First, because volunteering on Wikipedia is a powerful socially significant activity for many people. By creating articles, the authors bring obvious benefits to the community. It can be measured by views, respect for colleagues, etc. This greatly affects self-esteem and importance and over time quite strongly deforms on professional aspect.
Despite the common opinion that vandalism is strongly harmful to Wikipedia, these actions do not cause a great problem for the Wiki community, but are obviously annoying.
There are several major types of vandalism:
- Vandalism of images - loading of offensive images, malicious creation of animated GIF-s;
- Vandalism of custom pages - replacement of the content of users' pages;
- Vandalism to draw attention - adding an image, the choice of offensive nicknames, abuse;
You can read more about what is vandalism for Wiki community at this link.
Often harmful edits grow into the war of edits, abuse of the supreme moderator status of patrol and administrators. It happens especially if the changes relate to the biographies of living people or pages of brands and companies on Wikipedia. There are also customary malicious edits that are part of large-scale black marketing wars.
A good thing in these unpleasant situations is that all changes, edits, contributions are fixed and life-saved in the cloud or Wikipedia backlog. Therefore, the violation can be used as an evidence base, and the offenders can be deanonimized and bring to justice.
However, for small violations, we recommend that you cancel the edit and return the damaged version. Sometimes it will be enough.
On repeated vandalism, the right algorithm of action is as follows:
- If the edits are made by unregistered users from the IP address - you can mark that the user is engaged in vandalism. To do this, use the following template:
2.If the user is registered you can make a warning to him on his discussion page. Place there such a template:
{{subst:uw-vandalism1|PageName}} ~~~~
This template exists to warn registered users about the harm of their actions.
When continuing the conflict you have a war of edits. At this stage, you will already need to go to moderators and report the existence of a problem situation. In this case, the request to administrators will be helpful.
When the administrators failed to help you we recommend you to find the lawyers and go to the court. WikiBusines has experience in conducting such cases and is ready to become your reliable partner and consultant in such situations.
Moreover, if you want your article to be protected on sure, or you have already received the vandals, order our Annual Support.