OpenWiki:Vandalism

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.

Four things catch it, in this order:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Patrollers read Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages and mark what they have checked, so effort is not duplicated.
4. Everyone else. Any reader can press undo on any edit in a page history. This is the part that actually scales.

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 protection on OpenWiki:Community portal. If an account is doing nothing else, ask an administrator to block it.

Every one of these measures is cheaper than the alternative, which is checking edits before publishing them. Reverting vandalism takes seconds; reviewing every good-faith edit in advance would take longer than writing the encyclopedia. Open editing is not naivety about vandalism — it is a bet that damage is easier to undo than contributions are to replace.