Hello Josephine W., and welcome to your Counter Vandalism Unit Academy page! Every person I instruct will have their own page on which I will give them support and tasks for them to complete. Please make sure you have this page added to your watchlist. Your academy page has been specifically designed according to you and what you have requested instruction in - for that reason, please be as specific as possible in your answers, so that I know the best ways to help you (and do not be afraid to let me know if you think something isn't working). If you have any general queries about anti-vandalism (or anything else), you are more than welcome to raise them with me at my talk page.

Make sure you read through Wikipedia:Vandalism as that's the knowledge which most of the questions I ask you and tasks you do will revolve around.

How to use this page

This page will be built up over your time in the Academy, with new sections being added as you complete old ones. Each section will end with a task, written in bold type - this might just ask a question, or it might require you to go and do something. You can answer a question by typing the answer below the task; if you have to do something, you will need to provide diffs to demonstrate that you have completed the task. Some sections will have more than one task, sometimes additional tasks may be added to a section as you complete them. Please always sign your responses to tasks as you would on a talk page.

The CVUA curriculum

There are several sections of the training course. In some of them, will be asking you to do perform practical exercises; in others, I will ask you to read certain policies and guidelines, and then ask you some questions about their content. To be clear, it is not a problem if you give the wrong answer to any of the questions - making mistakes and discussing them is a crucial part of the learning process. For that reason, it is important that you do not attempt to find previous users' training pages in order to identify the 'right' answers to give: all your answers should be your own, so that we can identify and address any misconceptions that you might have. There is no time pressure to complete the course: we will go at whatever pace works for you, and you can take a pause or ask questions at any point along the way.

Communication

Counter-vandalism work can result in very large watchlists, which can make it more difficult to monitor pages using that alone. For this reason, I will ping you whenever I update this page with some feedback or a new task; I would also ask you to ping me when you have completed a task, so that I get a notification telling me that it's ready for review. See WP:PING for details on how to do this if you aren't sure. GirthSummit _(blether) 23:07, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Twinkle is a very useful tool when performing maintenance functions around Wikipedia. Please have a read through WP:TWINKLE.

Enable Twinkle (if haven't already) and leave a note here to let me know that you have enabled it.

@Girth Summit: I have enabled Twinkle. Blessings. ~ Josephine W. ☮ Talk to Me ☮ Email Me 08:38, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks - please see the first task below. GirthSummit _(blether) 13:10, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

When patrolling for vandalism, you may often come across edits which are unhelpful, but not vandalism - these are good faith edits. While it is often necessary to revert such edits, we treat them differently from vandalism, so it is important to recognise the difference between a vandalism edit and a good faith edit. Please read WP:AGF and WP:NOT VANDALISM before completing the tasks in this section.

Please explain below the difference between a good faith edit and a vandalism edit, and how you would tell them apart.

@Girth Summit: A good faith edit is not intended if it had problems, and as WP:AGF says, a problem in that regard usually indicates unawareness or misunderstanding of Wikipedian culture. A vandalism edit, however, is maliciously trying to defeat this project's purpose, which is to create a new encyclopedia, as WP:VANDAL says. Blessings. ~ Josephine W. ☮ Talk to Me ☮ Email Me 11:46, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Y ​Hi, and sorry for my slow response on this - it's been a really busy week, I haven't had much time for Wikipedia. This answer is correct - vandalism is any edit that is made with the intention of harming the project. An edit that's done for any other reason isn't vandalism; it might be problematic for other reasons, for example being unsourced, or pushing a POV, or just really badly written, so we might still do a revert - but we treat it differently to vandalism. It's important to be able to distinguish between true vandalism, and good-faith (but potentially problematic edits), and respond to each appropriately. Onto the next section... GirthSummit _(blether) 15:05, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Please find three examples of good faith but unhelpful edits, and three examples of vandalism. You don't need to revert the example you find, and I am happy for you to use previous undos in your edit history if you wish. Place diffs below.

Josephine W. - I see you haven't edited for a couple of months now. I'm going to remove you from the list of trainees for now - if you return to editing and wish to resume the course, please drop me a note on my talk page and I will reactivate. Cheers GirthSummit _(blether) 13:26, 1 February 2020 (UTC)