Wikipedia:Vandalism

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Vandalism is indisputably bad-faith addition, deletion, or change to content, made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia. The largest quantity of vandalism consists of replacement of prominent articles 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 explicit and inarguable, are not considered vandalism at Wikipedia. Committing vandalism is a violation of Wikipedia policy; it needs to be spotted, and then dealt with – if you cannot deal with it yourself, you can seek help from others.

A 2002 study by IBM found that most Wikipedia vandalism is reverted within five minutes. [1]

Types of vandalism

These are the most common forms of vandalism on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:How to spot vandalism for details on each of these and tips on how to find such edits.

Spam

Adding inappropriate external links for self-promotion.

VandalBot

A script or "robot" that attempts to vandalize or spam massive amounts of articles (hundreds or thousands), blanking, or adding commercial links.

Childish vandalism

Adding graffiti or blanking pages or the female cyclist vandal. Note that this page, itself, was blank page vandalized on June 11, 2005.

Silly vandalism

Users will sometimes create joke articles or replace existing articles with plausible-sounding nonsense, or add silly jokes to existing articles (this includes Mr. Pelican Shit.)

Sneaky vandalism

Vandalism which is harder to spot. Adding misinformation, changing dates or making other sensible-appearing substitutions and typos (e.g. [2] which was reverted because the source material is easily available).

Attention-seeking vandalism

Adding insults, using offensive usernames, replacing articles with jokes etc. (see also Wikipedia:No personal attacks)

User page vandalism

Replacing User pages with insults, profanity, etc. (see also Wikipedia:No personal attacks)

Image vandalism

Uploading provocative images, inserting political messages, making malicious animated GIFs, etc.

Template vandalism

Adding any of the above to templates.

Page move vandalism

Moving pages to offensive or nonsense names. Most infamous example was the Willy on Wheels.

Redirect vandalism

Redirecting articles or talk pages to offensive articles or images. One example is the Autofellatio redirect vandal.

See also

• Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress - report current activity
• Wikipedia:How to spot vandalism
• Wikipedia:Simple vandalism
• Wikipedia:Dealing with vandalism
• Meta:Friends of gays should not be allowed to edit articles (Humor)
• Wikipedia:Meaningless connection