Hello INSERTUSERSNAMEHEREADDHPANDSIGNATENDOFPARAGRAPH, 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.
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.
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.
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) 09:45, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
Twinkle is a very useful tool when performing maintenance functions around Wikipedia. Please have a read through WP:TWINKLE.
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.
Hopefully you'll have noticed that Twinkle allows you three options for performing a rollback - green, blue, and red links (see the screenshot). All three will revert all of the most recent consecutive edits made by a single user to a page.
Try to use these buttons where possible. The green and the blue ones allow you to add an edit summary - it's described as 'optional', but you should not treat it as such - always leave a brief edit summary, even if it's just 'Rv test edit', or 'Rv unexplained removal of content', or whatever. Use the green one when you think it's a good faith mistake, and the blue one when you're not sure. Only use the red one when you are certain that it is unambiguous vandalism - it saves time, because it leaves a generic edit summary, and all of them will take you directly to the talk page of the person you have reverted, to allow you to use the 'Warn' option to give them a warning. (Also note that you can use the brown "restore this version" button when you need to revert edits by multiple users.)
When you use Twinkle to warn a user, you have a number of options to choose from: you can select the kind of warning (for different offences), and the level of warning (from 1 to 4, for increasing severity). Knowing which warning to issue and what level is very important. Further information can be found at WP:WARN and WP:UWUL.
Sometimes during your patrolling for vandalism, you'll come across an edit that removes most, if not all, of the content from an article or section. It's easy to simply revert, warn, and continue on, but actually, these kind of edits usually require even more attention than the average malicious edit. Accidentally reverting helpful blanking is one of the main pitfalls that newer vandalism patrollers can fall into, so in order to avoid this situation, please read the following pages and answer the questions.
Before you answer these questions, it may be helpful to read WP:BLANK, WP:CR, and this user essay.
How could a blanking edit be helpful?
What are some of the main things to look for in an edit that blanks a lot of text?
Please find three examples of an edit that blanks content, and explain why they are either good or bad.
# | Diff of your revert | Your comment. If you report to AIV please include the diff | Trainer's Comment |
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Protecting and deleting pages are two additional measures that can be used to prevent and deal with vandalism. Only an administrator can protect or delete pages; however, anyone can nominate a page for deletion or request protection. You can use the Twinkle menu to request page protection or speedy deletion (the RPP or CSD options).
Please read the protection policy.
Please read WP:CSD.
In past iterations of this course, students have been asked to go out and actually tag pages for deletion, but with the introduction of WP:ACPERM, the amount of straight vandalism that gets created directly in mainspace has reduced dramatically. As such, I'm going to ask you to say how you would act in a set of hypothetical scenarios. What would you do if you saw the page listed in each scenario? Note that not all scenarios may warrant speedy deletion.
A user with the username "BobSucks" creates an article called "John Smith" that contains solely the following text:
John Smith is the worst elementary school teacher on the planet.
A user with the username "GoodTimesLLC" creates a user page with the following text:
'''Good Times LLC''' is an organization dedicated to helping your children get the highest quality education at an affordable price. Visit our website at goodtimes.info and contact us at 123-456-7890.
A user creates an article titled "Edward Gordon" with the following text:
'''Edward Gordon''' (born July 1998) is an aspiring American actor and songwriter. So far, he has starred in many school plays and has published two albums on SoundCloud. He has over 5,000 subscribers on YouTube.
A user creates an article titled "Bazz Ward" with the following content:
Bazz Ward was a Hall of Fame roadie and I wish he was as well known as Lemmy. Cheers Bazz.
(Attribution: Ritchie333 came up with this scenario as a question to an old RfA candidate. I've borrowed his example here. Hint: Try Google searching a few key terms from this short article.)
A user creates an article that was clearly copied and pasted directly from another website, which states "All Rights Reserved" at the bottom of it. Would your answer be the same if it didn't state "All Rights Reserved" at the bottom?
A user creates an article, but you can't understand any of it because it's in a foreign language.
A user creates an article, but shortly after creating it, the same user blanks the article by removing all of its content.
A new user creates a user page with nothing but the following content:
Jlakjrelekajroi3j192809jowejfldjoifu328ur3pieisgreat
How would this scenario be different if the page was created in a different namespace?
Please read WP:Revdel and WP:Oversight.
Occasionally, vandalism will be so extreme that it needs to be removed from publicly accessible revision histories - the criteria for these are described in the policies linked above. Revision deletion hides the edit from anyone except admins; oversight provides an even greater level of restriction, with only oversighters able to see the comments. The threshold between the two is quite fine - I've been on the wrong side of it a few times. If you are in doubt as to whether revdel or oversight is required, the best bet is to forward it to the oversight team - whoever reviews it will be able to make the decision and act on it.
Wikipedia has a policy which details the types of usernames which users are permitted to have. Some users (including me) patrol the User creation log to check for new users with inappropriate usernames (note that you can set this to view 500 users rather than the default 50 - I find that easier to scroll through quickly, and the link on my userpage takes you there directly). There are four kinds of usernames that are specifically disallowed:
Please read WP:USERNAME, and pay particular attention to dealing with inappropriate usernames.
I hope this never happens, but as you participate in counter-vandalism on Wikipedia, it is possible that you may come across a threat of physical harm. In the past, we have had vandals submit death threats in Wikipedia articles, as well as possible suicide notes. The problem is, Wikipedia editors don't have the proper training to evaluate whether these threats are credible in most cases.
Fortunately, there's a guideline for cases like this. Please read Wikipedia:Responding to threats of harm carefully and respond to the questions below.
Occasionally, some vandals will not appreciate your good work and try to harass or troll you. In these situations, you must remain calm and ignore them. If they engage in harassment or personal attacks, you should not engage with them and leave a note at WP:ANI. If they vandalise your user page or user talk page, simply remove the vandalism without interacting with them. Please read WP:DENY.
In light of your recent contributions, I expect that if you apply for the rollback permission at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Rollback, an administrator would be happy to enable it on your account, but first we should demonstrate that you understand what the tool is, and the responsibilities that go along with it.
The rollback user right allows trusted and experienced counter vandalism operatives to revert vandalism with the click of one button, not unlike the "rollback" button that you've already been using in Twinkle. This would give you a new rollback button in addition to the three you've been seeing in Twinkle. The new rollback button is slightly faster than the Twinkle rollback button, but more importantly, having the rollback right gives you access to downloadable counter-vandalism software like Huggle.
If you're interested, take a look at our rollback guideline at WP:Rollback and feel free to answer the questions below. The rollback right is not an essential part of this course, so if you're not interested, feel free to say so and we'll skip this section.
Please read each of the following questions carefully, and ensure that you have responded fully - some of them ask you to expand on what you would do in different situations. When responding to numbered questions please start your response with "#:" (except where shown otherwise - with **). You don't need to worry about signing your answers.
Please read each of the following questions carefully, and ensure that you have responded fully - some of them ask you to expand on what you would do in different situations. When responding to numbered questions please start your response with "#:" (except where shown otherwise - with **). You don't need to worry about signing your answers.