User blog:Blupo/How to Counter-Vandalism

counter-terrorism

Hello everyone! Many of us have seen page vandalism at one point or another:
 * Page blanking
 * Adding obscene words/images to a page
 * Erroneously editing the stats
 * etc.

We have editors that revert this vandalism fairly quickly. How do they do it? Well, I don't know how everyone does it, but here are some tips on how to revert vandalism quickly.

Classic editor vs. VisualEditor The VisualEditor lets you see how the page looks when you're editing it. The Classic editor shows you the entire wikitext of the page when you edit. The VisualEditor is better to use if you're not comfortable with wikitext. The classic editor usually runs faster than the VisualEditor, and tells you exactly what's on the page, not hidden behind any tricks. It also has a preview feature so you can see what the page will look like before you publish it. There's also a lot more features about the classic editor and wikitext that you can't do with the VisualEditor, but I can't explain all of them here without rambling.

This is a version of the Chaos Platemail page as written in wikitext: 

Overview
The Chaos Platemail is a legendary level 85 armor That is dropped by Mortis the Flaming Sear. It has 7 536 defense and 15 072 defense when upgraded to +20.

The drop rate for this item is either 0.2% or 0.5% (unconfirmed).

Trivia

 * This armor used to have only around 300 more defense than the Dragonskull Robe, it was eventually buffed and now has a significantly more defense than the Dragonskull Robe.

Wikitext also ties into the next thing:

Diffs and the Undo Button The Undo button appears on a diff page (such as [ this one]), which shows you the difference between two versions of a page's wikitext. It allows you to quickly undo the edit in case of something like vandalism. You shouldn't be manually removing the text unnecessarily if there's already a feature to help you automatically remove it. Additionally, if there's something not vandalism-like that you want to edit, there's an Edit button next to it.

Recent changes vs Wiki Activity Special:RecentChanges and Special:WikiActivity are two ways to see changes on the wiki. Wiki Activity lists out edits in a generalised way without too many details. Recent changes is a much more compact and detailed log of the changes in a wiki. In addition, Recent changes lists all changes on a wiki, while Wiki Activity only lists certain types of activity.

For the people who want to get their hands dirty... If you use the Recent changes, you may have noticed a little checkbox at the top of the page that says: AJAX. This is because this wiki has imported a script called AjaxRC that automatically refreshes the Recent changes log every 60 seconds (if you un-checked the box, it won't). Maybe someone was editing a page at the same time as you and you a notice came up. This is also a script called EditConflictAlert.

But you too can use these scripts to your advantage to fight terrorism vandalism. But first: you need to have custom JavaScript enabled for your account. (Reminder: Be careful when you import JS from places you don't trust. It may have malicious code in it.)

You can browse the Dev Wiki to see what custom scripts you can use, but here are some that I recommend:
 * QuickDiff: Lets you view diffs without leaving the page you're on.
 * AjaxUndo: Lets you undo edits without having having to go to the undo page.
 * FindAndReplace (classic editor only): Find phrases in a wiki page and replace them with something else. Also has regex.

Disclaimer : I'm not responsible for your use of custom JS. If you abuse it, it's your problem.

Ask for Help There are admins and mods here to help (at the time of writing this, that was a lie). If you need extra help, or the vandalism is too much, message them.

If you have trouble with getting custom JS running, you can message me.

Extra Links
 * Help:VisualEditor
 * Help:Classic editor
 * Help:Wiki Activity
 * Help:Recent changes
 * Help:Personal CSS and JS