Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Long-term abuse
Previous debate at Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:Long_term_abuse
Over the 18 months since the need for this page was previously discussed, the approach to vandalism on Wikipedia has matured, and there is greater confidence in the tools and methods first introduced 2-3 years ago, to wit:
- The automated tools to follow recent changes have grown in sophistication, quantity, and number of users
- The use of pattern matching to detect vandalism, pioneered in the aforementioned tools, is now common in fully automated bots and the abuse filter.
- The de facto policy on checkuser and blocking has become less burdensome on those Wikipedians who are dealing with vandalism
- More effective means of dealing with open proxies
- Anti-vandalism features of MediaWiki, itself, such as expanding use of captchas, non-admin rollback, the project-specific spam blacklist, edit throttling, and finer control of range blocks
Nearly any editor who has been around long enough would acknowledge that the threat of vandalism, though still present, has continuously declined over the last five years. The monitoring at the counter-vandalism page confirms this.
The importance of denying recognition to vandals has, in my opinion, become more important than the retention of often inaccurate and increasingly dated documentation of vandalism patterns. In today's Wikipedia, it is not necessary to understand who engages in what patterns of vandalism to deal with it.