'''Vandalism''' is editing deliberately intended to damage the encyclopedia. Adding a joke to an article, blanking a page, replacing text with abuse: all vandalism. A bad edit made in good faith is '''not''' vandalism, however wrong it is, and treating it as such drives away people who would have become good contributors.

== What happens to it ==

Four things catch it, in this order:

# '''Edit filters''' run on every save, before anything is stored. They match the shapes vandalism takes rather than judging content: blanking, obscenity, rows of repeated characters, passages in capitals, batches of external links. Depending on the rule, a filter tags the edit, warns the editor once, refuses the save outright, or hands it to the patrol bot. Every filter exempts autoconfirmed accounts. See [[Special:AbuseFilter]] and [[Special:AbuseLog]].
# '''The patrol bot''' reverts what the filters judged to be plain vandalism. The attempt stays in the page history rather than disappearing, so the record is complete.
# '''Patrollers''' read [[Special:RecentChanges]] and [[Special:NewPages]] and mark what they have checked, so effort is not duplicated.
# '''Everyone else.''' Any reader can press '''undo''' on any edit in a page history.

== If you find some ==

Undo it. You do not need permission, an account, or any particular status. Leave an edit summary saying what you did.

If a page is being hit repeatedly, ask for [[OpenWiki:Protection policy|protection]] on [[OpenWiki:Community portal]]. If an account is doing nothing else, ask an administrator to block it.

== Review after publication ==

Reverting vandalism takes seconds. Reviewing every edit before publication would take longer than writing the encyclopedia, so OpenWiki publishes first and checks afterwards.

[[Category:OpenWiki]]