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Vandal fighting
Easily one of the most important activities at Wikipedia is the constant maintenance of articles and other pages. This website, as a very high profile Wiki, is far more vulnerable than almost any other to vandalism, since almost anyone with an Internet connection is allowed to edit it in any way they choose. Activities like recent change patrol are a reaction to the large number of detrimental edits we see here. However, since the job of taking on the vandalism that various bots miss falls to the human editors of Wikipedia, there are always issues with the process.
Mindspillage's essay on vandal-fighting is, I believe, an absolutely invaluable piece of reading. It boils down to the fact that all editors should be treated as humans, because they are. The anonymous IP that replaces featured articles with F-bombs should be treated as kindly as the one that fixes spelling errors in good faith.
It's probably fair to say that most vandals are simply testing the waters at Wikipedia: bored school kids and unfamiliar users. They should not be blocked or warned exclusively as a punishment: the aim of vandal-fighting is to prevent future vandalism, not to punish individuals. With that in mind, it's absolutely crucial that vandal-fighting be done carefully:
- Always go through the full series of test templates, one by one and in order, without skipping any. That's right, all of them. Rather than skipping straight to the end, keep an eye on their contributions for fifteen minutes and apply incremental warnings as necessary, and always use the "-n" variation of the template (where possible) to tell them the specific article you believe they vandalised. To quote Mindspillage:
| “ | What does it cost you? A few minutes of refreshing someone's contributions page to see if they're still at it. If they've stopped vandalizing before you have to block, great! The aim was to stop damage to the wiki, not to punish the "offender". If they've gotten a clue after {{test3}}—or simply gotten bored—then the effect is the same as if you'd blocked. Blocking someone who's already stopped vandalizing, as a punitive measure, creates animosity: "hey, I stopped 15 minutes ago after I was warned and now I'm getting blocked!" | ” |
- Always welcome anonymous users, if their edits were reasonably benign. The {{Welcome-anon}} tag is there for a reason, and makes a good prefix to an actual warning if you want to avoid insulting, scaring or threatening the newbie. It isn't so necessary in cases of malicious, widespread vandalism - obviously - but can be very effective for easing newbies in gently.
- Never use the {{Blatantvandal}} template, unless it's absolutely clear that their edit was made out of malice. Even apparently major vandalism - adding utter crap to article text, deleting information, and so on - should be treated leniently. The blatantvandal tag is only appropriate when the user has made multiple major edits that have seriously compromised the quality of their respective pages.
New page patrol, as the name implies, involves trawling through a rolling list of newly-created pages in order to ensure that they meet a certain standard for inclusion. Unfortunately, while the instructions there go into excellent detail on how to handle unsuitable articles, it pays far too little attention to users' interactions. Such neglect to newbies' feelings has a decidedly negative affect on new users, which many users are aware of but nobody warns against. This was nicely demonstrated at my own RfA, which failed as a result.
So, what needs to be done?
- Always research an article's subject before placing the {{nn-bio}} or {{nn-band}} speedy deletion tags:
- If a quick Google research turns up nothing, check the spelling of the article title and try alternative versions. Similarly, if it gets lots of hits, add "site:wikipedia.org" to the end of your search query before trying it again, in order to check if an appropriate page already exists at Wikipedia (and if so, redirect the new one).
- If the article does appear to be about a non-notable individual, tag it appropriately and tell the creator that you did so. {{nn-warn}} tells the user what they need to do when creating articles in the future, and alerts them to the fact that their article is up for deletion - if you don't do this, you risk inadvertently violating WP:BITE.
- Always inform the creator of pages that you nominate for deletion, preferably using one of these templates. Deleting articles is a futile exercise if you don't inform users of the problems they create, so take the time to explain the problem (or, at the very least, alert them to it).
- Always add {{stub}}, {{wikify}} or {{cleanup}} tags as necessary. If you find that too tedious, then do it automatically, but always do it if you think it would be appropriate.
- Never use the {{db-reason}} tag. If an article doesn't fit into one of these criteria, it should almost certainly not be going through the speedy deletion process. Instead, place a {{PROD}} tag on the page to go through a more considered deletion process.
- Never play "new page whack-a-mole". If an article does not meet a speedy criterion, either tag it with {{PROD}} or consider ways to improve it instead.