Wikipedia:Low traffic article vandalism
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 | This page in a nutshell: Vandalism on low traffic articles needs to be addressed. |
There needs to be a solution to continual vandalism of low traffic articles.
The problem
[edit]The real problem of detecting vandalism on these pages is the fact that they are low traffic and that vandalism happens infrequently, once every few days or so. This means that, one, vandalism is usually not caught until a day later or so. It also means that these pages would almost certainly not be protected, except by pending changes, precisely because of the fact that the vandalism only happens once every few days. An example of a page that has a problem like this is the Jangid article, which is vandalized every few days.
Possible solutions
[edit]A solution for this would be to apply pending changes protection to the article, which might work, although it could create a backlog, or just not work at all. It might not work at all because, as previously mentioned, these pages are low traffic, so even with the notability it gets by being a page with pending changes in the recent changes page, they might not be checked often. Also, since vandalism only happens on these articles once every few days, they won't appear on the recent changes page much anyways. So, what should we do? I think that the best solution is to put them in their own category, and then have a special recent changes page that would show recent edits to these pages. Another possible solution is to have some kind of pending changes status for articles that have the low traffic vandalism problem. These two solutions would work well, although the specifics would still need to be worked out. But, since these changes might not come to, what should editors do now? I suggest doing these things:
- Loading random articles and checking through their edit history, until you find a page that has infrequent vandalism. You would then put it on your watchlist and check it for vandalism occasionally.
- Put articles that are not widely known about but are most likely controversial on your watchlist.
- Check the contributions of editors and/or IP addresses that you have warned for vandalism.
- If you are unsure a contribution to a low traffic article is vandalism, ask a more experienced editor.