Wikipedia:Wikipedia Connection/Newsletter/2018-10-03

Newsletter - October 3, 2018

The Ohio State University - Written by Jon McMahon

Meeting Information

Our next meeting is tomorrow, October 4, at 6:00 P.M. in Room 344 of the 18^th Avenue Library (same time and place as last week). Per usual, food will be provided. We recommend bringing a laptop computer to this meeting if possible.

WikiConference

Wikiconference North America 2018 is October 18-21, and it's happening right here in Columbus! For more information, see https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2018/Main_Page

If you're interested in attending, registration is available here: http://go.osu.edu/wcnareg Ohio Students can register for free.

The conference is in need of volunteers, especially those familiar with Ohio State's campus and facilities. If you're interested in helping out, please check out this link: http://go.osu.edu/wcnavolunteer

Meeting Topic

This week's topic is vandalism on Wikipedia.

Though most Wikipedia edits are honest attempts to make things better (and editors should assume this is the case when in doubt), people do try to vandalize articles from time to time. Vandalism ranges from obvious joke edits (see the history of this article) to more insidious attempts to misinform (see this list). People create articles on topics that are not notable enough (or are non-existent to begin with), add nonsense to existing pages, or sometimes even blank pages altogether.

Wikipedia combats vandalism in a number of ways. Editors frequently patrol recent edits to look for deleterious edits. Tools such as Huggle and Twinkle allow users to more quickly and effectively detect and revert vandalism. Some pages are protected due to frequent vandalism, preventing them from being edited by some users. Most commonly, only unregistered users and new accounts are prohibited, but some pages are protected to the point that only Administrators can edit them. Bots also patrol articles in search of vandalism, often responding more quickly than humans do.

Website

Wikipedia Connection's main page is located here. A quick way to open our page from anywhere on Wikipedia is to enter WP:OSU in the search bar.