User:Madminecrafter12/Vandalism

Vandalism is the act of editing or creating pages deliberately to obstruct the wiki. There are various methods used to prevent vandalism, and there are multiple ways to deal with it.

Meaning
The specific definition is vandalism is deliberately performing an action that harms, obstructs, or is misleading in some way. There are several other forms of editing or other actions that are harmful to the encyclopedia - however, unless they're made deliberately to harm, these would not be considered to be vandalism, although they may be disruptive editing.

What is not vandalism
This section is very important.


 * Doing something controversial without discussion - splitting pages, merging pages, etc. without discussion first is not vandalism.
 * Asking a question within an article, such as "Could somebody test this to make sure it's true?".
 * Test edits. If you see somebody add random wiki markup to an article, this would not be vandalism, but instead a test edit. This is disruptive editing, but it is usually not done deliberately.
 * Creating an article in the wrong namespace. For example, if a user created a page named "IGamer1556" saying "Hello, I'm IGamer1556! I love playing Minecraft, and I think the Minecraft Wiki is awesome," assume good faith, and simply move the page to their userspace. Do not accuse them of vandalizing - just kindly leave them a message explaining what you did and why you did it.
 * Making a mistake and messing something up. This is something that commonly occurs with new users, and is not vandalism. It can include stuff like misreading wiki-text thinking that it's messed up, when really it's just how it works, or adding wiki-text not really knowing how it works.

Assume good faith
Don't accuse an editor of vandalism if they didn't disrupt the wiki purposely or if you're not sure whether they did or not. When in doubt, assume good faith, and kindly reach out to them asking about their edit. When in doubt, always assume that others don't know what they're doing or made a mistake, rather than accuse them of vandalizing.

Reverting
There are 3 main ways of reverting vandalism: reverting to an earlier revision, undoing, and rollbacking. The final is only available to administrators.

Undoing
Undoing is the act of undoing one's edit and reverting all the changes that were in that edit. To undo an edit go to the page's history and click the "undo" button. You will see the diff show up as well as the normal edit box below. An edit summary will automatically generate. Undoing is rather flexible - e.g., you can use it to partially revert an edit by changing something in the edit box before saving, or you can add to or completely replace the automatic edit summary.

You can undo edits that are not the last edit made to the page, but this is only possible if there are no later edits that conflict with them. Otherwise, an error message will pop up saying "The edit could not be undone due to conflicting intermediate edits." Additionally, if you try to undo an edit that has already been undone, another message will say "This edit appears to already have been undone."

When undoing an edit, a clear additional edit summary should almost always be left, unless it's obvious spam or vandalism. However, it can never hurt to leave an additional edit summary even if it is clearly disruptive - so it's better to leave one when in doubt.