Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum:Vandalism

Sometimes, vandalism of articles occurs, mainly because it is seen to be amusing to destroy peoples work. Also, removing large chunks of text without comment or intentional falsifying of information counts as vandalism.

What to do if you find vandalism

If you find the work of a vandal, or find your own work vadalised, don't panic, all changes can be cancelled.

Cancelling Vandalism

Each registered member of Lexicanum can cancel vandalism like this:

1. Click on the article's tab called 'version at the top of the page
2. Locate a verion without the vandalism in it by clicking on the dates prior to the vandalised version
3. Click on the 'edit' tab at the top of the page and make any changes you might want to. You will get a message saying: "NOTE: You are working on an older version of this article. If you store all newer versions will be overwritten."
4. It is enough to write Vandalism as the summary, but you can write more like "Reverted to version of 12:34, 31 July 2008 Vandalism" or "re-established last changes by x".
5. Click 'Save page'

It is often a good idea to check the pages linked to in that article, as it is often the case that those are vandalised as well.

If the user is not logged in then it will have their IP address, the numbers split into four boxes eg. 192.10.12.166

If the user is logged in, then you can click on the users name and then on the left, click on user contributions to find out what the most recent changes were and check the last few changes for more vandalism.

Barring vandals

Sometimes vandals need only a few minutes to realise what they have done, while others require more time.

Sometimes it is necessary to convey a friendly message to the user, The following is offered as an example (click on the user and then the discussion tab):

Hello and [[Lexicanum:Welcome|welcome]] to Lexicanum!

Unfortunatly you do not seem to want to contribute meaningfully with us. Your vandalism has been completely undone and the administrators feel its necessary to block access to Lexicanum to you for a short time to prevent further vandalism. You would not be able to contribute any more and that would be a unfortunate? --~~~~

In the case of persistant vandalism, the administrators can block access to certain users. The recent changes are watched by the administrators for vandalism but if we don't spot some please inform any of the administrators and action will be taken.

What is inappropriate

Sometimes users don't know how to operate the Lexicanum correctly - this can be spotted when reviewing the changes. Maybe a user deleted the content of an article accidentally and didn't notice this. Just undoing this would be the appropriate reaction. When in doubt, just check the user's contributions, it should be quite easy to identify real vandalism.

This article is based on the article Vandalism from the free Encyclopedia Wikipedia and stands under the GNU license for free documentation. In Wikipedia there is a List of Authors available, and you can work on the article here.