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.