Today most of my tasks are in the “wait” phase, so I had some free time. Of course it’s a Sunday, so there wasn’t a lot to do. So I fell back on an old hobby: patrolling Wikipedia for vandalism. I’d say that 80% of edits are constructive, 10% are well-intentioned but misguided, and 10% are egregious vandalism. (Replacing a whole article with the word “poop,” for example.)

I’d like to point out that the deck is really stacked against vandals, though.

One of the most useful things is the Recent Changes page. Unsurprisingly, it shows the most recent changes to articles. Tweak the settings a bit, and I can view only changes by users who aren’t logged in, which probably accounts for 95% of vandalism. I can quickly click “diff” to view a summary of changes between the edit and the version before it, which makes vandalism quite evident. “hist” takes me to a history of all the changes, which is also useful. After that comes the change in length: (+1) indicates that the page was made one byte longer, for example. Huge differences are in bold; lengthy tirades inserted into the middle of an article, or outright “deletion” of articles, are super-easy to spot. (It’s worth remembering that all it shows is the net change of the edit: if you replace good text with obscene text of the exact same length, it’ll show a net change of “0,” so the size of the change shouldn’t be anything other than an occasional red flag that something’s up.) I get the user’s name (only IPs in the view I keep), followed by a link to their Talk page.

For example, I noticed a significant addition to the article on Jean Carne. Some guy kept inserting some sort of ramblings about her. Here’s a diff (obscene text). On the left is the “before,” and on the right is the “after.” The section in green is what got added, which clearly doesn’t belong.

Wikipedia allows logged-in users to include their own JavaScript, etc. into the pages they see, so I’ve got some mods to insert an “undo” option for me.

So it’s worth noticing that all of this took me maybe five seconds. That’s probably too high a number. I spotted a huge number of added content, saw the diff, noticed it was nonsense, and undid it.

But that’s only half the job. The next stage is to leave a note on the user’s talk page, explaining that you undid their edits. There’s a Wikipedia policy page on how to proceed, with a handful of useful templates. The basic premise is that they escalate from, “Your test worked and we undid it for you; next time please experiment in the Sandbox,” gradually growing in sternness until it gives a last warning: vandalize again and you’ll be banned. (Here’s an example, showing a guy who, frankly, got more warnings than he deserved.) You’ll note that, aside from vandalism earlier this month, it all happened in a short period–20:21 and he got his first warning, and by 20:39 he had been banned. What’s most awesome about this is that most of the time was him: we can’t warn someone again before they vandalize again.

However, I’m not an admin on Wikipedia, which means that I can’t actually ban anyone. But I don’t need to. There’s a handy page called Administrator Intervention against Vandalism, often referred to as WP:AIV for short. The use of a quick template allows me to identify a user or IP that’s actively vandalizing. My contributions rarely stay on the list for more than 30 seconds, after which time they’ve been acted on. I’ve never encountered a backlog, because there’s always an admin or twelve processing the list.

Another useful tool in our arsenal is the ability to view contributions by user. A fun bit of JavaScript allows me to simply hover over an IP / username and view their changes. So if I catch you vandalizing once, I’m going to go through your past edits. Most of the time your past vandalism was caught already, but periodically I’ll catch something.

There are two things worth noting:

• It’s often under 30 seconds to go from a user vandalizing a page to their edits having been reverted and a warning left.
• People patrol new edits pretty closely. I caught a guy today changing dates. They were subtle changes, but that doesn’t mean that no one caught it. Just as with people trying to trash pages, I had his edits undone in a matter of seconds.

There’s really something pretty satisfying with someone working up some sort of elaborate vandalism, only to undo it with a single click.