From TinWiki.org
In keeping with the spirit of a collaborative work, I believe that regular members can assist the moderators/editors in identifying vandalism and vandals.
One method that I have found to be quite simple, goes on the principle assumption that the majority of vandalism occurs from anonymous accounts. Here are the steps that I utilise to help find vandals:
- Go to the Special:Recentchanges page.
- Make sure that you've enabled (by clicking, to toggle their status) 'hide logged in users', and 'show minor edits' (both links can be found in the fourth line of text in the body of the page).
- Set the filtering by clicking on the third line: (show last) 500 (changes in last) 30 (days). (This will maximise the number of articles that are displayed)
- Go through the list of articles contributed to by anonymous authors, by right-clicking the author's name (or in this case, IP address, that series of numbers that looks like 203.179.1.70), and clicking 'Open in new window'. (Assuming that you use Internet Explorer. This also leaves the recent changes page open so that you can easily close the new window when you're done, to start the next one.)
- The new window that pops up will show a list of that user's contributions. Click the 'diff' button listed for every one of their contributions (usually only one or two will be there for anonymous users).
- On the right hand side of the screen is the change that the user made to the article, on the left hand side is what was originally there. If you notice edits to articles that have deleted massive sections of text to be replaced by "LOLOLOL I HAXXORED YOU PAGORZ!" then it is obviously a vandalism. (Sometimes vandals will be subtle, and make minor changes, like changing "BigFoot was abducted by aliens who used anal probes on him." to "BigFoot was abducted by aliens who used douche bags on him.")
- Go back to that user's contributions page, and click the small text under "User Contributions" that says 'Talk'. Add something along the lines of "This user is a vandal, mods please revert and ban.", whilst setting the summary of your edit to say something that will clearly identify it as a request for revert and ban, like "/* Revert and BAN, VANDAL*/"
Please note, however, that banning and reversion of 'vandalism' and 'vandals' is purely at the editors' discretion. As end-users we DO have the power to change the vandal's modifications back to what they were, but it's easier for changelogs if the Editors do a simple revert action. The issuance of bans is wholly the decision of the editors/moderators.
See also
