User blog:Mathmagician/Editors - Dealing With Vandalism

This entry is specifically for editors, and it contains most of the information that you might want to know if you want to help deal with vandalism here on the Terraria Wiki. While vandalism is mostly just an annoyance, dealing with it is important so that we can maintain accurate information for all gamers who visit the site.

Good Faith

 * See Assume Good Faith for more details.

Good Faith is the concept that people who edit the wiki generally do so with good intentions. Examples might include when someone makes a spelling mistake or accidentally inserts false information onto a page. It is general policy that you should always first try to assume that others are making good faith edits that they believe are helping the wiki. Not all edits are made in good faith though, which brings us to...

Vandalism

 * See Vandalism for more details.

Vandalism is any edit that is unquestionably harmful or is obvious spam, and was not done in good faith. Some common examples here on the Terraria Wiki would include:
 * 1) Creating a new page that says "OMG gais' Did U Know Penguin Are Awweesome!!!" (spam page)
 * 2) Putting "9999" for the attack damage of a Green Slime (inserting obviously incorrect information)
 * 3) Deleting correct information, or even deleting ALL information on a page (blanking a page)

Reporting Vandalism
If you see vandalism that you don't know how to fix or that you're concerned about, please report the vandalism at Forum:Report Vandalism. Even if you fixed the vandalism, you can still report it--and you should especially do so if there is a particular troll who's going around vandalizing multiple pages, or if a single page is suffering from persistent and repeated vandalism. Administrators and Rollback members can and will deal with vandalism if you report it. They will also notice that you're helping =)

Fixing Vandalism by Editing

 * Confused about how to edit on the wiki? See Help:Modifying text.

Small cases of vandalism can often be fixed simply by editing the page and putting the correct info back in. In case 2) for example, if you know what the correct value is, you can simply write that in so that the malicious value 9999 is gone.

Note: when editing, always leave a brief description of your edit in the Edit Summary window in the top right corner of the screen. Also, always "Preview" your edit to make sure it looks good. You should do both of these things before publishing your edits. Your edit summary will show up on the Page History, which in turn will help future editors by letting them know about your edits to the page.

Marking Spam Pages for Speedy Deletion

 * Please review Criteria for speedy deletion before doing this.

If you see a spam page like in case 1) above, please edit the page and place this code at the very top: This places the Speedydelete template on that page. Administrators will then be alerted that there is a spam page and they will delete it.

Undoing the Most Recent Revision

 * See Help:Recent changes and Help:Reverting for more details.

Sometimes, especially in case 3) above, the best way to fix vandalism is to "undo" the previous edit. To do this, click the arrow on the edit button and then click on "History." This will take you to the Page History. There'll be a list of edits in the history, and you'll need to click "diff" or "compare selected revisions" at the top of that list.

This will bring you to a Diff Page that compares the most recent revision (right side) to the previous one (left side). If you see vandalism on the the most recent revision, but the previous one looks fine, then you can click the "undo" button near the top right corner of the screen.

That will finally bring you to an editing window. Leave a reason why you're undoing the last edit using the Edit Summary window at the top right of the screen. Please do not delete the text that says something like: Undo revision 212432 by 99.141.219.89 (talk) Just add your reason after that part. After typing your reason in, click "Publish" and you're done. You've now properly restored the page to the previous version, hence undoing vandalism!

Reverting to an Older Version

 * See Help:Recent changes and Help:Reverting for more details.

Reverting to an older version of the page is very similar to undoing the most recent revision, but it's bit more time consuming. The only difference is that undoing an edit just takes a page back to the immediately preceding revision, whereas when reverting you can revert to any previous version. Reverting is necessary when there are multiple vandalism edits to a page, rather than just one.

To revert to an older version, you need to view the page history and then click on the date and time of the revision that you want to revert the page to. You should then leave an edit summary saying why you're reverting and click "Publish."

Note: the reason why this process is more time consuming is because there are multiple vandalism edits and you need to review several diff pages in the history in order to find out which version was the most recent non-vandalized version. Rollback members and administrators have special tools for dealing with this kind of situation, so reporting the vandalism is smart in this case.

Rollback Members

 * See Rollback for more details.

Rollback members are users who have been given rollback rights, allowing them to "rollback" a series of vandalism edits with a single click. These users' names will appear in a green font around the site, for example on the Special:WikiActivity page or when they leave signatures on talk pages. Rollback members are editors who have some experience dealing with vandalism and hate to see it on the wiki.