Wiki Vandal

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Wiki vandal (n., singular) A person of minimal intelligence who delights in defacing or maliciously deleting Wiki pages. This wretched creature longs to feel powerful and important, but lacks the ideas and patience to make original contributions to the discourse, and also lacks the courage even to try. Attempting to compensate for these deficiencies by attacking the work of others, the Wiki Vandal is doubly pathetic because they do not appear to realise that the work is easily restored, and that they can be traced, blocked and reported to their ISP. Vandalise if you will, but you will only make a fool of yourself.

Quote from a dictionary
vandal: a person who, out of malice or ignorance, destroys or spoils any public or private property, esp. that which is beautiful or artistic.

Some notes

Don't add people to the list below unless you are sure they are vandals. Maybe someone was just removing junk from a page, or doing a wiki masteredit. Also please consider that often vandals just want the attention. Don't give it to them.

Librarians and admins can block IP adresses. These blocks are only temporary, as users using dial-up lines have a different IP address every time they dial in and connect. Blocking IP addresses is a good countermeassure to stop vandalism in progress.

Permanent blocks would only be possible by requiring username/password for everyone. However, this is against the wiki spirit and raises the bar for contributing. For example, dnerra reported that the number of contributions to the [ext] German Go federation's discussion forum was reduced by "95 percent or so".

Furthermore, the more users SL has, the smaller the burden on individuals to restore any pages. One vandal against 100+ sensible users is not a fair contest, really. Also, some wiki theorists normally say that the slightly dull, encyclopedia-like quality of a developed wiki is a defence :-)

(Currently) Wiki Vandals are not a real problem. There are many more people interested in improving the site rather than destroying it. Many more eyes and hands to fix to the damage than to create the damage. The pages are archived and can be revived. There is no motivation to persistently vandalize the site: the vandals are anonymous; there is no monetary incentive to vandalize; the damage keeps getting fixed. Wiki's are the only case I know of where [ext] the Tragedy of the Commons does not apply. This is due to the lack of monetary incentive. So, the vandals will tire and go away. They will look for a place that provides them greater emotional payoff for their efforts. We have a community here that the vandals can not take from us. The can not join us unless they stop being vandals. We only need to continue our activities as we do today to win against the vandals every time.

(WME of comments by Morten, Arno, Stefan, Zarlan, Tamsin, Charles, wms, dnerra, Hu, Sebastian, Velobici)


Reviving pages

If a page has been defaced by a wiki vandal, the previous version can be revived. See reviving pages.


Vandal IP list

Most recent first (pages purposely not linked):

Note: IP's change if the user logs in on a dynamic IP, as most big ISPs provide, but patterns may emerge. For example, 68.120.128.31 and 64.168.21.1 may be the same vandal. ISPs can be contacted to get them (possibly) to check their logs and to notify the user to stop defacing pages. After repeated notifications, they will cancel the account.


This is a copy of the living page "Wiki Vandal" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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