Wikipedia:Feedback walkthrough/4
Dealing with bad feedback
Wikipedia has hundreds of millions of readers, but only a tiny percentage of them edit. Article feedback is a way of engaging readers and letting them make productive contributions on the fly.
While much of the incoming feedback is generally useful, there will be inappropriate posts, and we have developed several tools to deal with this. A "thumbs-down" button is provided next to the "thumbs-up" button (mentioned in "Dealing with good feedback").
Clicking this button will make this feedback post appear less prominently to both readers and editors. There is also a "Flag as abuse" button for more serious problems; if five users click this button, the comment is automatically hidden. It's possible that you'll see the same sort of abuse appearing repeatedly; obscenities, for example. If so, you can request an Abuse Filter (which will automatically remove or tag this kind of feedback) here.
Occasionally you may also encounter seriously inappropriate feedback - defamation, private information or copyright infringements. This is to be expected - it's unfortunate, but it happens regularly with edits, so we've got a way of dealing with it :).
If you see feedback that falls into one of these categories, simply email oversight-en-wp
wikipedia.org and the volunteers on that email list will handle it. Please be sure the edit meets the requirements for suppression indicated above. Most kinds of vandalism do not qualify for the severe action of suppression.
If you're a rollbacker, administrator or reviewer, you have special user rights as a "monitor", which give you access to a "Hide" button in the toolbar. You can also use this to get rid of really inappropriate feedback. If one article is facing particularly serious abuse, an administrator can turn off Article Feedback for various classes of users through the "protect" function. If you're not an administrator, you can request that they do so at Requests for Page Protection.
