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.)<\/p>\n
I’d like to point out that the deck is really stacked against vandals, though.<\/p>\n
One of the most useful things is the Recent Changes<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n For example, I noticed a significant addition to the article on Jean Carne<\/a>. Some guy kept inserting some sort of ramblings about her. Here’s a diff<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n There are two things worth noting:<\/p>\n There’s really something pretty satisfying with someone working up some sort of elaborate vandalism, only to undo it with a single click.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. … Continue reading \n