Wikipedia:Vandalism
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 15, 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.