PrintWiki/Policies/Vandalism

Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of PrintWiki.

The most common type of vandalism is the replacement of existing text with obscenities, page blanking, or the insertion of bad jokes or other nonsense. Fortunately, this kind of vandalism is usually easy to spot.

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 PrintWiki. For example, adding a personal opinion once is not vandalism — it's just not helpful, and should be removed or restated.

Committing vandalism is a violation of PrintWiki policy; it needs to be spotted, and then dealt with — if you cannot deal with it yourself, you can seek help from others.

• Blanking - Removing all or significant parts of articles.
  

• Spam - Adding inappropriate external links for advertisement and/or self-promotion. This applies only to placing links on numerous and/or unrelated pages. Adding self-promotional links to a few related articles may be inappropriate, but is not vandalism.
  

• VandalBot - A script or "robot" that attempts to vandalize or spam massive numbers of articles (hundreds or thousands), blanking, or adding commercial links. Another type of VandalBot appears to log on repeatedly with multiple random names to vandalize an article.
  

• Content vandalism - Creating joke or hoax articles, replacing existing articles with plausible-sounding nonsense, or adding silly jokes to existing articles is considered vandalism. Adding insults, using offensive usernames, replacing articles with jokes etc.
  

• User page vandalism - Replacing user pages with insults, profanity, or nonsense (see also Wikipedia:No personal attacks).
  

• Image vandalism - Uploading provocative images, inserting political messages, making malicious animated GIFs, etc. Repeatedly uploading images with no source and/or license information after notification that such information is required may also constitute vandalism.
  

• Page move vandalism - Moving pages to offensive or nonsense names.
  

• Talk page vandalism - Deleting the comments of other users from Talk pages other than your own, aside from removing internal spam, vandalism, etc. is generally considered vandalism. Removing personal attacks is often considered legitimate, and it is considered acceptable to archive an overly long Talk page to a separate file and then remove the text from the main Talk page. The above does not apply to the user's own Talk page, where this policy does not itself prohibit the removal and archival of comments at the user's discretion.
  

• Copyrighted material vandalism - Knowingly using copyrighted material on PrintWiki in ways which violate PrintWiki's copyright policies is vandalism. Because users may be unaware that the information is copyrighted, or of PrintWiki policies on how such material may and may not be used, such action only becomes vandalism if it continues after the copyrighted nature of the material and relevant policy restricting its use have been communicated to the user.
  

• Account creation vandalism - Creating accounts with usernames that contain deliberately offensive or disruptive terms is considered vandalism, whether the account is used or not.

The best way to detect vandalism is through Recent Changes patrolling or keeping an eye on your Bookmarks. Any vandalism found should be reverted to an earlier version of the page; remember to include any good edits that have happened since then! Vandalism should also be reported the the PrintWiki disputes email address. Send an email to disputes (at) printwiki |dot| org. Make sure to include as much detail(dates, names etc) and a reasoned statement for your claim.