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Wiki Vandal
Keywords: SL description
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.
Some notesDon'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 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 (WME of comments by Morten, Arno, Stefan, Zarlan, Tamsin, Charles, wms, dnerra, Hu, Sebastian, Velobici) Vandal IP listMost 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. Nico: What kind of behaviour should people adopt when such defacement attempts appear?
Arno: If you are the first one after a defacement, then you can revive the page (you need to set "deshi" status as your wiki experience in UserPreferences). If you are a "deshi" then click on edit-page and you will see a link below the text-area called "Revive previously archived version" Click there and you should get the original page. If this doesn't work (too many versions saved meanwhile) then only librarians or admins can revive the page (through the info&history page). HolIgor: There is one point. Several times when I pressed save button all context of the page disappeared. It happened only with Netscape on my UNIX box, never with IE under Windows or Netscape under Linux. I restored the page immediately, but not everybody knows how. I think that is the bug of the browser that fails to send the text to the server at the moment when old record has been deleted. Anonymous: Don't count the filter at "lewiston.k12.id.us" This is a school server, and I am not responsible for 900 students. (Sebastian:) This is an interesting point to discuss: So who is responsible? Can students just do what they want? Should someone who is responsible for a server be able to reveal the name of someone who misuses it? ariel: I think it would be fair to say that whilst school teachers and administrations should try their best to stop their students misusing the internet, the schools should not have to bear 100% of the responsibility. Things like this (and perhaps things in general) only work if everyone is given at least a little responsibility..... This is a copy of the living page "Wiki Vandal" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |