Wikipedia talk:Requests for investigation/Archives/2006/01

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This is a discussion archive created in January 2006, though the comments contained may not have been posted on this date. Please do not post any new comments on this page. See current discussion, or the archives index.

[edit] Idea for dealing with schoolkid vandals.

I have an idea for dealing with IPs from schools who vandalize Wikipedia. Most schools have only IE on the computers, which supports the bgsound tag. We should make a short MP3 that says something like "This student is vandalizing Wikipedia instead of doing classwork" in a loud voice that the teacher will hear, and embed it in a repeating bgsound tag if they click "edit this page" again. Then they could get detention for surfing instead of doing work, LOL. Of course, this will only work if the computer has speakers installed, and they are on. They shouldn't be surfing the internet in class anyway.

This probably isn't a very practical/effective solution for reducing vandalism but I'd like to hear what people think of it. --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 04:10, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

If we're going to do it, we may as well go full out. "HEY, TEACHER! I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORNO!" Something like that. Take a page out of the book of Slashdot trolling, chapter nineteen. Although it wouldn't be worth the effort hacking something that would be of marginal value anyway into the software. Lord Bob 04:13, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

I know, I wasn't being serious. --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 04:16, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Sure would be funny, though.--chris.lawson 04:32, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

I gathered you weren't, which is why half my reply was humourous in intent. I just knew that somebody would take it seriously, though...and yes, it would be funny. Of that there can be no doubt. Lord Bob 04:36, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

This won't work, because the computers at most schools don't have speakers to stop students from listening to music... Titoxd 17:56, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually, the last school I was at (before homeschooling for high school) had speakers on the computers. Someone brought in a Beatles CD one day, and they listened to it at lunch. But the bgsound tag might not work as much anymore, because once Firefox releases the filter plugins, schools might just jump for it. Unless Firefox has the tag too...Davidizer13 17:09, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

• Why not send an email to the administration of the school involved? Some sort of form email stating what pages have been vandalised, when they occurred and so on.

[edit] The " If vandalism persists after five minutes" comment

To the wiki foundation and their representants: You must have been joking when you wrote "If vandalism persists after five minutes:" (Using this page, section IV), making it sound as if vandals were caught, reported and blocked within minutes. What REALLY happens is that if it wasnt' for the dedication of group of fantastic editors, most pages would stay vandalized, as vandals are EXTREMELY RARELY blocked. Every single time I reported a vandal, that person didn't get blocked. There are countless examples of vandals user pages filled with comments of proper editors reporting vandalism or stalking taking place, BEGGING an admin to do something. Meanwhile vandals and interest groups rule parts the wiki, while valuable editors desert a place victim of its own success (slowdowns anyone?). You're shooting yourself in the foot thinking 'the community' will fix everything for you. Adidas 12:42, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Adding to my comment, the rules for blocking vandals are so lax that no vandal actually care. All you need is a dialup connection, because the admins are too scared to block subnets, so login/out and you are back in vandalism business. For pete's sake, some guy come in and adds vulgar words to 20 different articles under one hour, and you still think he could all of a sudden become a 'valuable contributor'. You're deluded, that's what you are. Adidas 12:46, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

You're right. I agree completely. But, at the heart of the matter, that's not assuming good faith which, deluded or not, is policy. In fact, its one of the five pillars. Furthermore, there's no telling when a middle school aged anonymouse editor will tire of posting funny words like "penis" or "gay" and actually start to contribute worthwhile information. jfg284 19:12, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Attn. admins

I'd like to collaborate with any administrators who watch and work on this page to establish some more specific guidelines.

First question: when reports are removed, where (if anywhere) are they archived?

Found my answer. It's linked to just under the colorful reporting procedure template. Jdavidb (talk) 20:47, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Proposal: any report can be removed (and archived?) if these three conditions have been met:

1. at least one comment has been posted in response indicating that the report has been acted on in some way
2. the latest comment for that vandalism report is at least 24 hours old.
3. a check of the contribs link indicates there is no more recent vandalism

Proposal: establish a standard for whether or not reports need to be archived. My vote is no. But if everyone else votes yes, establish standards.

Thanks to anyone who is watching. Jdavidb (talk) 20:37, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Proposal: some vandalism reports have a list bullet; many do not. This entire concept seems to have been lost in some subsections. My first suggestion was to eliminate the list bullet and suggest we just put them on our responses, since expecting inexperienced contributors to always get that detail might throw them. But then I realized it's trivial for the responding admin to just add it back in. So my proposal is we retain the bullet, I fix each section to make sure it's there now, and in the future we add the bullet in to any report we respond to that lacks it. We make our responses with an indented bullet. Since this is such a minor and trivial thing, I'm going to assume everyone agrees unless I hear otherwise. Jdavidb (talk) 21:01, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Proposal: we create a template somewhere (not necessarily an entity in the Template namespace) that shows how the reporting section of the page should be, complete with the various headers and comments. New archives can be created by substing this template. From time to time the existing page should be synced up with the template. New changes in formatting should go there. Jdavidb (talk) 21:29, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Has this page changed?

I remeber there used to be a section on this page that listed articles that were sustaining a lot of abuse. The only link I can find is 'most vandalised pages', which seems to be a list of high profile articles. I'm trying to keep the vandalism down at Woburn Collegiate Institute which is being attacked by multiple IPs and have no bloody idea where to report it. Sabine's Sunbird 16:35, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

If it was there, it was there before I started watching the page a few days ago. There is a link to the old version of the page. It might be there.

Or I might have taken it out in my whirlwind reorganization and formatting edits yesterday, in which case I'll try to put it back.

Meantime, you could put it in the sockpuppet section. All the users vandalizing it are presumably sockpuppets of each other. Jdavidb (talk) 19:05, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vandal Bot

Today, there have been a series of vandalisms of this page by a series of nonsense user names. I'm no expert, but it looks as if there is somekind of bot automatically creating a user name and then vandalizing the the page. Is there anyway to find the ISP this is originating from and blocking them? And I'm doing it here due to the fact that the main page is going down every few moments. Donovan Ravenhull 16:36, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

The vandal bot has been reported on the AiV page. Hopefully they can see the IP it is coming from and block it, or worst case just protect VIP for a bit and break the bot. --Syrthiss 16:41, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion for engaging with IPs

When thanking anonymous editors for test edits or warning them for vandalism, there are often old messages on the talk page including final warnings and block notifications. Put yourself in the shoes of someone stumbling across Wikipedia using a communal PC. You make an experimental edit, and soon afterwards you get the "you have new messages" box. If you follow the link, what do you see? Perhaps screeds of final warnings. I suspect that even among those who realise what's happened, most wouldn't go to the bottom of the page to find their particular message. I suspect many test edits are from potentially good contributors, and if they get directed to a whole raft of intimidating warnings they are likely to be frightened off.

What do you think of this idea? - when giving an anon IP a warning simply create a heading for existing warnings (call it, say, "Old messages") and place your new test-warning-or-welcome message-or-template above it at the top of the page. Your message will then be the first thing the editor sees when following the "new message" link. Any thoughts? --RobertG ♬ talk 14:34, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I just delete all old messages. ~~ N (t/c) 16:18, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't like that idea, because if the IP has a consistent history of vandalism then I will be less inclined to put a simple (test1). I know I could look into the contributions and see whether there was previous vandalism, but if the vandal is particularily virulent I don't take the time to do that. What might be a nice bridge of these two ideas is to create an archive of previous warnings on the talk page and link it after your welcome / whatever. You'd have your "Welcome to Wikipedia!" and then a [[User talk:wahtever/archived warnings|Previous Warnings Archive]]. --Syrthiss 16:55, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

After dealing with an IP vandal my first idea would be to delete the talk page (delete, not blank) to avoid scolding of innocent contributors, but I like the idea of archived warnings with a link. While preserving history it would also maintain a minimum of goodwill toward newcomers. --Eddi (Talk) 12:47, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Including subst in the usage of test templates

The usage section now states, "Use the {{test}}, {{test2}}/{{test2a}}, {{test3}}, and {{test4}} templates as appropriate."
Would it be all right if this is changed to, "Use the {{subst:test}}, {{subst:test2}}/{{subst:test2a}}, {{subst:test3}}, and {{subst:test4}} templates as appropriate." so it is consistent with the templates' instructions / discussion pages? --Eddi (Talk) 12:47, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

• Actually i think it is better if these templates are not used with subst, and i never so use them. Why? because when I am editing such a page, it is very helpfu to see exactly where in the warning sequece previous warnings fell, without needing to remember the exact wording of every varient of the warnign templates. Thes pages are not lilkey to be viewed often (I hope) so server load should not be a major issue even if the templates are transcluded. i agree that talk page tempaltes hould usually be transcluded, but IMO this is an exception. As an alternative, if people want to insist on using subst, please edit these templates to add an HTML comment with the template name or at least the place each one has in the sequence ("This is nrmally a thrid warning" or the like). DES ^(talk) 18:05, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
  • Yup. Add to that that it saves typing, and should the vandal in question look at his talk page source he'll see that it's all standardised which implies that we deal with lots of similar edits and they're not doing anything new or interesting. --fvw* 18:20, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

• Personally, I prefer to use the subst versions, because I've had lots of problems with persistent vandals changing the numbers to make nonsense of the page. Using subst makes it much more difficult for them to do this. I also always stick a notice about which warning template I'm adding in the edit summary, so a quick check of the page history will show what templates have been added in what order (at least when I do it).--chris.lawson 18:55, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

My main concern with the instructions is that new vandal fighters use the warnings before coming here. I want them to discover from experience what they can do to fight vandalism. I think telling them to use subst complicates that. However, I usually use subst. I think as newbies learn more about transclusion they can decide what works best for them. Chris, thanks for the idea of putting the template name in the summary, so I can still keep track. Jdavidb (talk) 20:18, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

I can't see how subst would complicate things – it's copy and paste just the same. And how will people learn about transclusion if it's not mentioned? Anyway, since the instruction pages (i.e. talk pages) of the templates specifically prescribe the use of subst, I thought it should be mentioned here, too, for consistency. --Eddi (Talk) 19:07, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] LA TV

Why was "Charlie the Disco Dog" removed from the Los Angeles TV station article, I added on? I didn't realize the L.A. station went on the air in 1982, no, I am not in Los Angeles. I am 25, but I must realize I am not older than that to seen the 1970s show, but in the 1980s and through today, I do not remember seeing only the show in reruns. But these users have to tell me what network aired the show.

12:14, 15 October 2005 (Unknown IP)

• Are you still trying to revive that article "Disco Dog featuring Charlie" that we deleted several months ago? How many times do we have to tell you that we need solid, credible evidence? Zzyzx11 (Talk) 19:15, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

The only evidence, he was created by Chuck Jones, although that is his only creation, but I now am going to take a break for a week. (preceding unsigned comment by 4.160.189.57 (talk • contribs) 23:36, 15 October 2005)

[edit] Counter Vandalism Unit

Counter Vandalism Unit formed! It is a gathering place for RC patrolers. It is intended to increase our capabilities when dealing with vandalism. Newer members are welcome with open arms. --Cool Cat ^Talk 19:06, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Requirements to be a member:

1. Must have a username
2. Must not be a vandal (obviously)

[edit] should non-admins refrain from using {{test4}}?

I've noticed that on the VIP page, users are told to warn vandals up to {{test4}} before reporting them. However, I'm not sure that this is the best idea, for two reasons:

1. Due to the nature of the message, other people may think that the person warning the vandal is an administrator, while he/she really isn't.
2. If no administrator is available, any vandal who vandalizes after {{test4}} may think that it's OK to keep vandalizing.

Maybe we should have a different version of {{test4}} for non-admins. Would a message like "the next time you vandalize a page, you will be blocked when an administrator notices you" be a good idea? --Ixfd64 20:01, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, I prefer the test4 as it is. If we add 'you will be blocked when an administrator notices you', then that shows a weakness in the system. While you and I may know that a post on VIP may not be read and acted upon for a bit, the vandal most likely doesn't. --Syrthiss 11:56, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Sometimes, when you use {{test4}}, it acts as a deterent. I have used it a few times on repeat vandals and they have not come back. --Dynamo_ace 12:20, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

You can go ahead and use test4. As an admin, it lets me know that somebody's been warned multiple times and I can block them on sight for vandalism. If you're uncomfortable with that, feel free to report them here when they are ready for a test4. Jdavidb (talk) 20:37, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What to do when multiple IPs are vandalising in identical ways?

The Dream Theater article has been repeatedly vandalised in the same way in recent days. However, the IP address of the person doing the vandalism keeps changing. This has the effect of making it look like the vandalism has stopped if only the old IP is looked at, but really it is continuing under another IP address. I am just wondering what, if anything, can be done in a situation like this? Durga2112 11:26, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Several things. Hopefully the repeated vandalism will attract more watchers to keep reverting. Meanwhile, each time one shows up, warn him and report him. If you have reason to believe it's the same guy who's been warned before on a previous IP address, post that in the warning so the admin can check the history.

Eventually they will get bored and leave or we'll have the whole net blocked. :) Jdavidb (talk) 00:02, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Something similar happening on Circuit City. I don't have time to do much about it right now. Is there a simple method of asking the Vandal Patrol to have a look at a specic page when a user does not have time to go through the normal procedure of handling it alone? --Anjouli 07:15, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Why not let registered users of say 3 months hand out tempoary bans which could be reviewed by administrators

[edit] Severity: useless as is

The current severity ratings are a little bit subjective, somewhat disregarded, and most importantly not all the helpful to admins patrolling the list.

A better idea might be five sections: one for each received warning template. A user who's been warned four times and still vandalizing is committing more severe vandalism than one who's only been warned once. It might encourage reporters to actually use the templates, as well. It would encourage folks to report earlier, though, which could be a drawback. Jdavidb (talk) 23:59, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

In practice, we should dump everything but the severe kind, and be a bit more specific about what severe is. Most vandals tweak a couple of pages and then leave - I don't even bother leaving them a test message, as all that will do is annoy the next person to use their IP address. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:03, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, unless its automatic like the afd page (updating sections there when edits are made to the main afd page for the article), I think it would be very hard to juggle moving your vandal report around between the categories. Did you mean just pasting a new vandal report into each tier?

The way I use this page is "These are people who look like they are vandal editors, but either aren't active enough to get bumped up to AiV or are so active that we need more editors looking at them to revert their changes." I don't know if that was what is intended with this, but if people started treating it as such...and removing vandals who have stopped vandalizing themselves...then I think this would on the whole be more useful than a reorganization. If the list was shorter it would also make it a quick job for admins to check here for possible banning needs on their way to AiV. --Syrthiss 12:08, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, I meant just moving reports around, but since you mentioned it, I really like the idea of transcluding reports like Afd, even if we don't rearrange the tiers.

The list was shorter once upon a time, but noone has been watching it. I'm trying to prune it like crazy. My plan is to archive reports that have been responded to after 24 hours of inactivity, as described above. Jdavidb (talk) 13:06, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What to do about semi-known frequent vandalizer

Long story short: I am a high school student. In my US History class, we have an assignment where we have to cite at least 2 sources. I was going to use Wikipedia as one, but my history teacher told em not to, giving the usual "Wikipedia is open-source and therefore unreliable" arguement. She then told me that she knows a professor at the UW who regularly goes and enters bad information into articles to proove to his students that Wikipedia is unreliable. This is, to my understanding, vandalism and should be stopped; he is defacing Wikipedia, site used by tens of thousands of users, just to make a point to the few students in his class who will use Wikipedia. The problem is, I don't know his username (my history teacher wouldn't tell me anything) his name, or even what department he is in; I am pretty certain this is all true, though, as my history teacher is not the type to lie about such things. Can anything be done? Aerothorn 20:05, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

My two cents: without more information its seems unlikely that anything could be done. Either knowing the username or even one or two articles would help immensely. However, don't begin to entirely freak out that this vandalism is happening. If they are editing high profile articles, there are likely other editors that are noticing the edits and reverting them. If they are editing low profile articles, the changes might last longer but someone will still come along sometime and fix them eventually. I'm picturing this guy standing in front of his class saying "Look! Nobody has reverted my changes to Death customs of the Upper Phragian Peoples of West Fiji, those fools!" :) --Syrthiss 21:12, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

If you spot any vandalism yourself, be sure to go through the procedure on the front of this page in order to warn, revert, and report it! We will go after it, I assure you.

Technically, your teacher is right that an encyclopedia should not be used as a resource. In my school days all of our materials on research always said that an encyclopedia was not acceptable as a resource but only as a means of getting a quick overview of the subject. However, teachers always waived this.

What I recommend you do is hunt down the sources that Wikipedia itself cites and use those for your project. If you can't obtain them yourself you might look at a local university library. (Or simply cite them and assume you won't have to provide them yourself, which is likely but not exactly the pure research thing to do.) Jdavidb (talk) 22:21, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

To me, it sounds like a violation of WP:POINT. Wcquidditch | Talk 20:19, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

This is a concern that goes beyond Wikipedia. It affects the entire Internet. Anybody can post almost anything they like on the Internet and it is up to the user to cross-verify. Just because a website is not open-source does not mean it is factually accurate! Same applies to books. There are lots of books published that contain factually inaccurate material - particularly in the area of pseudo-science. I don't see this as something that need worry Wikipedians any more than it would worry anyone else. The difference is that on WP things happen faster - both vandalism and corrections. We just live at a faster pace. --Anjouli 07:22, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Heck, if you want to read a lot of factually unaccurate material, try reading about the Battle of Gettysburg. There are books published which contain inaccurate information, old theories labelled as new and complete nonsense all the time. Just because something is published doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. So, it doesn't have to be pseudo-science to be prone to this.... --Habap 14:43, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Editing the page

Hi - I've just added a listing for a persistent offender (back after a ban) but in all honesty I'm not sure if I've done it correctly. The instructions say to use the "vandal|IP address" format in the relevant place (in this case at the top of the moderate IP section). On editing, it looks like I should just plop the text in underneath the noted place. However, doing this results in the listing appearing at the *bottom* of that section. Subsequent edits of the page show my added "curly bracket" section still there, so I'm assuming it's not been merged in correctly.

I'm no computer virgin, but the instructions are a little hard to follow. Is there a chance of some clarification? If I've screwed something up, my sincerest apologies! IainP (talk) 16:30, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit]  ????s

How can one tell Vandalisim from a gross malfunction, such a when HTML Tidy malfunctioned, taking this site offline, and making a royal mess out of Wikipedia ? Can this be moved to User Talk: Martial Law ? Martial Law 07:30, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

The only effects I saw from the HTML tidy problem was that invalid pages displayed badly, rather than the errors being silently corrected.

The HTML tidy problem is easily distinguished from vandalism because it is not reflected in the edit history. Identifying changes made by vandals is easy; just compare before and after versions. The only difficulty is deciding what is vandalism, what is finger trouble, and what is edit war material.

--David Woolley 15:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Charlie Dog page vandalized again

You can't count this as a "content dispute". Jeff Schiller claimed the page was heavily vandalized since September 2004, but no one even reported it.

This

[edit] Query

I cant quite understand why you can edit the website without being logged in, can some one point out a reason for this? Labtech

See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(perennial_proposals)#Abolish_anonymous_users. Jkelly 19:18, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism watch?

In my experience, vandals tend not to limit their vandalism to a single page. One of the recommended steps on the "vandalism patrol" is to review other contributions by the user to make sure that all the vandalism had been properly found and reverted. By the time I'm doing that, most of the vandalism has been reverted but I usually discover an edit or three not yet caught.

Often, the vandal is a repeat offender, returning to Wikipedia from the same IP address. Other times, the vandal is sharing an IP with valid users. For anonymous users with longish contributions histories, it would be very useful to know which edits had already been reviewed by another trusted editor. To be honest, if I've taken the time to review 20 or 30 edits, I don't want anyone else to have to wade through all that same abuse. They should be able to pick up where I left off.

In a couple of cases, I've been adding comments to the user's Talk page documenting the contributions that I've reviewed. See User talk:66.155.203.138#Vandalism Watch, User talk:68.125.128.233#Vandalism Watch, User:156.63.253.3#Vandalism watch and User talk:67.9.33.27 for examples.

I have a couple of questions.

1. Is this a good idea? Would anyone else find this helpful?
2. If you saw it on an IP user's page, would you add to the list?
3. If it's a good idea, should it be on the user's page (where, theoretically, it could be vandalized or blanked) or should it be in some protected space?
4. Is there a better way to meet this need?

Thanks. Rossami (talk) 21:54, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism monitoring

Would somebody have the decency to look at my userpage since I am trying to make a record of registered users that vandalize WP, or talk to me. Lincher 00:09, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Vandal

It is broken with usernames containing a space, a way to compensate is the usage of _ but that should be taken care of (to save time) --Cool Cat^Talk|@ 19:40, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Page length, archiving, etc?

Page is very very slow to load for me, considering it has vandalism notices going back to November at least (October?). I'm willing to go after it with a chainsaw, but wanted to see if someone has a clever-er idea. I don't want to just archive it, since some of the stuff *isn't* months and months old...and I'm not sure archiving it would be useful. Who wants to know that Josie and the Pussycats was the target of persistent vandals back in October 2005? They could verify that from the page history if they really needed to. Any thoughts? --Syrthiss 18:51, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Harrassment and Threats

I know lately you have been hearing alot from me. I am not a complainer by nature but I have a problem that needs your attention. a "new" user by the name of Quirkywiki has been harrassing me with constant threats, going as far as calling me a pedophile. This all stems from a page i mistakenly created for Mandy Moore. I was told that Ms. Moore's new album will be called Once Moore. I later found out that the information i got was false. I aided in the destruction of the article. But for some reason, a user named Extraordinary Machine created the article and mereged it with an already existing article. I didn't even know this user until later. But Quirkywiki claimed it was me or we were one and the same. And went to every user she could find and spammed them with lies, talking about the Mandy Moore forum (which has nothing to do with this site) to my book (which is also irrelevent). She tried to blame me for her getting banned. I did request it, but i didn't place the banned. I haven't the power. Quirkywiki has many sockpuppets, 206.170.104.27, 206.170.106.42, 206.170.106.48 just to name a few. People have warned her constantly but she refuses to listen. She thinks because she is on a public computer, she won't get banned. She needs to be proven wrong... again. Parys 19:09, 31 December 2005 (UTC)