User:FrigidNinja/Adoption/Lesson Three A
This lesson will take you through the basics of reverting vandalism. While you are by no means obligated to revert vandalism, it's always helpful to have another editor out there, especially with the high rate of vandalism we're receiving. If you ever become an administrator, you will most likely be involved with reverting vandalism and blocking vandals. So, let's get started.
As you know, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. This is both a blessing and a curse — it allows many editors with good intentions to contribute helpfully to the encyclopedia, but also allows people with not-so-good intents to mess around with pages. Fortunately, there are many volunteers in Wikipedia that will generally revert the vandalism within minutes or even seconds.
So, just what is vandalism? Here at Wikipedia, we define vandalism as any edit made deliberately to harm the encyclopedia (or any other page). This means that, for an edit to be considered vandalism, it must fit three criteria:
- The edit is harmful to the encyclopedia
- The editor is aware that this edit is harmful
- The editor made this edit to harm the encyclopedia
Often, it's easy to recognize vandalism. Many vandals will simply add swear words or remove random chunks of text. Some vandalism, however, is more sneaky, like changing height/weight values in templates. Basically, anything that can't be helpful to the article is considered vandalism, but remember to assume good faith. Edits such as non-English contributions or that appear to be trying to add information should not be considered vandalism.
Recent Changes
[edit]Now that we know what vandalism is, how do we find it? Well, the most useful tool is Special:RecentChanges. This special page lists every edit recently made on Wikipedia. You can find a link in the Interaction toolbar on the left. Looking at the page, it appears similar to a page's history. A typical entry in the list should look like this:
I'm going to explain what each part of the entry means; feel free to skip this if you're already familiar with it.
- (diff) stands for difference. Clicking on a diff link will show you the difference between a page before and after an edit was made. The link above will just bring you to the help page on diffs, but this link will show you an actual diff of a real edit. Note that text changed will be highlighted and in bold. This is useful while looking for vandalism, as it shows what a user added to or took away from a page.
- (hist) stands for history. This link will show you all edits that have been made to a page. You can click the link above to take you to the help page for hist links.
- The next link, in this case Canada, shows the article that was edited.
- The timestamp indicates when the edit was made. This is always in your time zone that you set under your preferences.
- The green or red number after the timestamp indicates how many bytes were added to or removed from the page. If the number is green, bytes were added; if red, bytes were removed. The number of bytes will generally correspond to the amount of characters on the page, but there are some characters that are more than one byte, and using templates can completely change this number. If the number is very large, it will be in bold. Bold red numbers are usually a good indication of vandalism.
- The next link is to the user who made the edit. If the edit was made by an anonymous user, the link will instead go to their contributions. The userpage link is followed by a link to the editor's talk page.
- The final part of the entry is the edit summary. In this case, the editor added information to the History section on the Canada article, so the edit summary will contain this information. It is usually good practice to include an edit summary for all edits, which will reduce the probability of your edit being reverted. Sometimes, special edit summaries will be present, such as "Blanked the page" or "Replaced content with...". These usually serve as a good indication of vandalism, but be careful, as users may sometimes blank their own userpages.
Now that you're familiar with Recent Changes, I want you to go and find three instances of vandalism. Don't revert them yet; we'll get to that later. Chances are, another editor will revert them anyways. Just post the URL of each vandalism edit into each pair of brackets below.
[] [] []
When you're done this part, we'll move on to the second part of the lesson.