Help Vandalism
Here's how to help restore pages that have been vandalized.
Vandalism
To begin, you first must understand what vandalism is. Take this quote from Wikipedia:
>Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia (such as swearing, deleting letters to make inappropriate words, etc.) (see also Newbie experiment). The most common type of vandalism is the replacement of existing text 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 inarguably explicit are not considered vandalism at Wikipedia.
Vandalism is not synonymous with trolling, although some trolling is vandalism:
>Trolling is deliberate and intentional attempts to disrupt the usability of a wiki for its editors, administrators, developers, and other people who work to create content for and help run that wiki. Trolling is deliberate violation of the implicit rules of Internet social spaces. It is necessarily a value judgment made by one user about the value of another's contribution.
Recent Changes
So a vandal puts bad things on pages, basically. How do you help prevent this sort of thing?
One way you can help is by going to the [/wiki/Special:RecentChanges recent changes] page, and looking doing the following:
If there are so many ! signs that you can't possibly check them all, then look for these things:
If the page you find is vandalism, like if the page is blank, or if profanity has been added, you can revert the edit:
Page-move vandalism
Moving a page changes its title. Page-move vandalism is moving a page to deface it by giving it a title that is nonsensical or inappropriate.
Any time a page is moved, an entry in the [/wiki/Special:Log/move move log] appears on Recent Changes telling what page was moved to what title. If you see a page moved to a title that is nonsensical or contains inappropriate language or that simply adds random words, you should revert this move in this way:
Note that there will still be redirects at the old title; a sysop will need to delete these. If there's no sysop around at the time, you can add Template:Delete to the redirects to tag them for deletion.
