User:RadicalOne/WikiCommentary/VandalismTemplates

Please do not edit this page, unless you are reverting vandalism or there is a serious issue that needs to immediately be solved.

Summary

Vandalism comes in all varieties, from edits that may well be test edits - such as adding "ASDFGHJKL" to the bottom of the page - to overt and obscene vandalism, like replacing the article header with a string of profanity. By and large, Wikipedia treats all vandalism as essentially equal, with successive warnings becoming more and more severe. However, this is a rather simplistic evaluation criteria.

Full Text

One of the largest issues concerning Wikipedia is the issue of vandalism. Due to the open nature of the database - the very nature that has boosted its popularity - it is a common target for both immature outbursts and more subtle, opinion-driven modifications. It also sometimes falls subject to unintentional damage from test edits by users as yet unfamiliar with the interface and/or operation of the database.
Common practice is to revert the edits in question, and post one of a set of template messages to the user's talk page. The first time, the following message is standard protocol:

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to Wikipedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to Article, did not appear to be constructive and has been reverted. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and read the welcome page to learn more about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. Thank you.

This is a helpful notice for a great many edits, but for others it is entirely insufficient. Take a recent edit I saw to Saturn's Talk Page. It consisted of replacing one of the headers - and many user comments - with nonsense laced with obscene language. With an edit such as this, "did not appear to be constructive" is a severe understatement. Because of that, I used a custom message:

Please refrain from making profane - "unconstructive" is an understatement - edits to Wikipedia, as you did to Talk:Saturn. Your edits are obvious vandalism and have been reverted. Judging from this talk page, you have continued to do so regardless of warnings. Continued behavior like this will result in administrator action.

This garnered considerable criticism, with other editors stating that "all vandalism is equal". If so, the vandalism assessment method is woefully inadequate. A much better system would have a set of criteria like those below to evaluate a questionable edit:

• Intent - Which is more likely bad faith, "asdfghjkl" or the aforementioned edit to Talk:Saturn?
• Placement - Is it at the top, where everyone sees it, or in the middle somewhere?
• Plausibility that the Editor is Serious - Some non-NPOV edits are seen to be vandalism at times; perhaps an edit to the talk page is more appropriate than risking a possible edit dispute.

Each potentially vandalous edit should be subjected to a set of criteria, and the appropriate warning template selected based on that. For example, the edit to Talk:Saturn merited at least a level-two warning, even if it is the first edit like that. -RadicalOne---Contact Me 00:07, 24 November 2009 (UTC)