging content. The ends are inconsequential. - Hephaestos| § 15:46, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, for example, by blanking other people's user pages, or taunting them on their talk page. Mark Richards 15:52, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Not in any meaningful sense. You userpage is not part of the encyclopedia content. Look, the bottom line is that there is a useful distinction between someone who replaces a page with "YOU ARE GAY" and a user who makes a controversial edit that could be reasonable, but is designed to produce heated debate (like listing George Bush on the list of alcoholics). The two are not the same, and we need to keep the two terms meaningful. Mark Richards 15:56, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The end result is the same, which is to say the degradation of the quality of the material. There is no reason a distinction should be made. - Hephaestos| § 16:02, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
No, the end result is not the same, there is no debate over the first, and considerable over the second. As you know, the poll on this issue has not reached concensus, whereas there is concnesus on vandals. The two are not the same and you are trying to push trolling into the category of vandalism because you can't get people to agree on allowing you to ban people you call trolls. It's not a good idea, because you confuse the terminology. Mark Richards 16:04, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
"Vandalism is indisputable bad-faith addition, deletion, or change to content, made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia." That's not terribly ambiguous, and I didn't write it. - Hephaestos| § 16:10, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, if someone makes a good edit, in bad faith, is that vandalism? Compromise the encyclopedia? In whose opinion? Vandals are clear, and trolls are not vandals (at least, not always, some trolls vandalise as well as troll, of course). Mark Richards 16:12, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Applying the concept of "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist", one can see that someone can put George Bush in a list of alcoholics (He SAID he had an alcohol problem) another can revert that saying the first was a troll; and the first can revert claiming valdalism because verifiable data is being deleted. Calling people names proves nothing. Asserting an act is trolling or vandalism is often a spurious attack to win an edit war based on ego. The "I know they are the bad guy so I can attack them" attitude is itslf POV. We ALL can be wrong. 4.250.198.9 20:48, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I removed this. Firstly, we do remove personal attacks, and we do sometimes edit Wikipedia to remove the real names of people who've decided to leave (cf user:H.J.), and I think these things are to be encouraged. If it's referring to articles - well, deleting information from articles is a normal part of the editing process, for example, if it's unverifiable.
I'm not sure whether a specific article is being thought of, but I can't think of any acts of censorship that I'd be happy to consider vandalism. Comments? Martin 17:47, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
If an anon user is vandalising talk pages persistently, how long should he/she be banned? What if they're blanking/vandalising articles? etc... — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 20:38, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
(The whole discussion was replaced by "vary bad" which suggests to me that the school in question may have a fair bit of work still to do on that one!)
whois 206.172.38.200 Bell Canada WORLDLINX04 (NET-206-172-0-0-1)
206.172.0.0 - 206.172.255.255
Lambton Kent District School Board LKDSB-CA (NET-206-172-38-192-1)
206.172.38.192 - 206.172.38.255
is there a template for vandals, like the one for tests? place the code prominently please. - Omegatron 19:44, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)
The link to Google Watch brings you to some irrelevant rant about how evil Google is, and has nothing at all to do with IP addresses. Since I couldn't find evidence that a vandal had put it there, though, I figure it was merely out-of-date. I replaced it with a link to ARIN's Whois. — Asbestos | Talk 15:13, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I think we should suggest that whenever you revert vandalism, you add something to the user's talk page. This makes it easy to identify repeat offenders at a glance by providing a record past vandalism on the talk page. – flamurai ( t) 11:47, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)
I've been dealing alot with vandalism the last few months and am starting to get rather good at it. The most important thing I've learned, and a thing I believe other could take note of, is that by far the most effective template to get most vandals to stop is the polite test template. Ok, so the template is (mostly) meant for test-edits, and the higher numbered testx templates have a more direct wording that one might think would scare the vandals more. But in my experience, if I start off my warnings with, say test3, after a user has vandalised a lot of pages, the vandal is most likely to just turn even more provocative and continue until being blocked. But give them the polite test-template first (even if they've been defacing, blanking, inserting profanity (i.e. been vandalising) lots of articles) and a surprisingly large number of them simply stop. Politeness works!
But my problem is users with an allready crowded talk-page. A page full of month old messages with block-threats and whatnot. Appending a test1 on those pages will simply look stupid and drown in all the harser messages when the anon clicks on "you have new message" to read. And most of these ip's are behind large isp or school proxies, so it's quite likely that the old messages were not read by that same user before.
So, my question is: Would it be ok to delete those old messages (say, more than a week old) when dealing with a new vandal? To clean the talk-page and give him the test1 template as his sole message? I know that many don't approve of deleting talk-messages, so that's why I'm asking. The old messages will of course still be available in the history, and it is certainly usefull to see earlyer vandalism history, but I feel that starting a fresh sometimes would be the best approach. Shanes 03:02, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'm sure it has been discussed before, but after going through the Recent Changes page, I'm beginning to see that the 'majority' (probably close to 95%) of vandalism occurs with non-registered users. While it 'may' reduce the amount of legitimate edits done to articles, it certainly will have a deterrent effect for a lot of vandals. Also, those who edit anonymously will most likely register if they feel they really do have something meaningful to add to an article. -- MacAddct1984 15:39, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
Why not let the non-registered editing in general, but close non-edited editing for pages which are frequently target of vandalism (like George_W._Bush, look at the history of the page)? This would make it a little bit more difficult for vandals. And - enhance the registration by a required working email. This is imho acceptable for common users but makes it more difficult for vandals to re-register. Wilfried Elmenreich 23:15, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Just four points:
Uncle G 09:57:50, 2005-07-26 (UTC)
I've protected this page since it's linked from some of the vandal warning templates and gets a lot of vandalism without many legitimate edits. Since I imagine this protection will be a fairly long-term affair, and I don't think the protection notice should be on the page itself: {{vprotected}} — Dan | Talk 23:18, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC)
I recently blocked User:62.253.96.42 for 48 hours due to vandalism (they had been blocked before), and the next day received two emails from other people using this IP wanting the IP to be unblocked. A few days later this IP was blocked again, but later unblocked b/c a registered user was accidentally blocked b/c he was on that IP. Today, I saw that this anon had another vandal-warning. A few of their edits are vandlism, but many are not. This is an NTL IP. Is there a way to deal with the (probably) one person doing the vandalism, without disrupting the other people that may use the IP? Lachatdelarue (talk) 13:19, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia has two conflicting policies which puts me in a situation I need a resolution to:
The question is, what do you do about Vandalism on Talk pages? On the Talk:Arguments for and against drug prohibition page, someone anonymously posted "specially since most non whites are high all the time....right dudetts?" My gut feeling is that it should be deleted, but I am aware that not deleting another user's words on a Talk page is considered sacrosanct among the Wiki community. Please help! Ravenswood 01:42, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Can an admin fix the flawed indentation on this page in the Templates section. I would, but the page is protected. Damn vandals. :) Superm401 | Talk 05:07, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
I think this page should not be a redirect. It is a good guide to those who want to stop vandalism, and if it were not for the fact that this page is one of the rare fully protected pages, I would revert it back to a separate page immediately. Mathmagic 18:34, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
How does a sysop determine the IP of a registered user for IP-blocking of vandalism? -- Zippy 05:53, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
He/she doesn't. Only a developer can do that. -- Someone else 05:54, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
From the Village pump
move to wikipedia:dealing with vandalism
Folks, what's our policy on "telling tales" (I can't think of a better term) on our misguided schoolkid vandals? Just as an example, I was looking at (porn-link) vandalism done my someone at IP [ http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=205.174.111.220 205.174.111.220 ], which resolves to a Pennsylvanian school district, and already reverted by the dedicated User:Ahoerstemeier :). Do we have a policy of sending the net admin for such an address a (hopefully mild) nastygram, or do we just let it lie? If we do, can someone point me to the policy page, and if we don't - should we? (In the latter case, I'd gladly draft a gentle nastygram for communal approval). Finlay McWalter 21:33, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)
"These blocks should last for a maximum of one month" -- Isn't it one day only? (See Wikipedia:Bans_and_blocks#Effects of being blocked) -- Menchi ( Talk) â 11:00, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)
"block the IPs of persistent vandals." -- How persistent? I may be mistaken, but it seems like sometimes vandals are blocked after 5 attempts. Which is admittedly very annoying already, and potentially damaging. -- Menchi ( Talk) â 11:00, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I don't understand why we don't all need to register before making edits. I'm sure this possibility has been discussed. Can someone direct me? (I've inadvertently edited while unregistered myself.) Is this a 'freedom' issue? Wetman 11:18, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)
The effort before wikipedia suffered from too many restrictions and wikipedia was begun as a radically open system to assist the other. Wikipedia became a huge success overshadowing and killing the former project. Various processes, semi-rules and so forth have been introduced into wikipedia to lessen the vandalism, but no one wahts to kill the goose that creates the gold. Anons contribute more than they vandalize and even more important, one edit becomes ten, they get hooked and soon another valued contributor is born. Stopping the anon edits could easily stifle that birthing process. 4.250.198.9 20:31, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
(from the village pump)
If a vandal disrupts a page and you revert it, and the vandal reverts your revert, have restraint and do not revert immediately. The vandal is trying to start a revert war. Do not take the bait. Leave the vandal hanging. Go back in an few hours and THEN revert. It is unlikely that the vandal will still be around.
More times than not, this strategy works. And you can spend your time editing things you want, rather than having your time sucked into a revert war. Kingturtle 06:15, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
How should one deal with bully editing that involves moving articles? The moving of an article can certainly be achieved by bold editing, but in the case where there is a discussion on the subject one ought to await taking action until consensus has been achieved. Moving ahead of consensus or even being unwilling to take part in a discussion would be considered bully editing, and as such a form of vandalism. Ordinarily, vandalism of an article can simply be reverted. Cut and paste moves are simply a variant of this, but the "Move this page" function may not allow such a move to be reverted if the originating page has been edited. I have recently been made an administrator and I'm looking for some advice on being able to use these powers for resolution without inadvertly setting a move war in motion. -- Mic 11:38, Mar 25, 2004 (UTC)
A study by IBM found that most Wikipedia vandalism is reverted within five minutes.
Is there a way to remove Vandalism from the edit history. My impression is that the general response to Vandalism is to just revert the edit, but I recently noticed a problem where the vandal also included the offensive text in the Edit Summary so that it continues to show up in the edit history. You can see an example on the page history for Ridley Scott or [4] --- Solipsist 06:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
There is another type of vandalism that isn't covered in the article, namely self-promotional vandalism. This would include unnecessary links to sites to try to increase traffic to them, or to influence Page rank. I think that the nigritude ultramarine contest guys would fall under that category as well. - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 21:40, Jun 4, 2004 (UTC)
Does removing vandalism count as a minor edit?
- RealGrouchy 01:14, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I removed Trolls from the vandalism section. Whatever one thinks about it, it is not useful to confuse the two things. Mark Richards 15:41, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
There is no confusion. Trolling is vandalism. - Hephaestos| § 15:43, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Trolls try to provoke a reaction by deliberately damaging content. The ends are inconsequential. - Hephaestos| § 15:46, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, for example, by blanking other people's user pages, or taunting them on their talk page. Mark Richards 15:52, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Not in any meaningful sense. You userpage is not part of the encyclopedia content. Look, the bottom line is that there is a useful distinction between someone who replaces a page with "YOU ARE GAY" and a user who makes a controversial edit that could be reasonable, but is designed to produce heated debate (like listing George Bush on the list of alcoholics). The two are not the same, and we need to keep the two terms meaningful. Mark Richards 15:56, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The end result is the same, which is to say the degradation of the quality of the material. There is no reason a distinction should be made. - Hephaestos| § 16:02, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
No, the end result is not the same, there is no debate over the first, and considerable over the second. As you know, the poll on this issue has not reached concensus, whereas there is concnesus on vandals. The two are not the same and you are trying to push trolling into the category of vandalism because you can't get people to agree on allowing you to ban people you call trolls. It's not a good idea, because you confuse the terminology. Mark Richards 16:04, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
"Vandalism is indisputable bad-faith addition, deletion, or change to content, made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia." That's not terribly ambiguous, and I didn't write it. - Hephaestos| § 16:10, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, if someone makes a good edit, in bad faith, is that vandalism? Compromise the encyclopedia? In whose opinion? Vandals are clear, and trolls are not vandals (at least, not always, some trolls vandalise as well as troll, of course). Mark Richards 16:12, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Applying the concept of "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist", one can see that someone can put George Bush in a list of alcoholics (He SAID he had an alcohol problem) another can revert that saying the first was a troll; and the first can revert claiming valdalism because verifiable data is being deleted. Calling people names proves nothing. Asserting an act is trolling or vandalism is often a spurious attack to win an edit war based on ego. The "I know they are the bad guy so I can attack them" attitude is itslf POV. We ALL can be wrong. 4.250.198.9 20:48, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I removed this. Firstly, we do remove personal attacks, and we do sometimes edit Wikipedia to remove the real names of people who've decided to leave (cf user:H.J.), and I think these things are to be encouraged. If it's referring to articles - well, deleting information from articles is a normal part of the editing process, for example, if it's unverifiable.
I'm not sure whether a specific article is being thought of, but I can't think of any acts of censorship that I'd be happy to consider vandalism. Comments? Martin 17:47, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
If an anon user is vandalising talk pages persistently, how long should he/she be banned? What if they're blanking/vandalising articles? etc... — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 20:38, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
(The whole discussion was replaced by "vary bad" which suggests to me that the school in question may have a fair bit of work still to do on that one!)
whois 206.172.38.200 Bell Canada WORLDLINX04 (NET-206-172-0-0-1)
206.172.0.0 - 206.172.255.255
Lambton Kent District School Board LKDSB-CA (NET-206-172-38-192-1)
206.172.38.192 - 206.172.38.255
is there a template for vandals, like the one for tests? place the code prominently please. - Omegatron 19:44, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)
The link to Google Watch brings you to some irrelevant rant about how evil Google is, and has nothing at all to do with IP addresses. Since I couldn't find evidence that a vandal had put it there, though, I figure it was merely out-of-date. I replaced it with a link to ARIN's Whois. — Asbestos | Talk 15:13, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I think we should suggest that whenever you revert vandalism, you add something to the user's talk page. This makes it easy to identify repeat offenders at a glance by providing a record past vandalism on the talk page. – flamurai ( t) 11:47, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)
I've been dealing alot with vandalism the last few months and am starting to get rather good at it. The most important thing I've learned, and a thing I believe other could take note of, is that by far the most effective template to get most vandals to stop is the polite test template. Ok, so the template is (mostly) meant for test-edits, and the higher numbered testx templates have a more direct wording that one might think would scare the vandals more. But in my experience, if I start off my warnings with, say test3, after a user has vandalised a lot of pages, the vandal is most likely to just turn even more provocative and continue until being blocked. But give them the polite test-template first (even if they've been defacing, blanking, inserting profanity (i.e. been vandalising) lots of articles) and a surprisingly large number of them simply stop. Politeness works!
But my problem is users with an allready crowded talk-page. A page full of month old messages with block-threats and whatnot. Appending a test1 on those pages will simply look stupid and drown in all the harser messages when the anon clicks on "you have new message" to read. And most of these ip's are behind large isp or school proxies, so it's quite likely that the old messages were not read by that same user before.
So, my question is: Would it be ok to delete those old messages (say, more than a week old) when dealing with a new vandal? To clean the talk-page and give him the test1 template as his sole message? I know that many don't approve of deleting talk-messages, so that's why I'm asking. The old messages will of course still be available in the history, and it is certainly usefull to see earlyer vandalism history, but I feel that starting a fresh sometimes would be the best approach. Shanes 03:02, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'm sure it has been discussed before, but after going through the Recent Changes page, I'm beginning to see that the 'majority' (probably close to 95%) of vandalism occurs with non-registered users. While it 'may' reduce the amount of legitimate edits done to articles, it certainly will have a deterrent effect for a lot of vandals. Also, those who edit anonymously will most likely register if they feel they really do have something meaningful to add to an article. -- MacAddct1984 15:39, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
Why not let the non-registered editing in general, but close non-edited editing for pages which are frequently target of vandalism (like George_W._Bush, look at the history of the page)? This would make it a little bit more difficult for vandals. And - enhance the registration by a required working email. This is imho acceptable for common users but makes it more difficult for vandals to re-register. Wilfried Elmenreich 23:15, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Just four points:
Uncle G 09:57:50, 2005-07-26 (UTC)
I've protected this page since it's linked from some of the vandal warning templates and gets a lot of vandalism without many legitimate edits. Since I imagine this protection will be a fairly long-term affair, and I don't think the protection notice should be on the page itself: {{vprotected}} — Dan | Talk 23:18, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC)
I recently blocked User:62.253.96.42 for 48 hours due to vandalism (they had been blocked before), and the next day received two emails from other people using this IP wanting the IP to be unblocked. A few days later this IP was blocked again, but later unblocked b/c a registered user was accidentally blocked b/c he was on that IP. Today, I saw that this anon had another vandal-warning. A few of their edits are vandlism, but many are not. This is an NTL IP. Is there a way to deal with the (probably) one person doing the vandalism, without disrupting the other people that may use the IP? Lachatdelarue (talk) 13:19, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia has two conflicting policies which puts me in a situation I need a resolution to:
The question is, what do you do about Vandalism on Talk pages? On the Talk:Arguments for and against drug prohibition page, someone anonymously posted "specially since most non whites are high all the time....right dudetts?" My gut feeling is that it should be deleted, but I am aware that not deleting another user's words on a Talk page is considered sacrosanct among the Wiki community. Please help! Ravenswood 01:42, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Can an admin fix the flawed indentation on this page in the Templates section. I would, but the page is protected. Damn vandals. :) Superm401 | Talk 05:07, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
I think this page should not be a redirect. It is a good guide to those who want to stop vandalism, and if it were not for the fact that this page is one of the rare fully protected pages, I would revert it back to a separate page immediately. Mathmagic 18:34, 22 February 2007 (UTC)