User:Driftmaster130/Work
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Here's how to help restore pages that have been vandalized.
Vandalism
To begin, you must first understand what vandalism is. Take this quote from Wikipedia:
Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia (such as swearing, deleting letters to make inappropriate words, etc.) (see also Newbie experiment). The most common type of vandalism is the replacement of existing text with obscenities, namecalling, or other wholly irrelevant content. Any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism. Apparent bad-faith edits that do not make their bad-faith nature inarguably explicit are not considered vandalism at Wikipedia.
- Vandalism is not synonymous with trolling, although some trolling is vandalism:
Trolling is deliberate and intentional attempts to disrupt the usability of a wiki for its editors, administrators, developers, and other people who work to create content for and help run that wiki. Trolling is deliberate violation of the implicit rules of Internet social spaces. It is necessarily a value judgment made by one user about the value of another's contribution.
Recent changes
You can help prevent vandalism on the wiki by patrolling the Recent changes and look for bad edits. If you find them, revert them and stop the user who made them with warnings or blocks, depending on how severe the vandalism is and whether or not the user in question has a history of vandalism. See the Warning Policy and Blocking Policy for more information.
Anyone can revert bad edits and hand out warnings, but only Administrators (Patrollers, Sysops and Bureaucrats) can block people and officially patrol Recent Changes. The following is a step-by-step outline of how admins can go about patrolling the wiki:
- First of all, every edit on the page with an ! next to it has not been inspected yet.
- Click on the diff link next to an edit that has an ! next to it to see the difference between the two most recent edits.
- If the page is not vandalism, then click the [[[:Template:Fakelink]]] link next to the edit.
If there are so many ! signs that you can't possibly check them all, then look for these things:
- A new page, symbolized by an N, is important to check out.
- An edit made by a red username, or a user name spoofing another user's name, needs to be inspected.
- An edit without a description is often made by a vandal in a hurry. Check these out.
If the page you find is vandalism, like if the page is blank, or if profanity has been added, you can revert the edit:
- While in the differences page, click previous diff and/or next diff until you find the most current non-vandalized version.
- Click on the Revision as of 00:00 link above that version and click "edit" at the top of the page. Alternatively, you can find the last good version and click on the date (not the diff) in the page history.
- Type "reverted vandalism" or "reverted spamming" in the edit summary. The shorthand for this is "rv/v" or "rv/s", respectively.
- Save the page (without making any changes).
- Now the page is the version that you selected, in effect removing the vandalism.
Characteristics of a vandal
When you see a user, most likely new, continually:
- blanking pages,
- adding or deleting (weird, unrelated) content on pages,
- creating pages that are false repeatedly,
- replacing all content on a page with a negative message (User pages seem prone to this attack the most),
- saying offensive messages on (user) talk pages,
and similar actions to the Super Mario Wiki, it is likely that he or she is a vandal or troll. Such users are automatically banned infinitely, though sometimes they return on another IP (often public), as a sockpuppet, and repeat their actions.
What to do
Trolling and vandalizing are not tolerated in any way at the Super Mario Wiki. If you see continual actions of any of the above, post a message at an online sysop's talk page or patroller's talk page in calm, non-cap letters. As such, the sysop or another sysop will either be online or will come online as soon as possible and block the unruly user, as well as use the special revert tool to quickly make amends. Do not give the vandals any sort of acknowledgement or attack: this is what they are aiming for and it will only encourage them to continue.
Proposals
Enforce a timestamp with user signatures
According to MarioWiki:Signature, signature and datestamp are preferable, referring to when users right their comments. While clicking the pen icon in the editing interface produces ~~~~ and automatically inputs a generic signature with a timestamp, several custom user signatures still either have the user manually inputting {{User:Username/sig}} to transclude their signature page, or just typing {{User|Username}}. Neither of these options will give a timestamp (which is an important part of the signature, according to the guideline page) and therefore makes it harder when looking back on older conversations to know when the comment was actually made without having to look at the talk page edit history. The solution is simple; enforce users to either set up their custom signatures to display the timestamp (a simple process even for new users who are inexperienced with wiki syntax, as shown in Help:Signature), or just have them use the plain default signature which already includes a timestamp. tl;dr simply transcluding the signature page as many users do, fails to provide a timestamp and can make reading older messages confusing; the process of setting it up to include a timestamp should be enforced to prevent this.
Proposer: driftmaster130 (talk)
Deadline: June _, 2016 23:59 GMT
Support
- driftmaster130 (talk) Per my reasoning.
