DreamHost:Vandalism
From DreamHost
Vandalism is defined as intentionally making non-constructive edits of any kind. There is little tolerance for such behavior on the DreamHost Wiki, and persistent offenders will find themselves temporarily blocked or permanently banned.
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Dealing with vandalism
If you see vandalism, revert it and leave an appropriate warning message on the user's talk page. Please sign warning tags with four tildes (~~~~). For the reversion edit, put in the edit summary that you have reverted vandalism, but do not perpetuate the vandalism by putting the text you have reverted. For persistent offenders that require a temporary block or permanent ban, please request the intervention of an administrator.
Important
- Check the page history in advance to make sure you remove all the vandalism – there may be multiple vandal edits, sometimes from several different IPs/accounts – and again afterwards to make sure that you have not unintentionally reverted any legitimate edits.
- If it is obvious that all versions of the page are pure vandalism, then you should nominate it for deletion, or if the page is patent nonsense or gibberish, mark it for speedy deletion by tagging it with
{{delete}}. - Also remember to check the vandal's (or vandals') other contributions – many vandals commit a sequence of edits that are vandalism, and you will often find more malicious edits to revert.
Types of vandalism
Vandalism may fall into one or more of the following categorizations:
- Blanking
- Removing all or significant parts of pages, or replacing entire established pages with one's own version without first gaining consensus. Sometimes important verifiable references are deleted with no valid reason(s) given in the summary. However, significant content removals are usually not considered to be vandalism where the reason for the removal of the content is readily apparent by examination of the content itself, or where a non-frivolous explanation for the removal of apparently legitimate content is provided, linked to, or referenced in an edit summary.
- Excessive lengthening
- Adding copious repetitive or meaningless content to a page.
- Spam
- Continuing to add external links to non-notable or irrelevant sites (e.g. to advertise one's website) to pages after having been warned is vandalism.
- Vandalbots
- A script or "robot" that attempts to vandalize or spam massive numbers of articles.
- Silly vandalism
- Adding profanity, graffiti, random characters, or other nonsense to pages; creating nonsensical pages, etc. Please note that the addition of random characters to pages is a common way that new users test edit and may not be intentionally malicious.
- Sneaky vandalism
- Vandalism which is harder to spot. This can include adding plausible misinformation to articles, (e.g minor alteration of dates), hiding vandalism (e.g. by making two bad edits and only reverting one), or reverting legitimate edits with the intent of hindering the improvement of pages.
- Userspace vandalism
- Adding insults, profanity, etc. to user pages or user talk pages.
- Image vandalism
- Uploading shock images, inappropriately placing explicit images on pages, or simply using any image in ways that are disruptive.
- Page-move vandalism
- Changing the names of pages (referred to as "page-moving") to disruptive or otherwise inappropriate terms.
- Link vandalism
- Modifying internal or external links within a page so that they appear the same but link to a page/site that they are not intended to (e.g an explicit image; a shock site).
- Modifying users' comments
- Editing other users' comments to substantially change their meaning (e.g. turning someone's vote around), except when removing a personal attack (which is somewhat controversial in and of itself). Signifying that a comment is unsigned is an exception. Please also note that correcting other users' typos is discouraged.
- Repeated uploading of copyrighted material
- Uploading or using material on the wiki in ways which violate DreamHost's copyright policies after having been warned is vandalism.
- Malicious account creation
- Creating accounts with usernames that contain deliberately offensive or disruptive terms is considered vandalism, whether the account is used or not.
- Edit comment vandalism
- Adding offensive edit comments in an attempt to leave a mark that cannot be easily expunged from the record. Often combined with malicious account creation.
- Hidden vandalism
- Any form of vandalism that makes use of embedded text, which is not visible to the final rendering of the article but visible during editing.
How to spot vandalism
The best way to detect vandalism is through recent changes patrolling, using the recent changes link to spot articles with edits that had come from IP addresses, or keeping an eye on your watchlist.
Active administrators
If you think someone needs to be temporarily blocked or permanently banned, leave a message on the talk page of one of these administrators:
