User:Shalom Yechiel/Drafts and archives/The vandals are winning!

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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

The vandals are winning in their never-ending fight to ruin Wikipedia.

The administrators, bot programmers, recent-changes patrollers, new-page patrollers, and all good-faith editors do their best to remove childish vandalism from articles as soon as possible. Unfortunately, my experience has shown that some vandalism can survive for weeks or months without anyone noticing it. The Controversy over Wikipedia's biography of John Seigenthaler Sr. brought this problem to public awareness. An anonymous editor inserted vandalism in May 2005, but it was not detected or removed until October, five months later. It could happen again.

A fundamental principle of security management is that the security forces must win every battle, but the opposition forces must win only once to cause major disruption. Nobody knows how many plots to hijack airplanes have been foiled by alert security officials. The Hindawi Affair in 1986, the Bojinka plot in 1995 and the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot are three examples from recent decades. Fortunately, nobody remembers these failed plots, or needs to remember them, but everyone was horrified by the attacks of September 11, 2001. On that terrible day, the terrorists succeeded and shocked the world.

Similarly, in Wikipedia, nobody knows how many attempts to subvert outstanding articles have been foiled by alert editors. Probably more than 99% of vandalism edits are reverted within ten minutes, and 99.9% are reverted within an hour or two. Even though this response rate is good, it needs to improve.

In the last months, I have fixed several instances of vandalism that lasted a long, long time.

Contents

[edit] Examples

[edit] From Londres (a disambiguation page)

  • An alternate spelling of the word laundry.
Vandalism: 18:05, 30 July 2007
Revert: 01:48, 29 February 2008
Duration: 7 months
How I found it: A real-life friend admitted to me recently that he had added this line as a joke.

[edit] From amine

"Aromatic amines have the nitrogen john pallapati atom connected to an aromatic ring as in anilines."
Vandalism: 16:42, 23 September 2007
Revert: 17:32, 8 October 2007
Duration: 15 days
How I found it: I was reading and editing the article to prepare for a chemistry test.

[edit] From Joseph Pulitzer

"He instead emigrated to the United States in 1864 to serve in the American Civil War."
Vandalism: 02:12, 8 February 2008
Revert: 21:24, 14 February 2008
Duration: 6 days
How I found it: Recent-changes patrolling.

[edit] From Gunnar Jarring

As a young child Gunnar Jarring was mentally, physically and sexually abused. His mother sold out her son to be a rent-boy in the local village of Grantip. A particularly nasty customer was Callum E. J. Gunter. He was oafish, fat, ugly and rotund. It is rumoured that he had to use four rent-boys just to lift his flab-pack. And when his tiny penis was revealed, the boys all laughed at him for they already had larger penis' than he did. Not a nice man. After spending several years as a rent-boy, he decided he could take it no longer, and killed his mother.

Vandalism: 12:33, 18 February 2008
Revert: 01:00, 21 February 2008
Duration: 2 and a half days
How I found it: I was reading the "Did you know?" section on the Main Page of the Hebrew language Wikipedia, which mentioned Gunnar Jarring. I clicked on the English interwiki link and saw the article in its vandalized state. I was not logged in.

[edit] From Religion in Sri Lanka

[Table of contents:]

1 We be reincarnerated in other bodies of fish
2 Jihad
3 Great beard dude
4 8 arm monkey elaphant thingy
5 Potatoes
6 External links
Vandalism: 22:46, 25 February 2008 (adding the letter "f" in a few random places)
More vandalism 10:05, 27 February 2008
Revert of the second vandalism: 02:23, 28 February 2008 (by an anonymous user)
Revert of the original vandalism: 02:24, 28 February 2008
Duration: 4 hours for the table of contents; 2 days plus 4 hours for the letter "f"
How I found it: Recent-changes patrol on the IP that manually fixed the TOC, then checking the page history.

[edit] From Jim Abbott

"Abbot's wife was killed some three years after his retirement. Her murderer was never captured, although police say that she was bludgeoned to death by a blunt, soft object, perhaps a stump. ...

"Batting was not an issue for Abbott for the majority of his career, since the American League uses the designated hitter. He did bat for himself during spring training games. When Abbott joined the National League's Brewers in 1999 he went to bat 21 times, collecting a grand total of two hits. This is comparable to the frequency of bringing his wife to orgasm, per attempt. Abbott often joked that his stump made things difficult in bed, to much laughter and by many."

Vandalism: 21:41, 9 January 2007
Revert: 03:33, 11 January 2007
Duration: 30 hours
How I found it: This was my first ever encounter with long-lasting vandalism. I had just found a link to Category:Living people, so I clicked it and found Jim Abbott in the first screen, i.e. the first 200 members of this category in alphabetical order. I started to read the article, then was shocked to read what you just read.

[edit] Conclusions

It takes some luck to find long-lasting vandalism. In the cases of amine, Jarring and Abbott, I was not patrolling recent-changes, but was simply reading the article like an ordinary user. If I hadn't happened to stumble on the article at that particular time, the vandalism would have lasted even longer.

Anonymous users often try to revert vandalism, as with Religion in Sri Lanka. Their good intentions are much appreciated, but they sometimes fix only one of two previous vandalism edits, leaving the other edit untouched. That's also what MONGO did when he fixed the vandalism to Joseph Pulitzer, not knowing that the previous anonymous user was also a vandal.

[edit] What to do?

[edit] Ban anonymous editing?

Actually, that wouldn't solve the problem. The vandals to Jim Abbott and Religion in Sri Lanka were newly registered user accounts.

[edit] Be suspicious of any edits by anonymous IPs or newly registered users

Yes. All of the vandals were either anonymous IPs or newly registered users with redlinked user talk pages. Edits by these users should be checked whenever possible. Therefore, if you are reverting an article to a previous version by an IP address, check the previous edit also. Make sure you've reverted to a stable version.

[edit] Double-check any reverts performed by anonymous IPs

If an IP address reverts vandalism, whether or not it uses the "undo" feature, it may not be aware that there might be earlier vandalism edits. Compare the current revision with the last edit by a known user (such as a bot) to make sure that all of the vandalism was removed.

[edit] Read Wikipedia!

That's what it's intended for, right? You never know where you might find a problem that you need to fix. Be a WikiGnome!

[edit] A personal note

I am especially troubled by this issue because I tried to create long-lasting vandalism during my period of mental illness. I changed the flag in the infobox on Ghana to the flag of Mali:

Vandalism: 00:47, 2 May 2007 (This was me.)
Revert: 14:28, 2 May 2007
Duration: 14 hours

That might seem like a long time, but when I tried it on other wikis, some of them failed to notice it for much longer:

Arabic Wikipedia
Vandalism: 00:50, 2 May 2007 (This was me.)
Revert: 20:33, 5 August 2007
Duration: 3 months and 3 days
Bg.wikipedia
Vandalism: 00:52, 2 May 2007 (This was me.)
Revert: 13:09, 24 September 2007
Duration: 4 months and 3 weeks

I am very ashamed of what I did, but I have learned, aside from the evil inherent in vandalism, that it's possible to get away with it if nobody's watching. We as a community must exercise constant vigilance to stop the vandals from winning.