Phantasm99

A gigantic loser who sucks at everything. I was once hacked and a hacker did a stupid edit on my account. Now my main goal is cleaning up pages on Wikipedia and destroying the scourge of vandalism.

This user has publicly declared that they have a conflict of interest regarding the Wikipedia article South Jordan.

Being hacked

Alright, story time my children.

So I was a new user on Wikipedia. I had already done 1 edit on an article. But I still wasn't confirmed yet. I wanted to grow on Wikipedia, and help make it a better place.

To be honest, I am still not exactly sure what happened. Maybe some drifting hacker found my password in the sea of the Internet. Maybe someone close to me who knew my password did it.

But all I know is, one day I went to check on my edit history (I was still new) and found that there was an edit on Hilary Duff. I also had a new message. When I went to check the edit, I found that my account inserted a death date, and claimed she died "of stupidity". What happened? I didn't make that...

I checked my message, and sure enough, it was a message that my recent "edit" to Duff was reverted and that I should be more careful.

That was when I decided I wanted to help revert vandalism on Wikipedia.

So yeah, that's my story. Not that interesting to be honest...

My list of the kinds of vandalizers

From my journeys with Wikipedia, I have come across some quite diverse vandals. I will be making a kind of field journal to help me and you identify "species" of vandals. This may be updated as I continue my journey.

Grandiose Vandals

These people are the most common type of vandal. They go in, make 1 very noticeable edit, then never be seen again. They are easy to revert, but they are annoying.

Skaters

Less common than grandiose vandals, but even more difficult to deal with. They make an obvious vandalization, then someone notices and reverts it, but then they revert that person's revert, so that person notices and reverts the vandal's revert, and the cycle continues. They often take forever to give up, and until that happens you have to keep reverting and reverting and reverting...

Blankers

Quite simple vandals. They just delete most or all of the page. They are not a huge problem but might get on your nerves every once in a while.

Page Gutters

An evolved version of blankers. They slowly but surely delete all of the page. It might take a while to notice content is going missing, and even harder to find out which version you need to revert to to get all the content back. These are more insidious vandals and ones to look out for.

Lurking Gossip

Lurking gossips are also very insidious. Unlike other vandals, they insert lies into less used pages that usually will not be noticed by fact-checkers. This will make it so that the occasional reader scrolling through will find that lie, and maybe believe it. And that lie could be anything. That's what makes these types of vandals very serious, as they could be inserting any kind of inane lie into an article. Fortunately I have never encountered one of these before. At least, I think I haven't...