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Author's note

Allow me to give some background to my motivations in writing this essay. I am an meta:exopedian (article builder) by inclination, but several months ago I became heavily active in recent changes patrol, new pages patrol and monitoring new usernames. Relative to article building, a thankless and laborious task, countering obvious vandalism was easy and offered instant gratification (i.e. the whack-a-mole of having persistent vandals and spam usernames blocked). I did so without the use of automated tools, with the exception of Twinkle.

However, in recent months I found myself patrolling recent changes fruitlessly, finding that any time I went to warn or report a vandal or revert a vandalistic edit, it had already been done. I could still report a suspect username to WP:UAA and nominate obviously inappropriate articles for speedy deletion, but these too became more competitive, with someone else beating me to it more times than not. After a dozen or so times spending half an hour or longer without being able to warn or block more than one or two vandals – while the amount of vandalism seemed undiminished – I relented, figuring that given my low success-to-effort ratio, my efforts would be better focused elsewhere.

Musing idly as to why this had become the case while browsing the active requests for adminship, I saw that several applicants were being opposed for their heavy use of new, automated counter-vandalism tools to rack up thousands of edits. Aha! I looked into it a little, and found that when an editor rather than a bot was beating me to the vandal-fighting, they were frequently using a tool called Huggle, nicknamed "Twinkle on steroids". I thought a little more on how difficult and time-consuming it would have been for me to do what I used to without the help of Twinkle to rollback and warn, and how rarely I encountered vandalism while browsing through articles as a reader, and concluded that overt vandalism is much easier to combat as it once was.

During the same period, I noted with increasing concern efforts at restricting editing by anonymous users. Though I feel it is antithetical to the spirit of Wikipedia, I can understand and regretfully support forbidding unregistered users from creating new pages; as as a new page patroller I know we simply don't have the manpower to patrol or the willingness to immediately clean-up the deluge of articles that would result. However, I saw an strengthening culture of highly active users and admins calling for more restrictions on anonymous and non-autoconfirmed users; specifically the decision to raise the autoconfirmation level (no link at hand, sorry), and the increasing trend of indefinitely semi-protecting templates (ref: [1]). Why I wondered, were we becoming more paranoid about vandalism just as it seemed to be becoming less of a problem? When inflation is steadily decreasing, you don't keep raising interest rates to combat inflation; you keep them stable or cut them to encourage growth. Wikipedia, I thought, could do well to do likewise. Skomorokh 13:21, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Reactions

Please place critical reactions, support and minor corrections here. Thanks, Skomorokh13:40, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with this essay. The chances of reading a high-profile article and encountering vandalism (particularly blatant vandalism) are small, and there are plenty of other problems that are more deserving of lots of attention. However, template vandalism has the potential to reverse this. It is very easy to vandalise thousands of pages (including high profile ones) simultaneously, and such vandalism will typically survive for several minutes as it requires detailed knowledge to revert. Plenty of people therefore see the vandalism. Long term vandals have started to notice this and Wikipedia is a sitting duck for these tactics (there are about 3000 unprotected templates with more than 500 transclusions, and more than 20000 with more than 50). One other minor point: you don't need to be autoconfirmed to create new pages - you just need an account. Hut 8.5 14:33, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your thoughts, Hut 8.5; I hadn't considered the breath of impact of template vandalism, despite the footnote. I couldn't find a link for the policy on autoconfirmation, do you have a link for the requirements for page creators? Thanks, Skomorokh 15:19, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes: Wikipedia:User access levels#New_users. Hut 8.5 17:56, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Danke, Skomorokh 18:35, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Complete Disagreement

I totally disagree with the essay. I have dealt with blatant vandalism recently, and it nearly cost me my life to try to get the admins to block them. Deleting the page was easy, but the vandal eventually created over 40 accounts to try to test Wikipedia. I bet I knocked a few years off my life expectancy just to stop the vandal. What's worse, no one offered help. They simply said "I'm not familiar, leave it to someone". Isn't that exactly the line of thought that can destroy us? That is why I totally disagree with the essay. Arbiteroftruth (talk) 06:30, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think the fact that scripts exist and programs to aid in removing vandalism has progressed fighting it, whereas the typical person who vandals now has not advanced in their methods. Vandalsim matters so long as the tools existing stay ahaead of the current practice. The sad part is as this individual pointed out above alot of time is invested in counter vandalism, not so much time is invested by the casual vandal person. One might argue that fighting vandalism is a hobby and the tools developed simply are a product of this. The concern should be is what happens if vandals make this their hobby like a vandal fighter does, and devote as much time to the effort in vandalizing as an individual does in fighting it?(I wont get into this aspect for now) Anyway in a layman perspective vandalism doesnt matter, but the threat of it is serious and shouldnt be cast aside, we need to continue to stay ahead of them. Ottawa4ever (talk) 23:50, 31 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ideas for development

If you are sympathetic to the perspective voiced in the essay, please add your ideas for developing it here. Thanks, Skomorokh13:40, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Title suggestion

Wikipedia:Ignore all vandalism or WP:IAV. It's, um, cuter. Mike R (talk) 15:35, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hah. I'm not sure "ignore all vandalism" reflects the sentiment of the essay, but pejorative acronyms are no big deal, personally. Someone might want to write Wikipedia:Ignore all vandalism as a parody of this essay; I'd be happy to link to it. Skomorokh 15:47, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Frustration

Overall, I can appreciate the drift of this essay and the concerns it raises (specifically the problems faced by a project run in many respects by people who may become jaded by gazing too long into an abyss). One problem which may need focus: frustration amongst exopedians who find and are not accustomed to dealing with vandalism, and/or the difficulty of maintaining pages while they are subject to heavy amounts of disruptive editing (take the latest sweep of celebrity obituaries or military clashes as examples -- they often wind up semi-protected if editors have trouble dealing with the scale of the problem). Are there better ways to mitigate this? – Luna Santin (talk) 18:56, 13 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Title could be better

"Vandalism does not matter" is, of course, an attempt to be provocative - to have the essay be noticed, and remembered. But it's not an accurate summary of the essay, which acknowledges the importance of vandal-fighting. Something like "Don't obsess about vandalism" or "Vandalism matters less" or "Preventing vandalism can be wrong" would, I think, be a much better title.

Which isn't to say that I disagree with the thrust of the essay, because I don't. I opposed a recent proposal to increase the auto-confirm requirements to 10 days and 20 edits (up from 4 days and 10 edits) precisely because I thought the benefits (reduced vandalism) were far exceeded by confusion by and hindrance of new editors, particularly the requirement that capthas be responded to for another 6 days, regardless of the number of edits an editor had, whenever adding an external link. (We want information to be footnoted with links; we want editors to cite their sources starting with their very first edit; when we require a captha for good external links, we seriously discourage new editors from adding them.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:38, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, the title is not strictly representative, but drawing attention is more important than strictly representing the argument, particularly as I am misrepresenting myself. An accurate title would be Wikipedia:I'm not sure but we seem to be getting better at tackling obvious vandalism, maybe we should start being less worried about it would be an accurate title. The claim that the "title could be better" is only true if there is a better version of the title; I couldn't think of one, and I don't think John's suggestions (with all due respect) are better either. It was inspired by the rhetorical weight of titles like Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance and Wikipedia:Process is important, which make their points in punchy, direct, memorable phrases. Further suggestions definitely welcome, Skomorokh 17:32, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, then you mean Wikipedia:Don't worry about vandalism, where "worry" means something like "lay awake at night, tossing and turning". -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:56, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A little stronger than that. Imagine we are one ethnic community, with a prevailing culture of "we must protect the homeland against the Outlanders at all costs; save our jobs! Save our women! Protect our children!" I would be saying "Outlanders contribute positively by making our homeland more culturally diverse and interesting, by taking low-paying jobs we don't want, and by trading with us for things we need. We have better and better fences for keeping bad Outlanders out, and better guestworker schemes for letting good ones in. Blanket bans on Outlanders getting driver's licenses and citizenship is far more destructive to our homeland than it is beneficial." The spirit here is not "Don't worry about Outlanders", it's "we must urgently rethink the way we treat Outlanders and guard vigilantly against self-destructive outsider-paranoia." If you dig. Wikipedia:Vandalism paranoia is destructive could do it, but it ignores the "as vandal-fighting gets easier, it gets less important" subtlety. Perhaps I should split it into two essays: the empirical observation (WP:PARADOX), and the normative implications (WP:TRADEOFF). Skomorokh 20:04, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]