Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the Unreal Wiki. The most common types of vandalism include the addition of obscenities or crude humor, page blanking, or the insertion of nonsense into articles.
Any good-faith effort to improve the Unreal Wiki, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism. Even harmful edits that are not explicitly made in bad faith are not considered vandalism. For example, adding a personal opinion to an article once is not vandalism — it's just not helpful, and should be removed or restated. Not all vandalism is obvious, nor are all massive or controversial changes vandalism; careful attention needs to be given to whether changes made are beneficial, detrimental but well intended, or outright vandalism.
Committing blatant vandalism violates the Unreal Wiki's policy. If you find that another user has vandalized Unreal Wiki, you should revert the changes and warn the user (see below for specific instructions). Users who vandalize Unreal Wiki repeatedly, despite warnings to stop, can be reported on this page's talk page, and administrators may block them.
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How to spot vandalism
The best way to spot vandalism is keeping an eye on recent changes or your watchlist. Any vandalism found should be reverted to an earlier version of the page, but remember to include any good edits since then! The auto-summary feature can also help users detect vandalism. (see Wikipedia:Automatic edit summaries)
How to respond to vandalism
If you see vandalism, please do the following:
- Check the article's history to identify all vandalized revisions. If the vandalizing user has made more than one edit, usually those earlier edits are vandalism as well. All vandalism edits
- If all revisions of the affected article are vandalism edits, mark the page for deletion with the {{delete-vandalism}} tag.
- Otherwise, revert the edits. If you are viewing the diff between the current version and the preceding version, you can click "undo" to undo the edit automatically. Otherwise, please explain in the edit summary that you have reverted vandalism.
- Leave a warning message at the user's talk page.
- Check the vandal's other contributions (click "User contributions" on the left sidebar of the screen).
- If the vandal continues to cause disruption after being warned, please report him or her on this page's talk page. An administrator will decide whether to block the vandal.
How to not respond to vandalism
- Do not feed the trolls
- Do not mark an article for deletion only because it is being vandalized.