Hi, and welcome to your CVUA school. By the time you've completed the tests and tasks here, you should have a good working knowledge of Wikipedia's policies and processes with regards to vandalism, and should have no difficulty understanding and dealing with 99% of the the things you'll encounter in this area. You can ask me questions on my talkpage at any time if you aren't sure about anything here, and I also welcome suggestions for ways of improving this course.
You can complete the sections in any order; let me know when you've finished one and I'll mark it and close it for you. Save for a few cases, there are generally multiple ways to answer the questions; not many of them have clear right/wrong answers. Although I'll always try and give a reason for each mark, the basic responses you'll see are:
Good answer; interprets policy correctly and shows a sound understanding of the issues involved.
Incomplete/insufficient answer; whilst partly correct, there are better responses to this question.
Poor answer; shows an inadequate understanding of the policies and guidelines concerned.
Have fun!
Vandals
editBecause anyone can edit Wikipedia, not all the edits that are made are constructive - some, in fact, are deliberately disruptive and need to be reverted. Please have a read of this essay and this guideline, then answer the questions and perform the tasks below. There's no time limit for this, it's more important that your work in this area be accurate than fast. If you aren't sure whether it's vandalism or not, it probably isn't.
Good faith and vandalism
edit- Please explain below the difference between a good faith edit and a vandalism edit, and how you would tell them apart.
- Please find and revert three examples of good faith but unhelpful edits, and three examples of vandalism. Please warn the editors with the correct template and give the diffs of your revisions below.
1.
2.
3.
Warning and reporting
edit- Please answer the following questions
- Why do we warn users?
- When would a 4im warning be appropriate?
- What should you do if a user who has received a level 4 or 4im warning vandalises again?
- Please give examples of three warnings that you might need to use while vandal patrolling and explain what they are used for.
- Find and revert some vandalism. Warn each user appropriately, using the correct kind of warning and level. Posts the diffs of those warnings below.
- Find an edit which could be a test edit and revert it. Warn the user with the most appropriate template, then post the diff below.
- Report 2 users to AIV and post the diffs below. Be sure to follow the guidelines and only report users where necessary; do not report simply for the sake of this task.
Dealing with difficult users
edit- Why do we deny recognition to trolls and vandals?
- How can you tell between a good faith user asking why you reverted their edit, and a troll trying to harass you?
Protection
edit- In what circumstances should a page be semi-protected?
- Semi-protection applies when there is a great amount of vandalism or violating the structure of an article like neutral point of view, copyright files and adding unsourced materials especially in BLPs.
- In what circumstances should a page be fully protected?
- There are two things this could happen: First, if a policy in the Wikipedia mainspace has been targeting editors for vandalism or making "likely to be challenged" edits, full protection may occur. Second, if there is an excessive amount of vandalism in the mainspace from popular articles or violating the structure of it like above. The most often issue is about edit warring where editors are in a content dispute must mandatory discuss it in the article's talk page to reach a consensus. This are what I learned from my experiences here, I hope to learn more in this test.
- Correctly request the protection of one page (semi or full); post the diff of your request (from WP:RPP) below.