Vandalism is the act of editing a wiki in a malicious manner that is intentionally disruptive or offensive. Vandalism includes the addition, removal, or modification of the text or other material. Vandalism can be committed by either guest editors or those with registered accounts; however, a protected page can only be edited by registered editors, or administrators, respectively.
The malicious removal of content, or the changing of such content beyond all recognition, verifiability and no original research, is a deliberate attempt to damage this wiki. There, of course, exist more juvenile forms of vandalism, such as adding irrelevant obscenities or crude humor to a page, illegitimately blanking pages, and inserting obvious nonsense into a page. Abusive creation or usage of user accounts and IP addresses may also constitute vandalism.
Response to Vandalism
If you see vandalism in an article, the simplest thing to do is just to remove or undo it, but sometimes vandalism takes place on top of older, undetected vandalism. With undetected vandalism, editors may make edits without realizing the vandalism occurred. This can make it harder to detect and delete the vandalism, which is now hidden among other edits. Check the edit history to make sure you're reverting to a "clean" version of the page. Alternatively, if you can't tell where the best place is, contact an admin. Or you can manually remove the vandalism without reverting it.
Notify administrators at the admin noticeboard of editors who continue to vandalize after multiple warnings, and administrators should intervene to preserve content and prevent further disruption by blocking such editors. Users whose main or sole purpose is clearly vandalism may be blocked indefinitely without warning.
Blocking
- Note that the times are dynamic and can depend strongly on the severity of the vandalism. These are only the general block lines for a medium case of vandalism.
If you vandalize, you will be blocked for:
- 1st time: 2 weeks
- 2nd time: 1 month
- 3rd time: 3 months
- 4th time: 6 months
- 5th time: 1 year
- 6th time: Infinite