Wikia

Vandalism is an addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the wiki's integrity. The most common types of vandalism are replacing text with obscenities, blanking pages, or adding nonsense.

Any good faith effort to improve the wiki, even if it's misguided or incorrect, is not vandalism.

Fix vandalismEdit

When you see that a page has been vandalised, please revert the page to the previous version. Reverting the vandalism quickly helps to protect the wiki, and it sends a message to the vandal that his or her efforts have been wasted.

Click the "history" tag on the page, and you'll see a list of all of the previous versions of the page.

You can see any version by clicking on the date. Click on the most recent version before the vandalism.

Click on "edit", and you'll see a regular edit page, plus a warning that says that you're editing an out-of-date revision of the page.

Hit save, and the unvandalized version will become the current version of the page again.

Check the vandal's contribution historyEdit

It can also be helpful to click on the vandal's IP address or username to see their contribution history. They may have vandalised other pages, too, and you can revert those.

Don't tease the vandalsEdit

Vandalism is irritating, especially when you can tell that it's the same vandal who's come back more than once. Please resist the urge to let the vandal know how annoyed you are. Don't write anything in the edit summary except "vandalism", and don't post anything on the contributor's talk page.

Vandals are looking for two different kinds of satisfaction: the pleasure of defacing our work, and the pleasure of watching us get angry about it. When you revert the vandalism and ignore the vandal, you take all the pleasure away; the vandal will get bored and move on to something else.

Let an administrator knowEdit

Administrators have the power to block vandals from the wiki. When you revert vandalism, please post a message on an admin's talk page and one of the admins will block the vandal.

This page uses content from another wikia. The original article was at Muppet Wiki Vandalism policy. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Solar Cooking, the text of any wikia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

This text is stored on Wikia Community Central. Suggest changes here.

Vandalism is the conspicuous defacement or destruction of a structure, a symbol or information against the will of the owner/governing body. In the context of an online community project, it is a usually deliberate attempt to damage the usefulness of content for other viewers.

Assuming good faith

Useful community content is that which most concisely and accurately reflects the widest range of relevant information on a topic. In the context of a wiki project, intent to reduce relevant information to that of a single viewpoint could be considered vandalism. In keeping with assume good faith, however, it may be possible to look at a one-viewpoint edit as additional information that the user feels should be incorporated or is under-represented. In such a case, it benefits the project to explain more effective methods of bringing this information to light while retaining the existing knowledge in the article. While calling someone a vandal almost always makes the accusation true, extra patience instead can enable one to become a beneficial editor.

Avoiding critical mass

Vandalism usually starts as a form of heavy-handedness which is never effective at getting a point across in a wiki community. We can nip it in the bud by explaining more effective ways of making proposals and working with others. If we alienate the editor, however, vandalism can turn into a form of vengeance. The wiki engine is written to minimize the effect of pranksters, and can even handle a few full blown vengeful vandals, but it cannot handle a vandalism movement that has reached critical mass, a situation where we react to vandalism by assuming bad faith and thereby create more vengeful editors. As a project approaches crisis levels, it becomes harder and more time intensive to assume good faith, but every act of kindness and patience moves the project away from critical mass.

Wikia

Help:Vandalism

Contents

Fix vandalismEdit

Check the vandal's contribution historyEdit

Don't tease the vandalsEdit

Let an administrator knowEdit

Contents

Assuming good faith

Avoiding critical mass

Dealing with vandalism

See also

Photos

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