A few things for current and aspiring vandal-fighters to keep in mind:
Good-faith efforts to improve the encyclopedia are not vandalism, even if they are misguided or ill-considered.
Content disputes are not vandalism. They should be dealt with by following the dispute resolution procedure.
Not all edits by new or unregistered contributors are vandalism. Check out the content added or removed before reverting blindly, and remember not to bite the newcomers.
Edits which appear to be in bad faith should not be considered vandalism until they can be proven such at a later date.
Anyone can help! Whenever you spot a page that has been vandalised, you are encouraged to edit it and clean it up, and/or warn the vandal using an appropriate warning template. See What to do if you spot vandalism below.
If you find yourself cleaning up vandalism frequently, you might be interested in patrolling recent changes. Note that participation is entirely voluntary. Also, you are not required to enlist anywhere.
There are various tools to help you. See the Tools section below.
1. Revert the vandalism by viewing the page's history and selecting the most recent version of the page prior to the vandalism. Use an edit summary such as 'rvv' or 'reverted vandalism' and click on save page.
See also the section below for tools to help with reverting.
2. Warn the vandal. Access the vandal's talk page and warn them using an appropriate template.
3. Report vandals who continue to vandalise after having received a final warning. Most cases of vandalism should be reported to WP:AIV. Cases that are not simple vandalism can be reported to WP:AN/I. WP:LTA may be used for reporting particular vandals who persistently return (e.g. via sockpuppets).
and check the (diff) links. If they contain harmful edits, you revert to the previous version. However, the high volume of edits that occur each second makes this difficult to accomplish most of the time, and several tools have been created to simplify the process:
Vandal Fighter, the original anti-vandalism program, is a Java program that displays the Recent Changes feed from Wikipedia's IRC bots and allows filters to focus on certain types of changes (e.g. anonymous IPs). It also maintains a personal list of trusted users, watched articles, etc.
Lupin's Anti-Vandal Tool monitors the RSS feed and flags edits with common vandalism terms. It also has a live spellcheck feature.
WikiMonitor is a Windows program that enables users to monitor recent changes, their watchlist, users' contributions, and other feeds in real time as well as providing multiple tools to aid in semi-automated editing and reversion. It is compatible with all Wikimedia wikis.
VandalSniper, a VandalProof-like application, is currently in beta. At the moment it has only been confirmed to run on Linux.
WikiGuard is a Mac OS X program that monitors the IRC feed and attempts to approximate each edit's risk.
RC birds is a Java program that emits different bird sounds for the RC feed depending on the user.
The IRC Bot, pgkbot, by Pgk, runs on the IRC channels below.
IRC Bots reporting at the #cvn-wp-en channel on the freenode network list suspected vandalism edits (for example: blankings, edits made by blacklisted users, etc.)
Young Orphans is a tool made by Interiot to find newly uploaded orphaned images. This is useful for finding various copyright violations and people who are using Wikipedia merely as an image hosting service.
ShadowTool is a lightweight RC patrol application for Linux.
Wikipedia Vandalism Watch is a Windows program that monitors specified users' contributions pages for top edits.
Huggle is a Windows program which parses edits from users not on its whitelist. You must be running Windows 2000 / XP / Vista and have .NET 2.0 installed for this program to function.
WatchlistBot is an XMPP bot that sends messages in realtime when articles are modified. Users with a Jabber account (note that Google Talk is an XMPP service) can subscribe to the bot and watch both articles and users.
Rollback scripts
Administrators and users who have requested it get a rollback button when looking at diffs in order to revert articles to their previous versions. However, non-administrators and users without the permission can emulate such a button using several tools.
RC patrol script gives non-administrators revert, filter, and popup tools while using the (default) monobook skin.
Godmode-light is a Javascript program to give non-administrators a rollback button.
Navigation popups are a set of utils that appear when hovering over wikilinks. Particularly, hovering over links of old versions provides a "revert" link.
Twinkle gives non-administrators (and administrators, for that matter) three types of rollback functions. Other functions include a full library of speedy deletion functions, user warnings, pseudoautomagical reporting of vandals, and more.
User:Adam1213/warn is a page that simplifies the process of warning vandals by allowing warnings to be submitted to specific users directly from the page.
Note that these are not operated by or affiliated with Wikipedia.
#cvn-wp-en Primary RC bot listing (NickServ registration required; voice invitations available on request from local operators or in #countervandalism)
Slightly elevated now. Tiggerjay (talk) 05:37, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Template:Vandalism information, a tool used as an indication of the current overall level of vandalism that is taking place on Wikipedia. On the page, click the edit button below the vandalism meter to change its level from 5 to 1 and/or add a short comment; 5 indicates very low levels of vandalism, and 1 indicates extremely high. You can add the vandalism information template to your userpage to stay up to date. See Template talk:Vandalism information for different styles.
Wikilink scripts enable you to double click on [[wikilinks]] within IRC clients. Useful if doing patrol on the IRC channels.
There are other scripts that may be handy while doing cleanup (not necessarily vandalism cleanup). Check them at WikiProject User scripts/Scripts (WP:JS)
Arnon Chaffin has built a wonderful page made just for vandal fighting and warning.
Civility is one of the pillars of Wikipedia. Avoid being rude, no matter how aggressive or obnoxious the vandal is. Some of them may want you to become angry and lose your temper: Don't fall for that!
Don't bite the newcomers. Not all bad edits are necessarily intentional vandalism. Some of them may just be test edits by newer editors.
On many ISPs, IP addresses are shared by many users, so be extra-careful not to be rude in your messages, as people seeing them may not be the same ones who vandalised.
Content disputes are not vandalism: If a user is adding biased content or you disagree with the information added, that doesn't mean the editor is vandalising. This includes violations of Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy. Corollary: 3RR rule still applies since it's not blatant vandalism. Instead of constantly reverting, discuss edits on talk pages and obtain community consensus. See resolving disputes.
